Tesla's Fast Charging Tech Is Clearly Better, But ...

Jan 31, 2024

CharIN has put out a forceful article on why it is unlikely to be a public charging standard. We’ll see about that….

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Tesla's fast charging tech is second to none. It's Superchargers are relatively small, fast, powerful, and easy to use. Furthermore, they are unmatched in reliability.

As Tesla explains it, the Tesla charging connector "has no moving parts, is half the size, and twice as powerful as Combined Charging System (CCS) connectors." What's not to love?

CleanTechnica research as well as other research and anecdotal evidence indicates that access to Tesla's Supercharger network is the primary reason many people buy Teslas, and even the sole reason according to some Tesla owners.

Aside from tech superiority of what Tesla now calls the North American Charging Standard (NACS), there's the fact that most electric vehicles in the United States use Tesla's system — because most electric vehicles sold in the US have been Teslas. It's a similar thing with the number of installed chargers. "NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined."

The evidence is piling up that Tesla's charging protocol should be a public standard. So, why not push for this earlier?

Years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that electric vehicle from non-Tesla OEMs could use Tesla Superchargers if those automakers designed compatible vehicles and contributed to the cost of developing the superfast charging network. There was murmuring off and on that some other automakers were going to take Tesla up on the offer, but nothing ever came of that. Instead of expecting competitors to help fund the charging network — along with swallowing massive amounts of pride and designing their cars to be compatible — perhaps Tesla should have just allowed open access years ago. It appears that what stimulated the change is federal and perhaps state funding for EV charging stations, funding that requires open access to the chargers. Some funding may even be tied to the chargers using a public standard. Such requirements came a bit earlier in Europe, where the ability to win permits for key charging locations has been tied to open access to the charging stations (i.e., the stations not being for only Tesla drivers).

Whatever the impetus was, Tesla is now working to get its charging connector designated as a public standard. "Network operators already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers, so Tesla owners can look forward to charging at other networks without adapters. Similarly, we look forward to future electric vehicles incorporating the NACS design and charging at Tesla's North American Supercharging and Destination Charging networks," Tesla writes. "As a purely electrical and mechanical interface agnostic to use case and communication protocol, NACS is straightforward to adopt. The design and specification files are available for download, and we are actively working with relevant standards bodies to codify Tesla's charging connector as a public standard. Enjoy."

So, that's Tesla's argument, but an organization that has been working on public charging standards for years has responded with its take on why it thinks Tesla should just stay in its lane. The organization, CharIN, actually counts Tesla as a partner. CharIN makes a few points, but the gist of it is that it takes years of cooperation and negotiation and testing to come up with technical industry standards, and the work has already been put in for more than a decade on the CCS charging standards and MCS standards. In other words, "we’ve been doing this for years — we’re not starting over now." (Not a direct quote.) For CharIN's arguments in its own words, here's the full press release:

In response to Tesla's announcement on November 11, 2022 to publicly-release the North American Charging Standard (NACS), the Charging Interface Initiative (CharIN e.V.) and its CharIN North America Chapter (operating as CharIN Inc.), would like to issue the following statement. CharIN is the largest global association focused on the electrification of all forms of transportation based on the seamless and interoperable charging experience enabled by the Combined Charging System (CCS) and the Megawatt Charging System (MCS). CCS and MCS are the global standards for charging vehicles of all kinds.

CharIN applauds Tesla for including DIN 70121 and ISO 15118-02 communication standards for the NACS proposal. We also appreciate Tesla's effort to move the e-mobility market forward even faster than it is moving now.

However, we encourage stakeholders to investigate ways to focus on market acceleration rather than the creation of yet another form factor alternative, which will lead to further consumer confusion and delay EV adoption. CCS has gone through many years of rigorous standardization processes, which is a required activity for any new standard proposal. After a decade of collaborative work, the domestic and international EV industry has aligned around CCS. For example:

At a minimum, the Tesla proposal will have the hurdle of passing through an established standardization process via standards bodies, such as ISO, IEC, and/or SAE. It is also important to acknowledge the challenges of creating new standards or changing the existing standards, such as:

We strongly encourage Tesla, as a CharIN member, to work with CharIN's membership base, the standards organizations, and others to accelerate the adoption of a fully interoperable EV charging solution to transition to electric vehicles more quickly. Ecosystem-driven collaboration is a proven method to create true standards accepted and adopted by a multitude of stakeholders, as well as a testing and conformance infrastructure to guarantee interoperability in the field. This is how CharIN, an inclusive, industrywide coalition representing nearly 300 leading e-mobility stakeholders, seeks to accelerate the e-mobility market in North America.

An EV owner and influencer, Branden Flasch, added some commentary on that press release to critique it a little bit:

"Worldwide, there are 61k DC fast chargers using the CCS connector, compared to 40k Superchargers" – A worldwide count of CCS connectors is fairly irrelevant. This is only about NA. Even Superchargers use CCS2 in Europe, and CCS2 is about as different from CCS1 as NACS is pic.twitter.com/Pmq3fIQDXy

— Branden Flasch (@brandenflasch) November 30, 2022

"In [NA] there are 18,880 CCS connectors compared to 18,405 Tesla Super charger connectors" – The stat we should be going by here is DCFC 100kW+. Tesla has 16045 Supercharger ports 100kW+ in NA, and according to @EVAdoptionTweet, there are 4862 CCS ports 100kW+. pic.twitter.com/florjEVFDj

— Branden Flasch (@brandenflasch) November 30, 2022

So, what do you think — does Tesla have a chance of getting NACS certified as a public charging standard?

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao.Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

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