Ford, GM, Rivian, and Volvo adopt the Tesla NACS charging port

This is big news, but there’s not much to add after reading the title. Tesla did two very important things early on. The first is that they developed a charging port where the design really makes sense for technical reasons. The second thing they did was to build thousands of Tesla “Super Chargers” just about everywhere.

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The Tesla NACS Supercharger Plug

In March of 2021, we wrote about the various proprietary charge plug designs (to see that article, click here)

The CCS “Combined Charging System” on the left, and the Tesla NACS “North American Charging Standard” plug on the right. Right now, NACS already outnumbers CCS charging stations two to one.

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Tesla’s Supercharger Network

Fortunately, Tesla’s charging standard works well, but even if it was only as adequate as the others, the main reason it’s rapidly becoming a standard is because their cross-country charging network already has over 45,000 locations (Click here)

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The Nissan Leaf

The biggest holdout on adopting the Tesla charger plugs is the Nissan Leaf. It is the most-sold electric car model on Earth right now, and that is partially because it has one of the most affordable prices for any EV. If you buy a Nissan Leaf, of course you can have a Nissan charger installed in your home’s garage, but there are not a huge number of public chargers available that provide a CHAdeMO or J1772 plug.

The two charge ports in the nose of the 2023 Nissan Leaf are the CHAdeMO (on the left) and the J1772 (on the right, which is half of a CCS socket). The CHAdeMO works fine, but appears to be a dying standard, so perhaps this next decade will see Nissan using the Tesla NACS plug instead of CHAdeMO? There are actually a significant number of public charge stations where you can charge with a J1772 or by using some kind of adapter cable. Of course that does not allow you to use a high-amp “fast charge”.

I applaud Nissan using two different sockets on their Leaf, and I hope they add the Tesla NACS port, or swap the CHAdeMo for a NACS, or add some type of adapter that allows Nissan owners to use the national Tesla charging network.

Personally, I am a big fan of hybrids, so…both sides can hate me (to see my article on hybrids, click here)

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Written by Ron/spinningmagnets, July 2023