Late last month, Ford and Tesla announced a two-prong partnership that rocked the North American EV charging world. First, starting in 2025, all Ford EVs will be equipped with only the Tesla-designed NACS connector, in place of the current CCS connector. Second, all Ford vehicles will have access to most of the Tesla Supercharger network, through an adapter for older models built with the CCS connector.
Before I had a chance to post this piece yesterday, GM announced that it is following suit. GM will also build NACS into all its EVs starting in 2025 and will offer an adapter for legacy vehicles, with access to the Supercharger network starting in 2024.
This is a huge deal. To date, discussions about America’s EV future have been heavily bifurcated. On the charging front, despite its market dominance, Tesla has been treated less as a standard bearer than as a prominent exception. For years, it was widely accepted that Tesla had largely solved the problem of EV charging, but only for its own customers. The proprietary nature–and sheer success–of the Tesla connector and Supercharger network meant it was easy to set Tesla aside and focus on solutions for the rest of the EV market. Tesla’s direct sales model and anti-union stance only served to further set it apart, with dealership lobbies pushing legislation banning direct Tesla sales altogether in certain states and making Tesla an unpopular candidate for federal funding—or (for a while at least) even federal acknowledgement.
The Ford and GM announcements change all that. With a stroke, the three largest American EV manufacturers have committed to NACS and the Supercharger network, which can no longer be dismissed as ‘Tesla only.’ It’s a seismic shift and there’s a lot to unpack here. Below I consider how Tesla got to this point, what this means for federal funding, and why this is a good time to have a frank discussion about connector quality. I also comment on the fundamental changes Tesla will have to make to accommodate the higher voltage of many non-Tesla vehicles.
What Tesla Did
The Ford and GM announcements were made only two weeks apart but are not an overnight development. Make no mistake: Tesla has been building to this moment for a long time. Last November, when Tesla first opened up its connector design and renamed it the North American Charging Standard, it did not simply invite other manufacturers to copy its homework. It revealed that it had crucially, but quietly, changed its communication protocol to match that of the CCS standard and laid the groundwork for a particular solution to the developing contest between the continent’s two major charging standards: one that matches CCS’s open communication protocols with the fundamentally superior hardware design Tesla pioneered and has been using for almost a decade. Around the same time, Tesla began to offer CCS adapters for its cars, and developed a hardware retrofit to older vehicles to allow them to communicate using the CCS protocols and similarly enabled the newer V3 Superchargers to speak the same language. These steps towards interoperability largely went unnoticed, but made the recent moves by Ford and GM possible.
Broadly, the announcements have been received positively by the EV-owning public. The Supercharger network, the largest and most reliable DC fast charging network in the world, has historically been a walled garden, available only to Tesla owners. It was only late last year that Tesla opened select Superchargers in the US to the general EV public by equipping them with a ‘magic dock’ Tesla-to-CCS adapter, with the promise to equip at least 7,500 with this adapter by the end of 2024. Ford and GM’s agreements with Tesla go above and beyond that. They will be the first manufacturers to outfit their cars with the NACS connector for service by Tesla’s charging network, but they almost certainly won’t be the last.
The Impact on Federal Funding
All this raises pressing questions about the effective exclusion of the NACS connector and Superchargers from the major federal funding programs authorized under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The $5 billion NEVI, $2.5 billion CFI, and $51 million Ride and Drive Electric programs have all centered on supporting the CCS standard. Tesla, despite being by far the most popular EV manufacturer, has had its standard largely excluded from these programs.
