Our big unanswered questions about the switch to Tesla-style EV plugs

The mass sponge EV charger plug migration continues to collect steam. Since we final wrote about the matter, first Polestar after which Mercedes-Benz additionally introduced that they are dropping the Combined Charging Standard 1 (CCS1) connector in favor of Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS). Sometime subsequent yr, non-Tesla electrical automobiles from these makes, in addition to Ford, General Motors, Volvo, and Rivian, might be ready to begin making use of Tesla’s Supercharger community. In 2025, these automakers—and possibly just a few extra—will begin constructing vehicles with NACS ports in-built.

It’s not simply the automobile makers. Charger producers and charging networks have additionally been asserting new NACS merchandise, and it looks like sufficient vital mass is constructing that CCS1 may be headed for extinction. Or at the very least it might be relegated to curio standing alongside CHAdeMO. Things are trying even higher now that SAE International is taking up the administration of NACS, so it’ll not be beneath the management of a rival OEM run by a billionaire recognized for impulsive and sometimes arbitrary selections. At this level, many are merely ready to see if Hyundai Motor Group or Volkswagen Group might be the subsequent big convert.

The justification for dropping an entrenched normal and switching to NACS, from Ford and others, was as a lot about acquiring entry for his or her EV house owners to Tesla’s Supercharger community, and why not? Even the most hardened partisan from the EV model flame wars has to concede that not solely are there way more Superchargers on the market, however they provide a vastly superior charging expertise to any of the public charging networks.

But does that routinely imply that the switch from CCS1 to NACS will assure a superior charging expertise for all these Fords, Chevys, Rivians, Volvos, Polestars, and Mercedes? I’m not totally positive it does. I’ve three big unanswered questions: Will the non-Teslas match Superchargers, will non-Teslas match in at Superchargers, and why ought to we consider {that a} completely different plug will instantly make all these horribly unreliable third-party charging networks instantly run completely?

For the {hardware} makers—vehicles and chargers each—the switch theoretically should not be that troublesome. In truth, NACS truly makes use of the identical communications protocol as CCS (and in addition ISO15118, also referred to as “plug and charge”), not like earlier variations of the Supercharger community that used a proprietary communications protocol that interfaced with a Tesla’s CAN bus.

Will it match?

But the first big drawback drivers from all these non-Tesla makes will encounter is whether or not or not the charging cable even reaches their charging port. As a completely closed ecosystem (till now), Tesla has been ready to optimize the Supercharger expertise for its EVs. So all Teslas have charging ports in the identical location (at the again, built-in into the aspect of a light-weight cluster), which in flip means the Superchargers do not want very lengthy cables to attain them.

Other manufacturers’ ports are throughout the place—typically on a entrance wing forward of the door, but in addition generally at the rear beneath the C pillar—however with little standardization of which aspect of the automobile they go. We don’t know whether or not Tesla will redesign Superchargers to accommodate the new arrivals, but when so, “you need long cables to get every position of the charging port,” mentioned Dennis Mueller, SVP of product advertising and marketing and communications at ADS-TEC, which makes EV charging {hardware}. “A long cable means they’re heavy; there’s a lot of cost of copper and so on.”

Those longer cables do not simply get costlier; additionally they get heavier and extra unwieldy. And it is probably not the plastic CCS1 plug that contributes to the heavy cables you’ve to cope with at an Electrify America or Chargepoint (or whomever) quick charger; it is all that copper wiring.