I am an EV user. My connection is not Tesla compatible. I wish the government would prod manufacturers to create a common connection for all EVs the same way there is a common gas intake for all gas powered vehicles.
>I wish the government would prod manufacturers to create a common connection
That is exactly why this is happening. Tesla is expanding their network and opening it to more manufacturers in pursuit of a $7.5bn federal funding program.[0]
>the new rules, issued after nearly eight months of debate...seeks to give consumers unfettered access to a growing coast-to-coast network of EV charging stations, including Tesla's Superchargers.
>Companies that hope to tap $7.5 billion in federal funding for this network must also adopt the dominant U.S. standard for charging connectors, known as "Combined Charging System" or CCS; use standardized payment options; a single method of identification that works across all chargers; and work 97% of the time.
Interesting enough, Tesla is (currently) obliged to add CCS compatibility to their chargers for eligibility, but these manufacturers are adopting their connector regardless.
>The new rules would allow Tesla to keep its unique connectors, but it will have to add a permanently attached CCS connector or adapter that charges a CCS-compliant vehicle, similar to a gas pump that has a separate handle for gas versus diesel.
When the 350KW chargers are online and working, which is apparently not often, which is why this move to NACS is happening. Only Tesla is motivated to run a reliable network. The other problem with 350KW CCS chargers is that they are often clogged by slower charging cars that can't take advantage of the higher charging rate. Watch one of the "Out Of Spec [Motoring|Reviews|Podcast]" YouTube channels to see examples of this on their EV road trips.
This whole thing reminds me of the ancient unix story of the DoD test of TCP/IP implementations, where they were deciding between the BBN stack and the Berkley (BSD) stack. The result was something like, "The BBN stack starts off much faster, but it crashes often and the machines take so long to reboot, so on average, the BSD stack is faster". Kirk McKusick tells the story far better...
I think reliability is a lot more important than speed. I understand the benefits of the SuperChargers. But I was responding to a comment that said this:
> But will the CCS be as fast at charging ?
Of all the problems with CCS, speed isn't really one of them.
Tesla always gets credit for stuff they're about to do. And half the time they don't seem to end up doing it. Or hit their dates. Don't get me wrong. Tesla has some great chargers. But they're great on their actual merits.
Wait. It's a wash because CCS tech which has been out for like 5 years is comparable to some future Tesla project? Tesla the company who have consistently missed fantasy deadlines set by the edgelord-in-chief?
Not that you’re wrong about self driving, but they have been light years ahead of the competition in other areas. I don’t think it’s fair to say that have “missed some deadlines” and generalize to this, when they’ve been a major contributor to bringing electric vehicles to the masses.
> I don’t think it’s fair to say that have “missed some deadlines” and generalize to this, when they’ve been a major contributor to bringing electric vehicles to the masses.
It's absolutely fair. These are separate statements, and they're both true. Tesla has missed "some" (only some?) deadlines. And they've also brought EVs to the public. It's completely fair to say these because they're true.
The connector is open. Obviously the producer of the charging station can always determine the charge rate regardless of the connector, which is why most EA stations sit out there in a half broken state limited to 120kW.
> But will the CCS be as fast at charging ? It seems like Tesla could control a lot with their proprietary connector if it has a faster charge rate.
Tesla is supporting CCS because that's what the bureaucratic funding dictates, not because anyone believes CCS will succeed. They will (and should) do the bare minimum.
But to be clear, that's not what this news is about. This news is about Tesla's push to get other companies to sign onto their previously-proprietary, still-Tesla-controlled "NACS" standard, en route to pushing the government to change the rules to allow NACS-only chargers and remove the CCS restriction.
Sounds like “10 million stranded Americans per day” to me. I hope the actual document is more rigorous than the summary, but then we all know how these things tend to play out.
I've had EVs for 7+ years now and have plenty of experience with J1772, Chaedmo, and CCS. All I can say is thank heavens Tesla's connector is getting adopted! It is the only connector that seems like it was designed with the ease-of-use regular people expect - not what us early adopter EV people will put up with. This kind of friction does impede adoption too.
As someone who has only ever used J1772/CCS, can you explain a bit more? I mean, it's just a plug that I stick into my car - I find the newer US home AC electric outlets with the automatic "safety shutters" harder to plug into than a CCS connector, so I don't really understand what friction you're referring to.
