Tesla’s charge port location is due to Elon Musk’s garage layout, says Lucid CEO

Lucid CEO and former Tesla chief engineer Peter Rawlinson claims that Tesla’s charge port location, and why everyone has to back into Supercharger stations, is due to Elon Musk’s garage layout back when Model S was designed.

If you have ever charged a Tesla vehicle at a Supercharger station, you most likely had to back into the stall. That’s primarily because Tesla’s charge port is located at the back left side of the vehicle.

There’s no standardization of charge port location on electric vehicles, and it is causing a bit of a problem right now as Tesla opened its Superchargers, with most of them equipped with small cables, to other electric vehicles with different port locations.

Tesla was early in making electric vehicles, so its choice of charge port location was important and influential.

Peter Rawlinson was the chief designer of Tesla’s Model S, its first EV designed from the ground-up. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied that since Rawlinson is now a competitor leading Lucid Motors, but there’s plenty of evidence that he was in fact in charge of the Model S engineering despite Musk’s vengeful claims to the contrary.

Now, Rawlinson has given some interesting insights into the decision-making behind Tesla’s charge port location. He says that he was pushing back then (circa 2010) for the now popular front driver-side fender charge port location (via PC Mag):

I told him, look, it [should be] the front fender on the left-hand side. Most Americans drive nose in rather than parallel park. And if you drive nose in, you want the charge port on the front. You don’t want a long, dirty old cable coming past the doors. And you don’t want to put the charge port on the very front, like the Nissan Leaf, because it’s a vulnerable spot. You can have a slight bump or fender bender, which could mean you couldn’t open it if it was damaged.”

The Lucid CEO says that Musk insisted that this wouldn’t work for him because it wasn’t compatible with the way the garage in his rented mansion at the time was set up:

Well, that wasn’t acceptable to [Elon]. He said it wouldn’t suit the layout of his garage in Bel Air. So I said, ‘Well, where do you want it, then? What suits the layout of your garage in Bel Air?’ He said it’s going to be on the rear because he could trip over the cable. He was renting the property, and he didn’t even own the place, but we put the charge port on the Model S on the left hand rear because of the layout of his rented garage in Bel Air!

Musk was in financial difficulties at the time and was renting a mansion in Los Angeles. He even claimed he had to borrow money from friends to cover rent.

With the Air, Lucid’s first EV, Rawlinson put the charge port where he wanted it originally for the Model S, but now that Tesla has opened the Supercharger network to all other EVs, he had to recognize that the value the network brings to customers is bigger than the limitation of the charge port.

He said that now the upcoming new Lucid Gravity will have the same charge port location as Tesla’s:

Because of that, every Tesla charger across the land you have to reverse into because the charge port’s in the rear, which is just nutty. [But] if you can’t beat them you’ve got to join them. So now we’ve put our charge portion on the left rear of Gravity to be compatible.

Rawlinson also added that he is happy with Tesla’s help to get Lucid vehicles working on the Supercharger network,

After all, it is undoubtedly the best fast-charging network in North America. There’s no question about that.