There’s been much news in the media recently about the adoption of NACS, The North American Charging Standard - Tesla’s charge connector - as the default for new cars.
It started a few months back when Ford announced that all their new electric vehicles will be fitted with a NACS connector.
Other OEM’s followed suit and, pretty soon it looks like it will be very difficult in the US to buy a new electric vehicle that doesn’t have the NACS connector on it.
A lot of people are hailing this as a great step forward in charger connectivity and there’s opinion pieces and articles written about how this is going to solve the US charging situation.
Of course it isn’t. We’ll talk about why in a short while.
In the meantime I want to just bring you up-to-speed with what the US situation is. For people outside the US it’s a little difficult to fathom what’s happening and why.
Basically, Tesla is the dominant force in EVs in the US. They sell more cars than other OEMs and they have more chargers than other OEMs. The supercharging network covers all the US and makes it pretty seamless to drive wherever you want across the country. The units are plentiful, powerful, and reliable.
But this only applies if you have a Tesla vehicle.
If you’re not in the Tesla eco system you have lots and lots of issues. For a start your vehicle has a completely different charging connector to Teslas - CCS1 (This is different to CCS2 which is what we have here in the UK and Europe). You are also much more limited in the sorts of chargers you can use. The network is much more sporadic. Chargers are less reliable, charge speeds are much less dependable, network connectivity is bad, payment systems are often complex and frustrating, and charging locations tend to have fewer units than supercharger sites (although it is getting better).
For a summary of the main differences between the Tesla ecosystem and the non-Tesla ecosystem in the US see this video:
Once Tesla announced that they were allowing other OEMs to use the NACS standard there were great cries of relief. People thought the charging problems they were having would be over and the Tesla plug-and-charge capabilities would be available to all cars with the right connector.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
In fact I suspect this move will end up being a bit of a backfire for the OEMs who went for it. Here’s why:
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