Range anxiety: Tesla is winning the charger wars
Tesla’s dominance over the U.S. electricvehicle market now includes how cars get their juice, said Dana Hull in Bloomberg. “There are two charging options for EVs in the U.S.” One is the Combined Charging System (CCS). The other is Tesla’s proprietary North American Charging Standard (NACS), which currently works only for Tesla owners. However, this vast network of “low-key and ubiquitous Superchargers, which now covers most of North America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East,” is winning over the field—and just scored two crucial CCS defectors. Both Ford and General Motors announced recently that they would partner with Tesla to allow their vehicles to use Tesla’s chargers. The deals make it “increasingly likely that Tesla’s standard will become the prevailing charger standard in the U.S.,” bringing the company $3 billion in additional revenue per year by 2030, according to some estimates.
Tesla’s technology should be the standard, said Aarian Marshall in Wired. Nearly a quarter of “EV owners who attempted to charge at a public station in the first three months of 2023 were unable to do so,” usually because the machines were broken, according to J.D. Power. The outlier in the data: Tesla’s public Superchargers, which gave problems to only 4 percent of their users. In fact, “Tesla owners rave about the ease of Superchargers:
Drive up, plug in, wait 15 to 30 minutes to charge up, unplug, and drive off.” The reliability of Tesla’s network “has been a key component of the company’s success,” said John Rosevear in CNBC.com. In November, Tesla published the technical specifications of its NACS plugs. For Ford and GM, who were growing increasingly concerned about the spotty record of
CCS, that offered “a shortcut” to begin integrating NACS into new vehicles.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk still has to “wait a little longer before he can dance on the grave of CCS,” said Umar Shakir in The Verge. The 2021 infrastructure bill earmarked $7.5 billion in funding to build out the nation’s EV charging setup—but only for CCS chargers. The White House said Tesla could still nab some of that funding as long as it offered drivers an option for CCS charging. It is already doing that with Magic Dock, a CCS adapter connected to its Supercharger equipment “that can pop out when needed using Tesla’s app.” The competition between the two standards echoes old tech battles like VHS vs. Betamax, said Stephen Wilmot in The Wall Street Journal. For the nascent EV industry, “a single open standard for U.S. charging would be very welcome.” That Tesla is emerging victorious reflects “both the higher number of chargers it offers” and their reliability. Ultimately, it means “drivers can relax a bit about their battery charge.”