It’s been a month since General Motors and Ford Motor Company formed agreements with Tesla Motors to adopt its North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector for electric vehicles (EVs).
Shortly after this, any third party EV charging vendor that wasn’t already supporting the technology signed up nearly immediately.
This includes Kempower, i-charging, Evercharge, FLO, Tritium, Autel Energy, ABB E-mobility, Wallbox Chargers and ChargePoint. Previously, Blink Charging, XCharge, EVPasport and Ivy Charging all supported the NACS connector earlier this year.
But will having to support a third charging technology make it easier to do business harder or just business as usual?
“Business as usual,” answered Taylor Weaver, CEO of EV charging vendor LNG Electric. “Most people see this as a battle for supremacy — I’ve heard this described VHS vs Betamax 3.0. It’s not. It’s about convenience.”
Weaver said this is the faster way to increase charging access for everyone regardless of the model EV. “Expanding access is key and that’s all that matters.”
Aatish Patel, president and co-founder of XCharge North America, agreed that business remains the same, but EV charging vendors must be ready to react and accommodate as needed.
“Very few companies supported Tesla natively, and now it’s changing,” Patel said. “Let us see how things develop, however I think the market will dictate the movement, not announcements.”
Other regions likely unphased
Europe is all on the combined charging system (CCS) and Tesla had to charge their own adapters to accommodate sales in Europe so it is unlikely to change there.
In fact, many other global markets are adopting CCS, which might leave North America as an outlier with NACS, said Patel.
“Asia and Europe are different than the U.S.,” Patel said. “Europe is on CCS2, and I don’t think that’ll change. Asia is using GBT and CCS2, and I think they’re going to go towards CCS2 on a longer term.”
Patel said XCharge sees automotive companies support multiple standards for a number of years but none of them are likely to simply go away because this would be a waste of infrastructure and dollars if every charging port had to be swapped out.
This raises the question again if maybe the move by Ford, GM and VW to support NACS in North America is just a temporary situation until these companies and third-party vendors build enough infrastructure across the region to support the incoming demand. Or if this is a long-term solution where we will see nearly all providers supporting three different types of charging adapters.
“I see a goal of getting a reliable network backing their vehicle, but I’m unsure if this is long term goal they’re focused on right now,” Patel said. “The announcement doesn’t solve the core issue at hand: We don’t have enough chargers in the right places. It just pushes the utilization into another pool.”
In the near term, Tesla gets a boost with its technology getting rapid recognition and the SAE International, a global standards body, is working toward standardizing the NACS connector due to the recent support.
With SAE standardizing the tech, it will at the very least be included in future discussions or technology for years to come. And the impact of all these companies signing on to support NACS is continuing to be felt across the automotive industry.
