last edit Nov.2023
Q: Should which charging connector your next EV uses be the key defining element in the 'Which car to buy' decision? Maybe not, after all our answer to any question is "It Depends."
Still it is one thing you should keep in mind..
About 80% of you, about 90+% of the time will be charging at home. Even if you're in apartment, many of which are starting to provide charging options, mostly under duress from state and local governments.
If you own your home, then you'll just put in whatever home connector your car uses, or get an adapter for the one you have. EasyPeasy. Except of course there's more to it. Why else would we be boring you with all of this.
While our first three EVs all charged directly off of standard home electrical outlets (we've been at this since the '80's) all the more recent cars, 2012 onward, have used the J1772 plug for home charging. We went into this in some detail back in a post from 2013 and we've been using literally that exact same charging cord since. 10 years on.
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| Standard J1772 EV charging plug. |
So yeah, this has been the standard for over a decade now. It basically acts as a switch with just enough smarts to switch on the power from the 120v or 240v AC outlet (or grid) you have it plugged into when it recognizes there's a car attached. The actual 'charger' part is in the car. This results in relatively slow charging, but ease of connecting to power.
This is why DC Fast Chargers were developed. They bypass the charger built into the car and actually charge the battery directly. CHAdeMO was the first 'standard' mainly in Japan and in the US used primarily on the Nissan Leaf, the first mass market EV here in 2011.
CCS1 then became the US standard, mainly because the other players didn't want to pay the (ridiculous) fees to the Japanese standards organization. Not Invented Here was also a factor, as was the expense of the overly large complicated CHAdeMO connector. CCS2 is one of the standards in Europe and S.America. China (of course) has their own. That said, the CCS connectors are, comparatively, also large heavy and expensive.
In (partially) response to this Tesla developed NACS*, a smaller lighter cheaper more reliable connector:
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| CCS (in grey) compared with NACS, both capable of 350Kw charging rates. |
Obviously a big size disparity. CCS also weighs over twice as much and is considerably more difficult to handle and insert. The cost is also proportional, CCS being about 2X as much. NACS also handles both AC 'home charging' and DC fast charging with the same connector on the car.
CCS was designed to make money for the companies manufacturing it. NACS was designed for reliability, ease of use, and efficient production ... of both ends, partially because the same company was making both ends -and- the fast chargers -and- the cars attached there-to. To add insult to injury the NACS fast charging infrastructure "Superchargers" costs a third, or less, to install and have been historically much more reliable as we have documented in earlier posts.
So if this NACS thing is so great how come we aren't using it already?
For starters, 'we' are using it already. Just under 75% of the EV's on US roads are Teslas, and Teslas use this connector. As for the remainder, there are several reasons:
Although Tesla agreed pretty much from the beginning to allow other manufacturer's cars access to the Tesla charging network and opened up their patents (free of charge) to allow that, they did want the other companies to help pay for the literally billions of dollars that charging infrastructure system costs, currently 48,000 stalls world wide. Hey it's only fair, if they (other car sellers) want the benefits they should help with the costs, no?
However, well established (and prideful) car companies are hardly going to bow down to some irritating upstart in that manner. What would they tell their stockholders? Besides, other companies are going to build out chargers, for profit, without the car companies' having to shell out any $$.
There's also the political angle. The Biden Administration and a number of congress critters have an intense dislike of Tesla, in small part due to them being a non-union shop. Until very recently pretty much all the political noise and invitations to meetings - etc. has gone to GM. They make the right noises, even though their execution has been crap. GM is in what? Sixth? Place in the world on EVs if you remove micro-cars that are china-market only.
So what changed?
Two things. Mainly, FORD figured out that there was no way they were going to compete on the charging side of the equation. They got into extensive negotiations with Tesla over this and agreed to adopt the NACS 'standard' on their vehicles going forward, and are paying some undisclosed amounts now and going forward.
