Tesla scored two major victories over the past couple of weeks with both Ford and General Motors adopting Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) for their electric vehicles (EVs). Starting next year existing Ford and GM EV owners will be able to plug in at over 12,000 Superchargers in Canada and the US with an adapter, and then in 2025 both automakers will add the NACS charge port to their EVs to make it a seamless experience.
Following the announcement by GM this week, there has been a domino effect across the industry with multiple EV charging providers saying they will also be adding NACS to their stations, both as retrofits to existing stations and including it when building out new stations.
The announcements have effectively killed what used to be considered the EV charging standard in North America, the Combined Charging System (CCS), almost overnight.
Despite this and the fact that the majority of EVs that will be added to US roads will soon be using NACS, the White House says that in order to receive federal funding to build EV charging stations, they must still include CCS connectors. There is a lot of money at stake as the administration has set aside up to $7.5 billion to build a network of EV chargers across the country.
The position of the administration was shared with Reuters by spokesperson Robyn Patterson.
“Earlier this year, we developed minimum standards to ensure publicly funded EV charging is accessible, reliable, and affordable for all drivers, and we required interoperability to promote competition. Those standards give flexibility for adding both CCS and NACS, as long as drivers can count on a minimum of CCS,” Patterson said.
Fortunately Tesla has this position covered after developing the Magic Dock, a built-in CCS adapter that can easily be added to Supercharger stations in a matter of just a few hours.
