For a couple of years, there was a war among the makers of electric vehicle charging plugs over which company would win market supremacy. Well, now it seems we’ve got a clear winner, and it’s Tesla’s North American Charging Standard. For a long time, it didn’t seem like this would be the case, with automakers like Ford and GM deciding to stay with the Combined Charging System connector. But, that all changed when Tesla offered broad access to the automaker’s behemoth Supercharger network.
Basically, Tesla’s connector is the most common in North America because the company has the most EV sales and the biggest charging network, according to Automotive News. Even though CCS is technically the standard plug, it doesn’t matter now that Tesla has offered broad supercharger access to anyone. It also doesn’t hurt that Tesla’s system has proven to be easy to use and generally reliable.
Other benefits include the fact Tesla’s plug is smaller and can be used for DC fast charging on a public network and AC slow charging at home. Non-Teslas use the bulky CS plug for fast charging and the smaller J1772 connector for AC charging.
Here’s more on how this shift in the industry came to be, from Automotive News:
“When Tesla announced the North American Charging Standard, most everyone in the industry scoffed and said ‘who are they to say this is a standard,’ “ said Matt Teske, CEO of Chargeway, which makes an EV charging app. Tesla’s design was objectively superior, but non-Tesla brands were already wedded to the Combined Charging System, Teske said.
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“The impetus behind the switch to NACS was not about the connector,” said Loren McDonald, CEO of the consultancy EVAdoption. “It was about the better charging experience across the Supercharger network.”
Ford, GM and every other EV maker, McDonald said, were facing intense pressure from customers who found CCS networks, such as Electrify America, unreliable. Independent testing confirmed those concerns.
The first domino fell when Ford signed a deal with Tesla in May of 2023. In fact, Ford CEO Jim Farley joined Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an audio conference on Twitter to make the announcement.
The CEOs said Ford would get access to most of Tesla’s Supercharger network in the first quarter of 2024 through a CCS to NACS adapter. Ford, in turn, agreed to build the Tesla system natively into its future EVs, starting in 2025. Tesla also agreed to make a CCS to NACS adapter in the meantime.
Farley said he personally reached out to Musk after being disappointed with CCS networks on a 2022 California vacation while driving a Ford F-150 Lightning. Farley’s kids noticed Superchargers functioning along their road trip route while the CCS experience was less than ideal.
“I just realized, ‘wow, that is a big advantage for them,’ “ Farley said in a May 2023 interview on the State of Charge YouTube channel. “I’d always intellectually understood, but I didn’t really understand it as a consumer.”
From there, more automakers fell in line. General Motors and its CEO Mary Barra made a similar deal to Ford, and GM’s cars would adopt a NACS port on future models, AutoNews reports. Access to Superchargers more than doubled the total fast chargers available to GM customers in North America.
Then, the floodgates opened. Tesla has granted Supercharger access to over a dozen brands, including Acura, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Lexus, Lincoln, Lucid, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo. This is market domination, folks.
In response, engineering nonprofit SAE International said it would begin the process of standardizing NACS, ensuring that any supplier or manufacturer could make and deploy the connector on EVs and at charging stations. SAE’s name for the public standard is J3400.
“The automotive industry last year decided this is the direction they’re going,” said Christian Thiele, director of global ground vehicle standards at SAE International. “What Tesla did so well is they maintained their system.”
SAE said in December that it took a key step in the standardization process with the release of a technical report.