Simone Giertz Builds an Autonomous Charging Robot for Her Tesla

Simone Giertz partners with Viam, a modern robotics platform founded by the co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, Eliot Horowitz, to build an autonomous charging robot for her custom Tesla truck.

(I work at Viam)

Honestly, I feel this rather highlights the engineering effectiveness of the original Tesla snake charger design. It's "just" a bunch of identical injection-molded spine pieces, and a bunch of identical winch actuators pulling on wires. Even the copper cable is much significantly shorter, which is a non-trivial cost and environmental impact if you plan to deploy millions worldwide.

The original Tesla video was dragged for being too sexual, so it's almost a relief to see that any implementation is going to be unnecessarily sexualized. It's just a lame joke that we're all going to have to "get past" as part of our cultural development.

The way the charger calibrated itself to Tesla's charging port was the funniest thing I've seen in a long time