These exclusions reflect a long-running two-track approach to the development of EV charging infrastructure, under which Tesla has been treated as a closed, self-sufficient ecosystem and public funds are funneled into Tesla alternatives. For example, the Volkswagen emissions scam settlement that funded the creation of the Electrify America charger network specifically called for chargers to be built with the CCS and CHAdeMO connectors, though the only car in America built with the CHAdeMO connector is the Nissan Leaf. As reported by Verge last year, only about 170,000 Leaf EVs were sold in the US over the last decade, while 2022 alone saw the sale of 564,743 Teslas. Notably, since last year EA has been phasing out CHAdeMO support from future sites, except in California where the state’s clean air agency (CARB) still requires it. So it’s hardly surprising that the NEVI program, a first-of-its-kind commitment of federal funds to the installation of EV charging infrastructure by private entities, imposed similar specifications requiring only CCS and allowing CHAdeMO connectors. Following Tesla’s NACS announcement in November, the NEVI Final Rule allowed NACS connectors to be installed at qualifying sites if and only if each charger also had a CCS connector.
Tesla, Ford and GM together control almost three-quarters of the EV market. Under the current NEVI rules, most American car buyers would be unable to use chargers funded by American taxpayers without first purchasing an adapter. This is obviously problematic. NEVI and other programs will have to revisit their technical standards to require direct support of NACS.
That said, it has taken years to develop the technical specifications set out in the regulation, and the funding is already flowing. Charging hardware manufacturers have spun up ‘NEVI Compliant’ offerings and have started to move their production to the US to comply with the made-in-America requirements that will be in effect in 2024. A shift in the technical requirements will disrupt those plans and supply chains, but the sooner the changes are made, the better. Disrupting the program while it is being deployed will inevitably be less painful than going back to retrofit hardware that is out of date before it is even installed.
Not everyone would view amending the funding legislation as a positive, however. CharIN, an industry group that exists to promote the CCS standard, is predictably dismayed by the total disruption of what the FHWA described, as recently as February, as the industry’s verified “mov[ement] to adopt CCS as a market standard.” A week after Ford’s announcement, CharIN released a statement of its own criticizing Ford’s move. CharIN claims NACS is not a standard at all, and explicitly calls for its exclusion from federal funding. But the statement also acknowledges CCS’s continuing reliability problems and fails to persuasively address the reasons Ford and GM have pivoted to Tesla for their charging solutions: a better connector and a bigger network.
And it doesn’t seem like NACS’s advantages are going to dissipate any time soon. Most know It’s no secret that Tesla has the largest DCFC network in the US, with 63% of the ports in the country, but the more telling statistic is that Tesla continues to deploy chargers at a rate that far exceeds the rest of the market combined. In view of these trends, it’s obvious why Ford and GM would want their customers to be able to tap into this network. It will soon be a significant competitive disadvantage not to be a part of this coalition.
So what is next? I think it’s likely that over the next six months, we will see at least a few other manufacturers adopt NACS. Rivian and Stellantis will almost certainly move over very quickly. If that happens, there will be no way for federal programs to justify not accepting and supporting NACS in their deployments. The European and Japanese car makers may prove to be slower to react, but if the federal funding shifts to accommodate NACS, they will likely fall in line. In my opinion this would present a best-case scenario, one where all of the cars in the country would be able to use all chargers, and where the technical standard would be world-leading.
Charging Standards
This shift in the EV charging landscape–and specifically, Ford and GM’s apparent willingness to backtrack on their own EV programs to take advantage of the merits of the NACS connector–should force a long overdue conversation about what a US standard could and should be. I mean that from the perspective of technical superiority and functional design.
If the U.S. government were to mandate a standard connector for all vehicles (for example, by conditioning certain EV manufacturer subsidies on the connector’s inclusion), the NACS would be an excellent choice for technical reasons. This would not be the first time a government has mandated use of a particular plug type. The UK mandated CCS (a different version than the one we use here), and China has its own standard called GB/T. These standards are, in my opinion, inferior to NACS due to their large size and lesser current carrying capacity, limitations that result from designs that require different pins for AC versus DC charging(or in the case of CHAdeMO and GB/T, entirely different connectors). But Tesla proved it possible for cars to receive AC and DC on the same pins, resulting in a compact connector that has unignorable advantages when it comes to reliability and accessibility. A world-leading standard doesn’t have to look exactly like Tesla’s NACS, but it’s hard to imagine a rival standard of similar quality emerging and overtaking Tesla’s decade-long lead.
