by Char Miller | Special to the Courier

The significance of the news that San Bernardino County has closed the Tesla Supercharger station in Upland is perfectly captured in the canvas sheaths that now cover nearly all 64 charging pedestals. The whole thing looks like a cemetery. As grave are the implications that Elon Musk and the Tesla Corporation gamed the system and may have cheated consumers, a pattern that is woven throughout several of Musk’s business ventures and political actions.

That said, the idea of the Supercharger stations was smart. Just look at how planners selected the Upland site. Long-haul travelers on Interstates 10 and 210 can easily access it by exiting for Monte Vista Ave. Local drivers readily reach the station set within a busy street grid. And the area’s population is growing. To the immediate south of pre-existing apartment buildings — College Park, for one — are massive housing projects under construction that frame Metrolink’s Montclair station and the future light rail depot. Other Supercharger locales are as shrewdly located.

Major U.S. automakers took note of the concept’s potential and were negotiating with Musk to conform their vehicles to the Tesla hookups, which meant that these stations would have accelerated the crucial conversion from fossil-fuels to electricity nationwide. So, what does Musk do as this system was about to take off? He fired the entire 500-person team devoted to building this infrastructure, shortchanging his own interests, and delaying by months the opening of Upland facility.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Consider that Musk repeatedly violated labor laws at the Tesla manufacturing plant in Northern California. He laid off hundreds of engineers when he broke Twitter. As the co-head of DOGE, he fired or forced out thousands of civil servants so he could gut federal agencies charged with protecting public health and safety, clean air and water, and our treasured public lands, and those providing Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, among others. Then there is Space X. Its Starship has repeatedly exploded after takeoff from its Brownsville, Texas launching pad, so much so that one wag renamed the body of water that absorbed the wreckage as the “Gulf of SpaceX Debris.” As epic a failure has been the Tesla Cybertruck. Its sales have been so anemic that Forbes and other outlets have buried the model by comparing it to that other mega-flop of a vehicle, the late 1950s Ford Edsel.

Now entombed, the Upland Supercharger station represents in microcosm the larger and longer list of Musk’s manifold failures. For some, this really isn’t news.

Char Miller is a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College. His latest book is “Burn Scars: A Documentary History of Fire Suppression, From Colonial Origins to the Resurgence of Cultural Burning.”