With Ford and GM's help, Tesla reignites the charging standard war
Up until about a month ago, the electric vehicle charging landscape was finally looking pretty settled. After many years of confusion for potential buyers, the CCS1 standard had just about achieved dominance as the de facto standard for all non-Tesla EVs. But Ford, and then General Motors, upended all that, as both automakers signed deals to adapt their EVs to use Tesla's Supercharger experience. Now the charging industry is scrambling in the wake of those deals.
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How could Tesla's deal with GM and Ford impact the wider EV industry?
"From the perspective of the industry, this is the culmination of a lot of things that have happened," said Arcady Sosinov, founder and CEO of the charging company Freewire Technologies. "A combination of the legacy OEMs missing the boat on deploying of charging infrastructure and their own network. The public charging networks having failed spectacularly at reliability and ubiquity. The business model for charging is now clearly a low commodity-like margin business."
Sosinov sees medium-term turmoil when it comes to end users making sense of fast charging. "There's going to be a standards war now for a decade because you're still going to have to have legacy vehicles," Sosinov told Ars. "Clearly, this is saying that Ford and GM made a mistake four or five years ago when they said, 'We're not building out a charging network.'"
We'll probably see many more dual-plug EV chargers in the coming years. The GM and Ford deals to use what Tesla calls the North American Charging Standard mean that by volume, the overwhelming majority of new EVs in the US will use that plug. But recently passed legislation to expand fast-charging infrastructure in the US will mean that CCS cables aren't going anywhere, either.
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Which charging companies now support NACS?
Specifically, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) standards say that "[t]his final rule establishes a requirement that each DCFC port must have a Combined Charging System (CCS) Type 1 connectors. This final rule also allows DCFC charging ports to have other non-proprietary connectors so long as each DCFC charging port is capable of charging a CCS-compliant vehicle."
"With GM joining Ford in adopting NACS cables, it represents another domino in the lineup towards widespread NACS adoption," said Alex Urist, vice president of XCharge North America. "But it's also regressive to the initial NEVI policy direction. If everyone adopts NACS, policy will need to be modified to include both NACS and CCS1. This also would cause extensive retrofit costs for ChargePoint operations to support both standards unless everyone drives around with adapters. From our perspective, XCharge North America has always stood committed to serving all types of vehicles. NACS plugs are currently available for all C6AM units as well as CCS1 cables."
"Ultimately, this drives higher costs for consumers. We have to implement both cables in both standards and test with both types of vehicles, and those costs end up coming down to the consumer," Sosinov said.
Some companies have already reacted by adding a second set of charging cables to product lines. For example, charging company Blink just announced that it is adding NACS and CCS plugs to its newest 240 kW DC fast charger.
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What is the reaction of NACS's competitors?
"Given recent announcements by Tesla, GM, and Ford, we are clearly witnessing the continued evolution of the EV charging industry as technologies advance and industry stakeholders come together and evaluate best practices," said Blink CEO Brendan Jones. "We are excited by the increasing interest in our sector and are prepared to support all moves to increase EV adoption."