Just days after Ford and General Motors said they would adopt Tesla’s charging technology, electric vehicle charging companies are cautiously accepting Tesla’s charging technology as the main standard in the United States, but questions remain about how interoperability will be achieved.
Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) could be prioritized in a rare agreement between Tesla and the two U.S. automakers, which control more than 60% of the country’s electric vehicle market.
That puts companies including ChargePoint, EVgo and Blink Charging at risk of losing customers if they only offer combined charging systems (CCS), the competing standard favored by the Biden administration.
The White House said Friday that electric vehicle charging stations that offer Tesla plugs will be eligible for billions in federal subsidies as long as they include CCS connections. The White House aims to spur the deployment of hundreds of thousands of chargers, which it sees as integral to the adoption of electric vehicles.
ABB E-mobility North America, a charger maker owned by Swiss industrial company ABB, said it has been working on NACS since Tesla made its technology available in November.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest in starting to integrate NACS connectors into our chargers and devices…Customers are asking, ‘When can I get one?'” said Asaf Nagler, the division’s vice president of external affairs. He said the company is still in the design and testing stages and has been working with Tesla.
“The last thing we want to see is bring a solution to market that is not seamless,” Nagler said, adding, “We still don’t fully understand all the limitations of the (Tesla) chargers themselves.”
Ashley Horvat, senior executive at Schneider Electric’s U.S. electric vehicle charging hardware and software supply group, said interest in adopting NACS has been rising since Ford Motor and General Motors made the announcement.
Blink Charging said on Monday it would launch a new fast charger using a Tesla connector, as did ChargePoint Holdings Inc and Tritium DCFC Ltd. EVgo chief commercial officer Jonathan Levy told Reuters the company was working with its suppliers to “serve all electric vehicle drivers regardless of which fast-charging connector they use.”
Shares of some of these companies fell sharply on Friday, but pared some losses on Monday after saying they would adopt NACS.
Still, there are concerns about whether the dialogue between the two standards will go smoothly and whether having both standards on the market will increase costs for suppliers and customers.
Neither the automakers nor the U.S. government have explained how interoperability will work or how money will change hands.
“We don’t know much about the charging experience,” said Aatish Patel, co-founder of charger maker XCharge North America.
“There are still miles to go”
Charger manufacturers and operators have cited some concerns about interoperability: whether Tesla Superchargers can adequately charge high-voltage vehicles with fast charging, and whether their charging cables are designed to fit into the ports in certain cars.
Tesla’s Superchargers are integrated with its vehicles, payment methods are tied to users’ accounts, and users can charge and pay seamlessly through the Tesla app. The company offers adapters that charge its cars at non-Tesla stations and opens its Superchargers to non-Tesla vehicles.
“If you don’t have a Tesla and you go to Superchargers, it’s not that simple. How much Tesla integration do Ford, GM and other automakers really want to have in their vehicles to have that seamless integration? Or are they going to move to less seamless integration to access a larger network?” said Patel.
A former Tesla official who worked on Superchargers said that NACS charging piles will increase cost and complexity in the short term, but given its higher vehicle ownership and better user experience, the government needs to support a standard – NACS.
The person now works for a charging company and is not authorized to be interviewed by the media, so he declined to be named. The company, which is developing CCS chargers, is “reviewing” its strategy because of Tesla’s deal with General Motors.
Oleg Logvinov, president of CharIN North America, an industry body that promotes CCS, said: “Tesla’s proposal… is not a standard. There is still a long way to go before it becomes a standard.”
Logvinov, who is also CEO of EV charging parts supplier IoTecha, said CCS deserves support because it has been working with multiple suppliers for more than a decade.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
