Last week, American automotive OEM General Motors Co. said it would collaborate with Tesla Motors to integrate its North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector into its electric vehicles (EVs) beginning in 2025.
The move comes shortly after Ford Motor Company said its drivers would be able to access 12,000 Tesla Supercharger stations across the U.S. and Canada. The move to adopt the NACS connector effectively doubles the number of fast chargers available to Ford EV users starting early in 2024.
GM will now give access to these same 12,000 Tesla Superchargers to GM EV drivers via adapter while the company continues to build more than 134,000 chargers in North America.
Why it matters
With both American car making giants supporting Tesla’s NACS, it has set off shockwaves throughout the automotive industry and EV charging ecosystems. The domino effect has happened as other companies in the EV supply chain are throwing out support for NACS to compete.
What remains to be seen is if this is a short-term solution for these companies until they can fully develop their own infrastructure and push out their own proprietary networks. Or if it is a long-term development with these automotive OEMs fully committing to Tesla’s NACS technology or at least supporting it in future vehicles.
But the impact is already being felt across the automotive industry as many other companies are coming on board to support NACS.
Quick adoption
EV analytical research vendor EVAdoption has developed an NACS tracker focusing on the companies supporting Tesla’s NACS technology.
In terms of automakers, obviously Ford and GM are supporting NACS now, but Aptera Motors announced last year it would also support the technology by 2024.
Meanwhile, EV charging vendors are also poised to move into this technology. Blink Charging’s new direct current fast charger supports both NACS and combined charging system (CCS) connectors. The company unveiled the chargers at this year’s CES 2023 and is in the final stages of its design.
Other EV chargers that just this past week pledged to support NACS after Ford and GM’s announcement include Kempower, i-charging, Evercharge, FLO, Tritium, Autel Energy, ABB E-mobility, Wallbox Chargers and ChargePoint.
Other EV chargers were already heading in this direction prior to Ford and GM’s announcement. EVgo began to support NACS technology in 2021 as well as the other two main fast charging standards including CCS and CHAdeMO.
EVPassport, Ivy Charging and XCharge also all announced support for all three charging technologies earlier this year and prior to the automotive OEM announcements.
In the software market, just this past week ChargeLab and AmpUp both announced NACS support.
What’s next?
It is likely that other automotive OEMs will follow suit as American carmakers have effectively doubled their fast EV charging capacity overnight. To compete in North America — at least in the short term before global network infrastructure is developed — these automotive OEMs will likely need to sign their own deals with Tesla.
In other regions — particularly in Europe where EVs are growing faster than North America — developments are also likely to happen as companies are looking to grow their EV fleets substantially in the next few years. Specifically, Europe has a goal to transition to these electrified models in the next 10 years and many automotive OEMs have a goal to completely convert to electric fleets by this time if not before.
