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by ryukafalz 1311 days ago
Hilarious to call their thing the "North American Charging Standard" when every other manufacturer in North America has already standardized on something else.
3 comments

They are all tiny in comparison...

The vast majority of EVs in the United States use this now, and it's not just historical - Just to emphasis the most popular EV cars in the US today are:

Tesla Model Y 60,271 20% 191,451 50.7% 33.2% Tesla Model 3 55,030 67% 156,357 94.5% 27.1% Ford Mustang Mach-E 10,414 – 28,089 49% 4.9% Tesla Model S 9,171 150% 23,464 79.9% 4.1% Chevy Bolt EV/EUV 14,709 226% 22,012 -11.3% 3.8% Hyundai IONIQ 5 4,800 – 18,492 – 3.2% Tesla Model X 6,552 43% 19,542 16.4% 3.4%

Cars can last 10 or more years. If you buy a car today you're making a bet that Tesla and its standard will still be dominant over all other car and charger manufacturers in the year 2032+. That is an extraordinarily foolish bet.

My bet is that within two years Tesla standardizes on CCS for its US cars (thus getting rid of an annoying upgrade/adapter/retrofit problem) and then what'll be left is the sad minority (AKA me) who are stuck with the dying standard and an annoying dongle.

I'd bet a garage will be able to do a connector swap within an hour's labour if Tesla will make the necessary firmware changes.
For legacy cars the likely answer is that people buy the $250 dongle. For new cars this will cost a few hundred bucks in parts and labor (or let's say 1-1.5% of the sales price) and it will be required surgery on your brand-new car.

Who is going to pay for this? If it's Tesla, then the smart move is to put CCS into cars right now (and as a side benefit, standardize their US and European models [edit: nevermind this bit, not the same standards].) If it's the customer, then it's an annoying non-trivial cost you'll have to bear. Yuck.

They don't standardize US and Europe because US is CCS1 and Europe is CCS2.
Ugh god why. Didn't realize that. Rest of the point stands.
Since good adapters exist, it's not really a deeply committing bet.
Adapters remove the benefits of having a "superior" charging standard. It may be that the Tesla connector is better than CCS, but Tesla+CCS_adapter is going to be obviously worse. (This is something you're going to use every day, even a slightly worse ergonomic experience adds up.)
My point is you get a Tesla for many reasons, not just the NACS plug, and if CCS wins you still enjoy all those other things.
But there are already 3x more level 2 + CCS ports than tesla ports.

In the US:

There are 36000 individual tesla connections

There are 92000 l2 j1772 ports.

There are 22000 CCS DC fast ports

They are comparing the DC fast number to the tesla number, and ignoring the j1772 number.

They are comparing fast charging only, yes. (Also all Teslas come with a J1772 adapter.)
Which is pointless to compare -

1. All the other cars are J1772 + CCS

2. So you'd have to provide adapters for every other non-tesla car, or replace every non-tesla port. Not just the 20k CCS ones, but the 96K J1772 ones.

3. They are claiming a false ubiquity to make it seem like now is a good time to do this. The point at which there are 3x other plugs than yours is not a point where others are going to switch to your thing.

In fact, they are almost certainly doing it because they see the train coming at them, and don't want to deal with it.

It's too late.

Are you trying to imply that just calling something is a standard doesn't make it a standard ? Hmmmm
Try plugging a Nissan Leaf into a CCS charger.
Let's just not talk about the Nissan Leaf. The Nissan Leaf is completely out-of-place in today's EV landscape and by current EV standards, it barely counts as a "real EV" you can live with. Speaking as a former Leaf owner.

The Leaf is the only model in the U.S. that uses, or has ever used, the CHAdeMO connection that the Leaf has. Good luck finding a CHAdeMO charger now, it was already hard 4 years ago and it is just getting worse. Most places that had one were Nissan dealerships, but those are almost always broken now. Nissan dealers just don't care about it. Even when they exist and are working, that has to be the most difficult connector I've ever seen for a consumer-grade product.

Their 40kW battery base model costs as much as a 60kW Chevy Bolt. Where I live, 40kW will get you only ~120 miles of range. That small of a battery also can't charge that fast.

The most damning thing of all though is that the Nissan Leaf is the only EV sold today that doesn't use active cooling on their battery pack. It was a horrible oversight on the Gen1 Leaf, but it is absurd for the Gen2 after most of those Gen1 batteries cooked themselves to death (and were eventually replaced after a class-action lawsuit).

> The Leaf is the only model in the U.S. that uses, or has ever used, the CHAdeMO connection

That's mostly true, but there is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV which still uses it.

Nissan for a long time has stuck to the Japanese standard (CHAdeMO) for their NA cars; some early EVs in America used CHAdeMO as well I think, but afaik only Nissan has stuck with it here.

I think even they've dropped it for future stuff tho.

Nissan Ariya has a CCS port, so even Nissan has standardised on the CCS. The Nissan Leaf is the iPad with the Lightning port of the EV world.
Lightning? Maybe the OG 30-pin iPod/iPhone connector.
Apple doesn't sell anything with a 30-pin connector.