A big pain point for electric vehicle owners could soon sting less, thanks to an announcement from the Jeep-, Ram-, and Chrysler-maker Stellantis—one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers.
This week, the company said that it would add the Tesla-designed charging connection system, called the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, to its electric vehicles by 2025.
In most cases, the new connector will supplement an older one called the Combined Charging System, or CCS, and an even older one, called CHAdeMO. Those were designed by a group of professional engineers, but they tended to be slower, clunkier, and in many cases harder to get into the ground than the Tesla competitor.
Stellantis was the final domino to fall before Tesla’s connector could declare victory in North America. Ford said it would add the newer connector to its electric vehicles in May. Since then, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Honda, the Hyundai Group, Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, and others have followed. In fact, only a handful of electric startups are still holding out.
The upshot: By 2025, many more vehicles will be able to use many of the same stations to charge.
Surveys suggest that today’s American electric vehicle owners, a relatively tolerant first adopter lot, are often frustrated with the public charging experience. Chargers with broken plugs, wonky payment systems, and software incompatible with the cars they’re trying to charge—all are common on public roads.
Tracking down the right public charging station is “a weird mental hurdle for people,” says Joseph Yoon, a consumer insights analyst at the auto research firm Edmunds. “Did you have to Google where the nearest gas station was?”
For those reasons, the mess of acronyms and standards feels like EV esoterica, but could be a make-or-break factor in the electric transition. Now, finally, the US has reached some charging standardization, in the same way that Europe and China have. (Not surprisingly, those places are further ahead in electric vehicle adoption.) The change could help convince more potential EV drivers that electric is both better and not that different from what they’re used to in a gas-powered car.
For Tesla, the dominance of its charging standard (which it cleverly renamed in 2022) is a big win. It is, symbolically, an acknowledgement from other automakers that its Supercharger network is both the widest ranging and most reliable in the US. It is also a tacit acknowledgement that the more compact design of NACS is superior.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s a potential source of revenue—stable “recurring revenue” that could show up quarter over quarter without much fuss—that one analyst has predicted could bring in $20 billion by decade’s end. That’s especially nice because Tesla warned earlier this year that it anticipated a sales slowdown as it ramped up production of its Cybertruck and a new, cheaper vehicle.
Still, there is plenty to be worked out on the technical side of electric vehicle charging. Stellantis’ announcement makes clear some of the complications: While the company said that it would be using the Tesla standard, it did not say that its electric vehicles would actually have access to the Tesla Supercharger network. Nor did it mention whether the charging standard might in the future be adopted outside of the US. “While we don't have additional details at this time, the company is continuing to look at all options that make charging simpler and more convenient for our customers,” Dan Reid, a spokesperson for the automaker, wrote in an email.
Instead, the company cited future use of the coming Ionna charging network, a joint venture between BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis, which will supposedly see a network of 30,000 DC fast chargers deployed across the US and Canada later this year. Indeed, careful readers will note that Stellantis’ press release on its connector change carefully omitted both the T-word and NACS, what the electric-automaker-who-must-not-be-named chose to call its plug system.
Another complication: Having the same connector doesn’t necessarily mean that all North American EVs and chargers will speak the same “languages,” either between chargers and the networks that support them, or between the EVs and the chargers themselves.
Getting these standardized protocols in order will be necessary to get to the electric vehicle holy grail: Any car being able to plug in to any charger anytime and pay automatically, like filling up a gas tank minus the cash or credit card exchange.
Once that happens, electrics might really beat the alternatives. “It’s going to be a huge boost to EV adoption,” says Yoon.
