[SirSourdough]

Deep integration with the car is the most difficult piece of the Supercharger system to achieve for any other charging network. They have the best in-car and in-app charging experience, with the best routing to chargers and scheduling tools. Most networks still require you to use an app or RFID card to start a charge, Tesla you just plug in.

The other is probably just scale of the parent company in terms of being able to build out and service the network. They tend to have more prominent, nicer locations for their stations.

[WorldMaker]

CCS2 supports "just plug in to charge" as an optional feature so depending on your manufacturer and CCS Type 1 charger it worked some of the time. All the charger networks and manufacturers are now migrating to NACS hardware over (the ugly) CCS Type 1 and NACS requires that CCS2 optional feature (NACS uses Tesla designed hardware but CCS protocols/software) so most charger networks including Electrify America and most manufacturers moving forward past the current transition to NACS should all support "just plug in to charge". "Soon."

Standardizing NACS was an interesting win for Tesla because their hardware design won out, but it was also a massive breach in their "moat" putting the other charging networks and other manufacturers on a much more equal footing with the charging story.

On the one hand it makes direct dumb "bottom line" business sense why Tesla would stop investing in its own network with such a massive breach in their "moat" about to spill out and maybe equalize the playing field. Perhaps especially if you think you've already earned enough recognition for your brand that you don't need to maintain it long term, just maintain the facade and PR spin of it. On the other hand, with such a huge first mover advantage and what everyone knows was a respectably huge "moat", you'd think there would be pivots to take advantage of to bulwark other parts of the same moat and still maintain some other advantage along the way to the old adage that "Teslas are the easiest to charge". Gutting the department may truly be a short term gain for shareholder quarterly results traded for a long term mistake and the risk of the loss of that first mover advantage they worked so hard to earn.

It's certainly fascinating to armchair quarterback what other options were in play here.

[ulfw]

While I do think the Tesla / 'NACS' plug is a lot nicer/smaller/easier to use than CCS1, what really is the big win here? It's all based on CCS protocol anyway and hence will have the exact same interoperability issues than before.

[WorldMaker]

The big win for interoperability is that NACS as proposed flipped some CCS protocol features from "optional" to "required". The EU mandated some of those optional features. In North America so far it has been a free for all how much of the software protocol manufacturers actually implement of CCS and many truly have done "the bare minimum". That was the bargain that NACS proposed for Supercharger compatibility in the US was that the SAE should have to also start mandating those features. If it gets standardized that way, and it seems like that will happen, a lot of the interoperability issues should start to go away. One of those features was "Plug and Charge".