Tesla Pulls Off Its Most Unlikely Stunt Yet

Tesla showed off something last week that I genuinely thought I’d never see.

If you follow Tesla news at all, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I’ve wanted it for years, and frankly, I’d given up hope.

Yes, I’m talking about Tesla’s home charger, the Tesla Wall Connector finally smart charging cars that aren’t Teslas.

My garage has a Powerwall, a Tesla and an electric Mini Cooper. Until last week, only one of those cars could charge smartly.

Back in 2023 I reviewed the Tesla Wall Connector and gave it this verdict: A Good Choice For Tesla-only Households. Not Great For The Rest Of Us.

The problem was brains, or the lack of them. In Tesla’s world, the car does the thinking. The Powerwall tells the Tesla how much spare solar there is, and the car throttles its own charging to match. The Wall Connector just passes the electrons along like a glorified extension cord.

Plug my Mini in, and nobody was listening. It charged at full whack from wherever the power happened to come from, including my Powerwall.

Firmware 26.34 for the Powerwall and the Gen 3 Wall Connector fixes that. The Powerwall now talks to the charger directly, so the badge on the car doesn’t matter. Tesla’s Australian support page says Charge on Solar is now “available for any EV regardless of make for Powerwall and Wall Connector owners.”

There’s also a Low-Cost Charging mode that uses your tariff and solar forecast to charge at the cheapest times.

SolarQuotes writer Jacob Boyd has the full fine print here.

Tesla admits other cars exist

Tesla is not a company famous for its humility. For years, the deal was simple: buy the whole Tesla kit (car, battery and charger) and it all plays nicely together. Buy anything else and you’re on your own. A bloke on a Tesla exhibition stand last year rolled his eyes at me when I asked when the wall connector would talk to other brands, and told me it was never gonna happen.

This update concedes that plenty of Powerwall owners park something else in the garage.

The cynic in me suspects this has more to do with how many Powerwalls now sit next to BYDs and Kias than any sudden attack of introspection. I don’t care. It works.

A few weeks ago I argued that anyone selling batteries or EV chargers should start with one question: “What do you already own?” If the answer is a Powerwall and a non-Tesla EV, the Wall Connector just went from “not great” to the only sensible choice.

The other reveal

Last Thursday (Friday morning our time), at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, Tesla finally unveiled their new Roadster – labelled “Klanborgini” by some wag on Facebook. The car drove up a curved ramp, clung on with suction fans until it was upside down, fired its cold-gas thrusters, flipped in mid-air and landed on its wheels.

I can’t stand Elon Musk, but I’m a control engineer. That stunt took serious engineering and will inspire young engineers everywhere. The thrusters run on ultra-high-pressure air through ten nozzles. Keeping a car stable while it cartwheels through the air on bursts of compressed air is a brutal control problem, and they solved it on a livestream with the world watching.

If you watched that car flip, launch off an upside-down ramp, barrel roll, land, and felt nothing – I’m sorry. You’re dead inside.

It was almost as exciting as Tesla’s Wall Connector firmware update. A Tesla home charger admitting my Mini exists is a bona fide miracle.