In exchange, the second big thing: Tesla is allowing the FORD App access to the servers/api that authenticate the connection and start the actual charging, and handle the billing. This was a big deal because now FORD is in your face on your phone while you're charging. Imagine the advertising revenue! And data (mis)management.
Well, and 'brand awareness' despite that fact that you're obviously sitting at a Tesla charger ;-)
GM decided they couldn't afFord (see what we did there? ;-) to be left behind and quickly decided to follow suit. It's almost certain many other Dominoes will Fall. The Biden folks are pretty ticked off and are trying to revise the rules to require CCS on charging stations put in with federal support, despite that not being in the original law. This part is getting interesting. At this point (late 2023) the ONLY manufacturer that sells into the North American market that has NOT signed on to use NACS as their primary charging connector is Stellantis (Fiat, Chrystler, RAM, JEEP). Even VW is onboard now.
Many existing chargers have both NACS and CCS connectors. See Tesla Magic Dock. Also, equipping charge stations with two cords is do-able if you don't want to go the dockable-adapter route. That's how they support CCS + CHAdeMO now.
On the car owner end of it, adapters are available. This example photo is an NACS to J1772 adapter. It's around $50 on Amazon. Tesla makes a (necessarily much more complicated) CHAdeMO to NACS adapter that's a couple hundred dollars. If a 'standards organization' charges a bunch in licensing fees for you to include their very important standard in your product -or- they have an exclusive manufacturing agreement in place it can push costs up rapidly. Having to do complicated electronics/communication protocols adds costs too. Unfortunately CCS-NACS is, comparatively speaking, relatively difficult, so that will mostly be implemented by having the vehicle manufacturers do the heavy lifting -or- putting both types of plugs on each charging station, which is actually starting to happen. The other charging station companies are not -completely- clueless ;-)
*NACS is called the North American Charging Standard. At least recently. It was previously called the Tesla connector. It is registered with many standards bodies. Most of them don't recognize it as an exclusive north American standard. The SAE still recognizes CCS 'a' US standard. NACS is now an SAE standard as well. Some of the complicated bits, mostly surround auto-recognizing the vehicle and automatically starting charging when plugged in, is still under negotiation. This is no surprise since 'who controls the money' is a more fraught conversation than a physical engineering standard.
Do note that in the "negotiations with other car makers" Tesla is allowing them access to only some (around 60%?) of the Supercharger stations out there. Most of the already congested, by existing Tesla drivers, stations will be excluded, which only makes sense as they're protecting their user base.
Its VHS vs. BETA all over again. Except in this case Beta, the better technology with the worse marketing and extraordinarily irritating pitchman (or NACS in this case) has 75% of the electric cars on the road in the US using it's connector at this time. Yes, Tesla really is that dominant.
We regard this whole thing as a good deal for almost everyone, especially future electric car drivers.
The best, most reliable and lowest cost technology wins? Despite political and corporate and 'standards body' headwinds? ...WhoDaThunkIt?
Final notes: We'd hate to be invested in other charging providers right now. EvGo, Electrify America, ChargePoint... Owie! Competing directly against a provider (Tesla) that has 99.7% uptime, compared with a non-Tesla industry average around 75%, and historical pricing 30-50% lower -and- who is directly integrated into the Ford and GM apps has got to be difficult.
Investment-wise we're unlikely to jump in with FORD or GM either, even though we do think the above changes should reduce the need for massive government bailouts in the future, even though that probably remains the most likely scenario.
That said: Here are the charging station companies that have announced support for NACS:
ABB/ABM, Blink, Chargepoint, EVgo, FLO, Tritium and Wallbox. While Electrify America is currently absent from this list, they don't build any of the chargers, which are supplied by ABB/ABM and Tritium, so they're likely to follow suit.
Our only concern with this is the conversion of existing charge stations to NACS. The easiest thing from the charger manufacturer's standpoint is to install a NACS cord on existing stations. The most prevalent 'has two cords' type of stations have CHAdeMO on the second one. It seems probable that CHAdeMO will get phased out leafing the ~200,000+ Leaf drivers in North America in an unpleasant position.
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