One concrete thing that is better about the Tesla connector is that there are no moving parts that user needs to manipulate.
Tesla/NACs connector is just stick it in and it works... the car holds onto it until it is done or you tell it to let go.
I don't think I've ever seen a public J1772 connector that had a functional spring in the little thumbpress/lock/turn on thing which means if you don't know you need to stick a key or pen cap, or squeeze really hard to pry the little fucking plastic tab up to the lock position, it just won't work.
> I don't think I've ever seen a public J1772 connector that had a functional spring in the little thumbpress/lock/turn on thing which means if you don't know you need to stick a key or pen cap, or squeeze really hard to pry the little fucking plastic tab up to the lock position, it just won't work.
I'm still a little baffled that people have all these problems. I've owned an EV for the past 6 years, I charge at public charging stations all the time (primarily ChargePoint and EA), and while I've had tons of problems with the chargers themselves (e.g. the charger just not working) I have never had a problem just sticking the charging plug into the outlet in my car.
As someone else with 5+ years driving EVs with a CCS plug, they work for me, but I can see them being much more unwieldy for physically challenged folks. The Tesla connector is easier to manipulate and line up correctly with the charge port.
Ultimately it's going to boil down to money. Having DC and AC charging share the same conductors makes the plug cables cheaper. That adds up when deploying and maintaining a charger network.
They did. It was CCS. Everyone except Tesla was on board to using it, and it was widely viewed as the standard going forward, and even Tesla was retro-fitting its chargers with CCS ("Magic Dock"), and presumably would one day switch its cars over.
Then Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford, who signed stupid deals that handed the future back to Tesla, and now the only question is whether Tesla consolidates the entire industry behind it (possible) or we end up in a world with a split between NACS and CCS (also possible, but probably less likely).
I don't think people can hear this loud enough. I own an EV with CCS, I'm glad the rest of the industry looks to be going NACS. CCS is in fact objectively terrible. CCS could only seem decent when it was following on something as truly atrocious as Chademo.
He is really into good engineering which has made him a huge fan of Tesla, especially since they took some of his recommendations and incorporated them into their manufacturing process.
It is fair to say he is biased, but at the same time I don't see why his assessment of NACS vs CSS is wrong.
It's better engineered and designed. It's that simple. Yes, the differences aren't mind-blowing, but who cares. As long as they properly open it up and standardize it as they are saying they will, then this is a perfectly good outcome. Most EVs and fast chargers in the US have Tesla/NACS ports anyway, so this is the easier lift to standardize.
It's not black and white: CCS supports 800V charging, NACS does not (yet). Higher voltage = lower current and lighter cables and less strain on the connectors.
Superchargers wete also lagging on liquid-cooled cables, which will be included in v4.
If it's possible for NACS to support 800V charging then that is not really a very meaningful advantage of CCS, is it? I think Tesla themselves will eventually switch to 800v at some point.
V3 Superchargers have liquid cooled cables, that's why they are thinner than V2 cables. V4 has even crazier liquid cooling, where the conductors are directly immersed in the coolant.
> sounds like goal-shifting, considering gp's rather absolute claim on NACS having superior design and engineering
CCS currently supports 800V. NACS is going to support 800V. The number of extant chargers with 800V capability is, to a reasonable approximation, the same for CCS and NACS. So NACS being able to support 800V rhetorically balances CCS being able to roll out 800V chargers (or any, period), at least in my mind.
Put another way, one solution is deployed and capable of upgrading. The other is also capable of upgrading, maybe comes upgraded already, but hasn't been deployed. The first strikes me as better engineered. (The latter may have superior design, but I have trouble buying that argument given NACS can be upgraded.)
Sure, but I don't know whether that would be a hardware revision or just a protocol thing how complicated it would be. Could be a software update for all I know. Is it the case that all currently deployed CCS chargers support 800v charging? If not, is it possible for an 800v architecture vehicle to charge at a 400v CCS charger?
Plus, if the concern is the port then I don't necessarily mind that fast charging companies will have to deploy new hardware, as long as the cars don't need to get retrofitted all the time or use adapters.
> Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford
Consumers prefer NACS to CCS. And Electrify America failed, spectacularly, to deliver a working product. (As someone put it bluntly, NACS exists. CCS does not. You bet on the horse, not the unicorn.)
