Tesla Supercharger Voting: Arad, Romania Makes the Winners List. What Happens Next?
Tesla has added Arad to its official list of community-picked locations for future Supercharger sites. What a voting win really means, what Tesla does not promise, and which new stations just opened next door in Hungary.
Arad, in western Romania, is now on the list of places where Tesla intends to build its next Supercharger stations. The city is among the winners of the latest Supercharger Voting round, in which owners and fans pick where new chargers should go. The official "Tesla Charging" account published the list late on October 28 (US time), and the city now also appears on the program's official page on tesla.com.
What Tesla announced
The round produced 36 winning locations worldwide. Ten of them are in Europe: besides Arad, the list includes Tábor (Czech Republic), Tripótamos (Greece), Dunaújváros (Hungary), Agrigento (Italy), Bydgoszcz (Poland), Abrantes (Portugal), Biljača (Serbia) and two locations in the United Kingdom. The rest are spread across the US, Canada, Latin America, Turkey and Asia.
On the program page, Tesla says each winning location will be "one of the next" places for a Supercharger site. That is the whole commitment. There is no address, no stall count and no opening date.
Why a win does not mean a charger tomorrow
A vote tells Tesla where drivers want to charge. It does not hand the company a plot of land. Tesla still has to find a landowner willing to host the station, a grid connection strong enough for fast charging, and every local permit. Each of those steps can drag on, and Tesla-focused outlets point out that some earlier winners waited years before opening.
Romania already has a recent example. The Brătuleni station near Iași, which opened in October, also started life as a community vote. On the community-run map supercharge.info, which tracks the status of each location, cities such as Deva, Bacău and Sebeș are still listed at the voting stage. Arad has now moved into the winners column.
Why Arad matters
Arad sits on the A1 motorway, roughly halfway between Timișoara and the Nădlac border crossing into Hungary. It is the route many Romanians take when they drive west into the rest of Europe. Today Tesla has two stations in Timișoara and one in Oradea, but none in Arad itself. Drivers leaving the country through Nădlac either charge in Timișoara or cross the border and look for the first Hungarian site, in Szeged.
Andrei ran his highway efficiency tests for the Tesla Model Y Standard and the Model 3 Performance on exactly this stretch of motorway, so we know how busy it is with EV drivers.
Meanwhile, two new stations in Hungary
In the same week, "Tesla Charging" announced two new sites in neighboring Hungary, each with eight stalls. The first is in Érd, just southwest of Budapest, toward Lake Balaton. The second is in Zalaegerszeg, in western Hungary, handy on the way to Slovenia and Croatia. For anyone driving from Romania to the Adriatic, the Hungarian network keeps getting denser.
What it means for drivers
If you drive a Tesla or another EV through western Romania, a station in Arad would shorten charging stops before the border. For now, though, do not count on it: plan your trip around the stations that exist today, using the Tesla app or the in-car trip planner.
If you want a say in the next locations, the new voting round is already open. All you need is a free Tesla account. You get five votes per round, with at most one vote per location, and you can suggest new spots that may appear on the map in later rounds.
If you drive a non-Tesla EV, many European Superchargers are open to all brands. We explain step by step how to charge a non-Tesla EV at a Supercharger.
