Electric vehicle charging companies are cautiously embracing Tesla's charging technology as the main U.S. standard, mere days after Ford and GM said they were adopting it, but questions remained about how any interoperability would work.
The White House said on Friday that EV charging stations that offer Tesla plugs would be eligible for billions of dollars in federal subsidies as long as they included CCS connectivity. The White House aims to spur deployment of hundreds of thousands of chargers, which it sees as integral to EV adoption.
"The last thing we want is to rush a solution to the market that is not seamless," said Nagler, adding,"we still don't fully know all the limitations of the charger itself." Some of these companies' stocks fell sharply on Friday, but were paring some of those losses on Monday after they said they would adopt NACS.
"We don't have much visibility on what's the charging experience going to be like," said Aatish Patel, co-founder of charger maker XCharge North America.Charger makers and operators noted several concerns about interoperability: whether Tesla Superchargers can adequately charge higher-voltage vehicles with fast charging and whether the design of its charging cables will suit the ports on some cars.
A former Tesla official who worked on Superchargers said NACS chargers would add cost and complexity in the near term, but the government needed to support one standard - NACS - given its higher vehicle population and better user experience.