Big News! Tesla Proposes North American Charging Standard

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Rejoice, EV owners in North America, Tesla is suggesting its charging equipment should be the standard for North America. One of the most frequently heard complaints from people considering the purchase of an electric car is that there is no common charging standard. They don’t want to be driving around with a welter of charging cables and adapters. They want to be able to find a charger, plug in, and recharge their batteries without a lot of fuss.

There is a lot of interesting history about how and why charging standards in North America developed as they did, and someday that history will be part of courses in business school about how not to do things. But the truth is, having a number of charging standards is holding back the EV revolution. That’s not good. Now Tesla has taken a bold step forward to suggest its charging equipment be adopted as the standard for North America. Here is the Tesla blog post in full:

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“With more than a decade of use and 20 billion EV charging miles to its name, the Tesla charging connector is the most proven in North America, offering AC charging and up to 1 MW DC charging in one slim package. It has no moving parts, is half the size, and twice as powerful as Combined Charging System (CCS) connectors.

“In pursuit of our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, today we are opening our EV connector design to the world. We invite charging network operators and vehicle manufacturers to put the Tesla charging connector and charge port, now called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), on their equipment and vehicles. NACS is the most common charging standard in North America: NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla’s Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined.

“Network operators already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers, so Tesla owners can look forward to charging at other networks without adapters. Similarly, we look forward to future electric vehicles incorporating the NACS design and charging at Tesla’s North American Supercharging and Destination Charging networks.

“As a purely electrical and mechanical interface agnostic to use case and communication protocol, NACS is straightforward to adopt. The design and specification files are available for download, and we are actively working with relevant standards bodies to codify Tesla’s charging connector as a public standard. Enjoy.”

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Tesla & Standardization

The image above is all it takes to understand the benefits of adopting the Tesla charging standard. The equipment is elegantly designed. It is compact and lightweight. If there is to be a standard — and there really ought to be — the Tesla design is head and shoulders above the CCS design.

The problem is, virtually every manufacturer that sells electric cars in North America except Tesla has adopted the CCS standard, as have all the major EV charging networks. As Tech Crunch observes, “Tesla didn’t name any automakers or charging infrastructure companies as converts. In this highly competitive environment, in which virtually every automaker is now using the CCS, it’s hard to see GM, Ford and Stellantis switching to Tesla’s technology.

“However, at least one company — EV startup Aptera — supports the move. Earlier this year, Aptera called for the U.S. government to adopt Tesla’s Supercharger technology as the standard for all EV charging in the country. And EVGo has added Tesla connectors to some of its charging stations in the United States.

“The blog post said that network operators ‘already have plans in motion’ to incorporate NACS at their chargers. If network providers like ChargePoint, EVConnect or Electrify America add NACS, it would allow Tesla owners to charge at these stations without a need for an adapter.”

The Tesla Charging Takeaway

There are a lot of political and egotistical considerations here, many of which relate back 15 years or more to when electric cars first started selling in North America. Mistakes were made. Toes were stepped on. Some still have old scores to settle.

But we need this in North America and we need it now. It would be idiotic if everyone had to carry an adapter to use a gas pump — pentastar shaped for Chrysler products, a three-pointed star for Mercedes, a square for GM, a rhombus for Ford. And yet, we have something silly like that for EV charging.

Might there be some connection between this announcement and the $5 billion the federal government is dangling as an incentive to build out America’s EV charging infrastructure? Probably. Tesla certainly would like a piece of that pie. But the point of spending all that money is to move the EV revolution forward in America, and the best way to do that is with the best charging equipment available. Stay tuned. The end of this story has yet to be written.