As I’ve mentioned previously, there are essentially three charging connector standards in the US. CHAdeMO, a protocol created by Japanese car manufacturers, debuted in 2010 and was the first widely deployed DC fast charging connector. The popularity of the Nissan Leaf helped drive the popularity of CHAdeMO, but its relatively low initial charging power 62.5kW meant that it was not a real solution for long range EVs.
CCS has been the leading ‘open’ standard in the US and Canada, and has been widely adopted by manufacturers. The CCS stands for “Combined Charging System” and is so named because it quite literally combines the J1772 level 2 connector with two additional large pins for DC charging. This bulky arrangement allows cars to be built with just one connector capable of handling both AC and DC charging (in contrast, CHAdeMO cars require two separate ports).
Around the same time CCS was developed, Tesla developed its own connector and, in 2012, introduced it with the launch of the Model S. The Tesla connector (since rebranded the NACS connector) proved to be superior in pretty much every way. It is less than half the size of the contemporary CCS and easier to handle, but has higher current carrying capacity. The main way Tesla was able to achieve this was to use the same large pins for both AC and DC charging. This reduced the overall pin count and therefore size of the connector. The one downside is that Tesla owners have always had to use an adapter to use the public networks, whether those be J1772 Level 2, CHAdeMO, or CCS chargers.
Image: Tesla
Looking at the two connectors, it's obvious which is more elegant, but the benefits are not just skin deep. The larger CCS connector must be aligned just so to connect properly, and is more unwieldy to use, presenting a challenge when stretching the cable close to its limit to reach a charge port that is far away from the charger. This can be particularly challenging for smaller individuals and those with disabilities or physical impairments. It is also easier to package the NACS connector in a car, with Tesla famously hiding its port in the taillight of its vehicles.
Limited Voltage
For the reasons outlined above it may seem pretty clear that moving to NACS is the right decision for Ford and GM, but there are certainly some potential kinks to work out as well.
The major immediate issue is the question of voltage. Tesla vehicles, and therefore Superchargers, operate on a 400V battery architecture. While this means the NACS connector itself is capable of handling higher amperage, and therefore the power levels on higher-voltage cars, the inverters that power the Superchargers will need to be upgraded to support those voltages. This may be relatively straightforward for the V3 superchargers, which use technology developed through Tesla’s commercial solar business, but older V1-2 Superchargers will almost certainly not be able accommodate higher-voltage cars (as they are essentially rack-mounted versions of the vehicles’ on-board chargers) and will need to be replaced entirely. The result is that vehicles with higher-voltage packs may not be able to charge at all on legacy Superchargers, or may charge very slowly.
Ford’s 2025 switch to NACS won’t raise the voltage issue if Ford intends to continue with its 400V architecture for the foreseeable future. This would represent a departure from GM and Dodge, but would allow Ford to take maximum advantage of Tesla’s existing charging network. Most would argue that 800V systems represent an advantage, particularly when it comes to charging, but the high current-carrying capacity of the NACS connector largely negates that advantage (at least for smaller vehicles).
The more likely possibility is that Tesla plans to move to support 1000V DC charging with its Superchargers in the very near term (which it would likely have to do anyway for the larger battery used in its Cybertruck), and that the V4 (or upgraded V3) Superchargers capable of this will be rolling out sooner than expected.
GM’s announcement seems to confirm this course, as it has already committed to an 800V architecture for its EV lineup. Either way, Ford and GM vehicles will have access to Superchargers starting in the spring of 2024, so Tesla has a year or so to make the necessary changes to the network to support higher voltage. Given GM is likely already tooling up its 2025 NACS cars, I’m certain Tesla is quickly upgrading the Superchargers to support them.