The auto industry is standardising around NACS because it will eventually force the standard into the open. That, in turn, enables antitrust questions about the Tesla/Supercharger tie-up. (In the meantime, everyone avoids the wastefulness of a meaningless standards battle.)
We should have some brand of car install both plugs (as I understand the smarts are in the car, the plug is basically a dumb electrical connection) and then after a year or two see which people are using.
There are many cars on the global market with two AC charging sockets but last time I checked, there are none with two DC charging sockets. Multiple DC charging sockets would be a severe safety risk without a beefy isolating mechanism, which adds weight and a non-trivial point of failure.
<<Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford, who signed stupid deals that handed the future back to Tesla>>
It's always curious to see someone with such strong conviction that somehow they have an insight, without access to any of the information involved in negotiating this partnership, that the various folks at GM and Ford failed to see.
As far as I know, Tesla will still add CCS compatible adapters to the Supercharger network in the future, since it is a requirement for the EV network funding they're going after by opening up to additional manufacturers.
That's the plan as of right now, but the clear intent here is to push the government to change the rules to allow NACS-only chargers. If a few more automakers (Hyundai and VW being probably the most relevant) sign deals with Tesla to use NACS, it'd be impossible to argue that there's any reason to do a CCS buildout.
> FHWA Response: Commenters overwhelmingly supported the CCS connector standard and verified that the industry is moving to adopt CCS as a market standard; therefore, FHWA requires CCS Type 1 connectors for each DCFC port through this final rule. Although a few commenters preferred Tesla connectors, most of the Tesla products are proprietary and do not address the needs of the majority of EV makes and models available in the domestic market. However, on November 11, 2022, Tesla announced its “North American Charging Standard” (NACS), which makes its existing and previously proprietary Electric Vehicle charging port and connector available for broad and open public use, including to network operators and vehicle manufacturers. In the announcement, Tesla noted that charging providers were planning to offer NACS charging ports at public charging infrastructure. This rulemaking allows permanently attached non-proprietary connectors (such as NACS) to be provided on each charging port so long as each DCFC charging port has at least one permanently attached CCS Type 1 connector and is capable of charging a CCS-compliant vehicle.
Again, the CCS rule came out in February, and when the rule was being made it definitely did look like "the industry is moving to adopt CCS as a market standard", as prior to Nov 2022 there was no "North American Charging Standard", only Tesla's closed, proprietary tech.
I think the government would only allow NACS only if it becomes an open standard. The government can't mandate a connector that only one manufacturer can make when alternatives exist.
> Then Tesla pulled a fast one on the morons at GM and Ford
They're trying to sell expensive EVs, but people were buying Teslas instead because they can guarantee the chargers work and are in good locations.
I have a lot of strong criticisms of Tesla, but slowly investing billions into building a reliable charging network over the last 10 years is hardly a "fast one"
Seems like it’s happening without government intervention. It’s hard to imagine now that Ford, GM, and Tesla are on the same standard that the rest will not follow suit.
Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?
If I were to buy a car with CCS today, and then in 2024, NACS wins, and all cars going forward have NACS, and all charging stations change to NACS as a result... In the year 2030, can I get the port upgraded, are the changing stations obligated to support CCS indefinitely, is there an adapter I can just keep in my car for NACS->CCS that actually works (NACS->CCS is currently not an option... will it become an option?), or is my CCS car just unchargeable?
I wouldn't imagine so; a short, rigid adapter could have very thick conductors which would have low resistance relative to flexible cable. And being a passive adapter, it would be easy to make very heat tolerant.
Correct, but that is necessary in order to get a relatively lightweight and flexible cable to carry huge loads. It’s not nearly as important for an adapter which is, for the DC pins at least, a solid bus bar encased in heat resistant plastics.
I was thinking that the contact resistance would create quite a bit of heat as well, and if there's nowhere to dissipate you can get quite hot. Even if a high temp plastic can take it, you might burn the person handling it.
> Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?
I'm not sure those statements are mutually exclusive. All new manufacturing produces ewaste. CCS cars will still be chargeable in one form or another until the car itself dies.
So why is everyone fleeing the North American standards J1772/CCS1 in favor of Tesla's? What do these car companies stand to gain switching the charging port? They don't own charging networks.
While there is a lot of activity going on to build CCS chargers, the current state of the CCS charging network is not great. This is a competitive advantage for Tesla.
