Xiaomi has unveiled a home robotic arm charger that autonomously plugs and unplugs your EV — delivering on a concept that Tesla prototyped over a decade ago but never brought to market.
The compact device, only 152 mm wide, is designed to fit in tight home garage parking spaces and integrates into Xiaomi’s smart home ecosystem for smartphone control.
Tesla’s unfulfilled promise
In December 2014, Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla was working on “a charger that automatically moves out from the wall & connects like a solid metal snake.” He added: “For realz.” By August 2015, Tesla showed a functional prototype — a multi-segmented robotic arm that slithered snake-like toward the charging port, aligned itself, and connected automatically.
It looked like the future. But a decade later, the product never shipped. Tesla quietly abandoned the snake charger concept, and the last we heard about it was in 2020, when it was still supposedly “not dead.” It’s dead.
