Elon Musk’s electric car chargers are pushing out Washington’s favorite

“Imagine having a fuel dispenser with a different size hole than the gas tank,” said Arcady Sosinov, founder and CEO of charging company FreeWire Technologies, which plans to begin installing Tesla-compatible connectors on chargers starting next year. “It just seems ridiculous, but that’s really what’s happening in the electric car charging industry.”

Feuds between rival technological camps are nothing new – as seen in the 1980s battle between VHS and Betamax, or the frequent confusion among consumers over which USB cable to use. But in this case, Washington put its thumb, and billions of dollars, on the scale for one of the candidates.

The agreements by Ford and GM to use Tesla̵[ads1]7;s North American charging standard add considerable strength to Musk’s company’s efforts to dominate the charging business. Together, the three companies accounted for 75 percent of EV sales in the United States during the first quarter of this year, according to data released by Cox Automotive in April.

In February, the Federal Highway Administration decided to require companies applying for grants for electric vehicles to use the second standard, the Combined Charging System. Almost all automakers except Tesla produce their vehicles with CCS plug-ins, and even GM and Ford won’t switch until 2025. Regulators in Europe have required CCS, and even Tesla uses CCS there.

The White House claims that recipients can use the federal money to build NACS plugs along with CCS plugs. But critics say attempts to cut both ways could hinder America’s EV adoption goals by delaying convergence on a single charging standard.

“Imagine you show up to a site and you have four CCS and four NACS cables, and all the CCSs are taken and the NACS is available, but your car isn’t using it,” Sosinov said. “Having a single standard would ultimately be better for the consumer.”

For Ford and GM, the decision to support Tesla’s technology puts them on board with chargers that the industry generally sees as technologically superior in terms of charging speed, ergonomics and reliability.

Ford sees benefits from the NACS technology in terms of “consistent access to charging” as well as the performance of the plug itself, Chris Smith, Ford’s head of government affairs, said during a webinar organized by Resources for the Future on Monday.

“Availability of charging is going to be incredibly important to our business model,” Smith said, adding that the shift marks an “important step forward to ensure we have uniform standards.”

GM also believes making NACS the “unified standard for North America” ​​will enable more mass adoption of electric vehicles, CEO Mary Barra said during a Twitter Spaces conversation with Musk on Thursday.

But until last year, NACS wasn’t even an option available to other automakers. Tesla kept its charging technology exclusive to its own vehicles, while other companies coalesced around CCS through a global standards-setting process pushed by an association called CharIN.

“For someone to converge on something, there has to be an open standard,” Oleg Logvinov, chairman of CharIN, said in an interview. “So far, CCS is the only choice that has all the characteristics of a true open standard and the ability to be a cornerstone of the ecosystem.”

As Logvinov noted, Tesla’s NACS technology relies on some of CCS’s underlying communication protocols for the interface between the vehicle and the charger.

But while Tesla built out a huge network of fast-charging superchargers using its NACS technology over the past decade, the current CCS fast-charging network is just over half the size and plagued by reliability issues. Tesla operates about 19,400 fast chargers using NACS nationwide, compared to about 10,500 CCS fast chargers operated by all other companies combined, according to the Department of Energy.

For companies like Ford and GM that have staked their future on electric vehicles, the lack of CCS infrastructure poses a major problem.

Barra said partnering with Tesla would nearly double access to fast chargers for GM customers.

Kevin Schwain, senior director of electric vehicles at energy software firm EnergyHub, said Ford and GM faced a “very pragmatic decision about the fact that the non-Tesla network is smaller, more prone to failure.”

“The Tesla charging experience — the network they’ve built is undoubtedly the best out there,” Schwain said.

Last fall, Tesla pounced, finally opening up its charging technology and renaming it the “North American Charging Standard” in an attempt to make it the dominant American charging technology. It also struck a deal with the White House in February to open some of its Superchargers to the public in exchange for federal incentives.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Musk, who has been at odds with the administration on a number of other issues, touted the benefits of adopting NACS as a national standard during the Twitter Spaces event.

“We can focus on one standard — that’s going to be really good for consumers,” Musk said. “They just don’t have to worry about which plug, which socket, which charging station – it will just work seamlessly.”

Sosinov said major automakers had been “waiting and waiting and waiting” for industry or governments to deploy a ubiquitous charging network under the CCS standard.

“Public charging infrastructure has been so poor to date that Ford and GM were effectively forced to do what they did,” Sosinov said. “It’s a self-preservation move, because now they’ve committed billions of dollars to developing electrified powertrains, and if charging infrastructure doesn’t exist, who’s buying the car?”

Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, said that from the automakers’ perspective, Congress has “failed time and time again” to provide the funding to create a charging network using CCS.

“Students to the area code 313 [in Detroit] who have supported all the legislation, now have to bet on Tesla, on Supercharger, because they can’t trust the government [CCS] infrastructure rollout,” Ives said, calling it “the biggest black eye” the federal government has faced in its EV initiatives.

In response to a request for comment, the White House painted Ford and GM’s decision as “an advance” in its goal “for every car to be able to use and have a high-quality experience at every publicly funded charger.”

“More drivers having access to more high-quality charging — including Tesla Superchargers — is a step forward,” White House spokeswoman Robyn Patterson said in a statement.

Patterson noted that the federal requirements make NACS eligible for charger funding “as long as drivers can rely on a minimum of CCS.” That means installing connectors of both types in the same locations with the federal money.

In a statement after this story was published, a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson said making NACS connectors and adapters eligible for funding when provided in addition to CCS will ensure that future stations “can serve all EV drivers, regardless of the vehicle’s current or future contact type.”

“Our technical experts are in active conversations with automakers, charger manufacturers and standard-setting bodies to ensure federal investments continue to support a reliable, convenient and user-friendly charging experience for all drivers,” the spokesperson said.

But with Tesla, Ford and GM – America’s three largest electric vehicle manufacturers – all converging on Tesla’s technology, it seems increasingly likely that future EVs will be built with a NACS intake.

The charging industry already seems to foresee such a future. EVgo, which operates most of the fast-charging stations in the U.S. outside of Tesla’s network, is “now actively evaluating a potential retrofit for NACS,” Chief Commercial Officer Jonathan Levy told POLITICO in a statement Friday. And Blink Charging announced Monday that it is developing a fast charger with both CCS and NACS connectors.

Even CharIN, the association that supports CCS, said Monday it would convene a task force to support sending NACS to a standardization process “to unify the charging standards market in North America.”

“For any technology to become a standard, it must go through a fair process in a standards development organization,” CharIN said in a statement.

The question for the Biden administration is whether to stick with its decision to require CCS or rotate to Tesla’s system, if that’s where the private sector is headed.

“They were rightly trying to push the industry in the direction it was already going at the time,” Schwain said. “These announcements could change course — could cause us to re-evaluate what these minimum standards are that the federal government has put in place.”

Pushing for the development of both standards could increase the cost of building stations and make the charging experience more difficult for drivers, even with the availability of adapters, Sosinov said.

“While I prefer that NACS has ‘won’ the default war, this effectively ensures that it will continue to be a default war,” Sosinov said. “For consumers, to have one standard [CCS]even if it is a substandard standard, in the end it would have been better.”

CharIN’s Logvinov agreed, saying there are “no winners in standard wars.”

“All parties lose because consumers are confused, they delay adoption,” he said. “If we need to continue with more plugs and chargers, it will cost more to develop and deploy the infrastructure.”