So GM and Ford wanted to sign deals to use Tesla's charger network to remove a competitive advantage that Tesla had. Tesla apparently agreed to that, but one condition is that GM and Ford had to agree to switch future vehicles over to Tesla's previously-proprietary (and still Tesla-controlled) "NACS" standards instead of CCS. GM and Ford agreed. Rivian appears to have followed suit after GM and Ford agreed.
Other automakers are now evaluating the landscape to see where things will fall. The best alternative was always going to be that we had a unified CCS standard future, but now that GM/Ford have made that impossible, they may decide that it's better to get some leverage by unifying on NACS rather than having a split-standard future.
Their agreements with Tesla are not public, so it's hard to tell what the benefits are. You say "everyone" is switching, but it's only American companies that have pledged to switch to NACS from CCS (so far), I don't think 3 for 3 is a coincidence.
Also unlikely to be coincidental is the fact that Tesla "opened up" its charging patents/specs to competitors [1] in 2014 - but only signed its first partner in 2023, a few months after billions of federal dollars were made available for interoperable charging networks.
1. IIRC, they included a mutual non-aggression clause for patents, and if a 100-year-old company with plenty of patents like Ford, you may balk at that. I'm speculating that Tesla has been offering much more generous terms than the 2014 offer
The major benefit to Tesla here is that it pushes most of the costs of unifying the continent on a single standard upon third party charging networks. Ford and GM have minimal exposure to that, so they don't care, and it saves Tesla a lot of future heartache.
And it's a sensible move if you care about e-waste, given that there are far more NACS vehicles and NACS charging stalls in than CCS1 vehicles and CCS1 charging stalls. (And that contrast becomes even more extreme if you assume that the thousands of unreliable CCS1 stalls would be getting scrapped anyway.)
Meanwhile Nissan and Mitsubishi are still selling brand new cars with CHAdeMO plugs. So much for it being a universal standard.
I don't doubt they'd like it to remain that way. Starving CCS charging networks of federal dollars that are be relied upon by Japanese, German and Korean manufacturers would be a win for US manufacturers; expanding a Tesla-moat into a US-manufacturer moat. Tesla gets federal dollars, control the standard and keeps its hungriest competitors at bay who most threaten its margins; Ford, GM and Rivian get access to a large network and protection from foreign competition by being invited into the fort.
Cartel-like behaviour is notoriously self-emergent.
Insidiously, this arrangement might even get the US government to look the other way if it is American car companies vs. everyone else despite the original assumption being that CCS networks would get most/all of the federal funds.
> Interoperability of EV charging infrastructure. The requirements relating to interoperability similarly address less visible standardization along the national EV charging network. The FHWA is working to establish a seamless national network of EV charging infrastructure that can communicate and operate on the same software platforms from one State to another. The FHWA establishes interoperability requirements through this final rule for charger-to-EV communication, charger-to-charger network communication, and charging network-to-charging network communication to ensure that chargers are capable of the communication necessary to perform smart charge management and Plug and Charge.
I bet it will. Why would you bother hampering the design of the charge port door by requiring it to be large enough to cover both J1772 and NACS? The adapter solution is much easier for Tesla and others. And the adapters are cheap.
Yeah, I'm beginning to think you're probably right. Although J1772 is a real standard, NACS is rapidly becoming a de facto "real" standard, and it completely subsumes the purpose of J1772 plus it works for DCFC. NACS is slightly less clunky than J1772 also.
That's basically the same story of how USB BC 1.2 (the old 'battery charging' standard that allowed 5V-1.5A out of USB plugs) came to exist. Vendors were making custom protocols that allowed higher currents than the measly 500mA USB permitted, and eventually the USB-IF threw up their hands and essentially incorporated these industry-made solutions into the USB BC1.2 standard. It wouldn't surprise me if SAE releases some new standard that happens to be NACS...
Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network. they uses CCS and VW is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. i think they can stand on their own. time will tell though.
Go check out some car forums for folks that depend on EA (like Lucid). I've never had an issue with EA, but the general consensus seems to be that EA reliability is abysmal, with stations frequently being down (though reviews seem to be on an uptrend starting in 2023, so perhaps it was a pandemic related issue).
As another commenter stated, though, Volkswagen was forced to create EA as part of their Dieselgate settlement, and their behavior in the past hasn't exactly instilled confidence that they see it as something worth investing in.
