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by yardstick 747 days ago
More like voluntarily pushed or strong-armed by the prospect of governments mandating Tesla support a different connector thus forcing more complexity in their cars and chargers.
2 comments

Arguably there's no evidence for Tesla ever wanting to use its plug as a moat. The Tesla connector pre-dates CCS1 as a standard. By the time that it was clear that the rest of the industry would converge on CCS1 in North America, the investments made by Tesla (and its customers) on their connector was far too great to contemplate shifting.

Whereas in other markets, the business case for converging on CCS2 was more compelling. Europe chose to compel CCS2 as their standard, but in Australia, Tesla pivoted to CCS2 without any government pressure.

They offered their patent to others very early on, before it crossed regulators minds.
They offered their patent conditioned on a reciprocal patent grant (or agreement not to enforce any patents against Tesla) from the takers, as far as I understand. The difference with NACS is that they genuinely opened the connector and removed that requirement.