Aurich Lawson | Getty Images QualitySponge EV charger plug migration continues to accelerate. Since our last article on the subject, first Polestar and then Mercedes-Benz have also announced that they will be ditching the Combined Charging Standard 1 (CCS1) connector in favor of Tesla’s North American charging standard ( NACS). Sometime next year, non-Tesla EVs from those brands, as well as Ford, GM, Volvo and Rivian, will be able to start using Tesla’s Supercharger network. By 2025, these automakers (and possibly more) will begin producing vehicles with built-in NACS ports. Not just car manufacturers. Charger manufacturers and charging networks have also been releasing new NACS products, and it feels like CCS1 may be dying. Or at least it might be relegated to antiquity alongside CHAdeMO. Things are looking even better now that SAE International is taking over management of NACS so it will no longer be controlled by a rival OEM run by a billionaire known for his impulsive and often arbitrary decisions . For now, many are just waiting to see whether Hyundai Motor Group or Volkswagen Group will be the next big shift.
The rationale for ditching entrenched standards and switching over to NACS by Ford and others is to give EV owners access to Tesla’s Supercharging network, why not? Even the most die-hard proponents of the EV branding debate have to admit that Superchargers are not only far more numerous, but offer a far superior charging experience than any public charging network.
For hardware manufacturers — cars and chargers — the switch should theoretically be less difficult. In fact, NACS actually uses the same communication protocol as CCS (and ISO15118, also known as “plug and charge”), unlike earlier versions of the Supercharger network, which used proprietary communication with Tesla’s CAN bus interface protocol.
Does it fit?
But the first big question any non-Tesla manufacturer driver will have is if the charging cable reaches them charging port. As a fully closed ecosystem (so far), Tesla has been able to optimize the Supercharging experience for its EVs. As a result, all of Tesla’s charging ports are in the same place (at the back, integrated into the side of the light cluster), which in turn means the Supercharger doesn’t need long cables to reach them.