EA is bad at best. Very unreliable network, especially the ones not near urban centers. Yeah you get reliable charging if you’re near big cities but once you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it can be terrifying. I’ve personally arrived at an EA charger to only find it not working and the next closest one was a 50 mile detour. Thankfully I plan liberally, but I’d be in a very bad spot if not. Someone I know, also had a locking problem where the charger wouldn’t detach. And I’ve seen news items relating to literal bricking of cars by using the chargers.
Having to "plan liberally" is something that makes EVs much less usable on long trips. When road tripping, its fastest to arrive at a charger with a very low state of charge (way less than a 50mi buffer). When I road trip my Model X, I trust that the supercharger will work, and I target arrival at a 3-5% state of charge. This allows me to charge at the fastest part of the charging curve, and to depart when the charge rate starts to drop off.
I have road tripped well over 10k miles in my Telsa over the last 5 years, and I've never seen an entire supercharger site offline (like happens with EA). I'm sure it must happen after natural disasters when grid power is cut, but its not the normal state of operations like it is with EA.
EA is pretty bad. The fact that no one can decide what side the connector should be on also leads to chaos (cars splayed out everywhere around the chargers).
> Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network.
The only car manufacturer with a competitive charging network or only competitor period? ChargePoint seems better than Tesla my area. Most of the Tesla stations in this area require a hotel stay to charge.
IMO the market is too new and there’s more room for innovation here. At the point that EVs can be charged in less than 5 minutes, I’d be on board with standardizing.
That's because much of the Supercharger network was deployed with the assumption of only supporting Tesla vehicles. If any third party charging network deployed NACS fast charging stalls in your area, they would absolutely be compatible with any CCS1 vehicle with an adapter.
The most likely outcome is that third party stalls will either mimic Tesla's magic dock or over-provision with two cables per stall, or (most likely) have some ratio of NACS-only, CCS1-only, and CHAdeMO stalls based on demand.
> So now, once again, the USA adopts a "standard" shunned by the rest of the world.
Maybe I could have the wrong read, but this sentence structure:
> the USA… shunned by the rest of the world.
Does two things: it implies there's a standard "the rest of the world" has agreed on (there isn't, and there never is, it's one of the things that makes the world big) and it signals you as probably one of the two types of people which might be unintentional on your part, but still:
1. A European complaining about America.
2. An American complaining that we're not doing things the European way.
There are other possibilities, but those are the two most probable reads.
As far as charging standards go, we haven't settled on a standard because there's only one charging network worth a damn in the country, and until Tesla started making agreements with other automakers to sign them on, it was exclusively for use by their customers which isn't great if you're Ford or GM or another startup EV manufacturer and trying to get people to buy your electric cars instead. Right now it looks like (in my opinion, this is not settled) we'll probably settle on NACS, but as opposed to what? CCS? 1 or 2? CHAdeMO/ChaoJi? Is there a technical issue you have with NACS specifically or is it just that it's not a de jure standard somewhere else?
That's a lot of cogitating on my motives. I'm just an American who hates dealing with non-standard "standards." I hated it with SCSI's connector fiasco. I hated how Sony undermined Firewire (oh, and AES/EBU before that, and kept pushing their MemoryStick long after the world had settled on SD), and that USB failed to learn from the idiocy of SCSI's connector fiasco. And don't even get me started on Lightning.
And there are just plain shitty standards, like ATSC's. Anyway, for adults who have lived through plenty of these standards blunders, it's even more irritating to see them not headed off by the only entity that has a chance of doing so in this instance: the federal government.
The last I heard, CCS 2 was set to be widely adopted. And sure enough, any charging connection that doesn't support DC is absurd. So yes you can argue it's good the government didn't act sooner and mandate one of those earlier short-sighted ones.
Eh, whatever. As long as something dominates the continent I guess it's OK. It's not as if I'm likely to take my car to Europe or Africa on a lark.
Fair enough, Dongletown sucks. It’s a common enough thing on this forum that was the optics as I saw it, but additional context helps.
As far as CCS2 goes, or actually CCS Types I and II, there’s already a split between continents and regions on that one; and then there’s CHAdeMO and GB/T which are in active use. CCS aspired to be a global standard but it was never going to get there, not on this planet. There’s also another standard called MCS in development.
