Ford’s Deal To Use Tesla Charging Connector And Superchargers Could Kill CCS

A Ford parked at a Tesla Supercharger—a sign of things to come for Ford buyers

Ford Motor company has announced that starting next year, Fords will get access to Tesla's Supercharger network via an adapter sent to all owners, and later, new Fords will be made with the Tesla connector on them, allowing use without an adapter. This may mean the death of the "standard" Combined Charging System (CCS) connector used by non-Tesla cars, and there is a strong case that it should. Whether it means the death of the J1772 slower-charging plug is a different story.

Conventional wisdom is that J1772 and CCS are "industry standards" and thus the sure winners. They are also encoded into various laws creating subsidies for the installation of charging stations. But in spite of being a "standard," the Tesla connector is found on two to three times as many cars as CCS/J1772 because Tesla outsells all other carmakers combined. Is the "standard" the one chosen by the most companies or the one chosen by the most people?

Tesla's connector was proprietary, in that you initially needed a license from Tesla to use it, while the other connectors were owned by a standards body. Early on, Tesla declared it would license its patents for "free," but there were a few strings attached and almost nobody accepted the offer. That changed recently as Tesla declared its connector to be entirely open, and people can use it without the company's permission. It renamed it the "NACS" or North American Charging Standard. EVgo has put Tesla plugs on its fast chargers for a few years, and an adapter to let J1772 cars charge from Tesla slow chargers has also been available for some time, but not much else. Aptera, which has yet to ship a car, has said it would use the Tesla connector.

Ford gets three things of value from Tesla:

Ford's announcement marks a big change because Ford is the (distant) No. 2 EV vendor in North America, where these plugs are used. With No. 1 and No. 2 using NACS, and more than two-thirds of the cars on the road, it has a stronger claim to being the common standard. Everybody would prefer that there was just one charging plug—car owners don't want to use adapters, and EV charging stations don't want to have to have two or more plugs or adapters. For some time, there was competition between CCS and the Japanese CHAdeMO standard, but that ended when Nissan, the champion of CHAdeMO, released its Aria car with CCS. Even so, because the Nissan Leaf was the leading EV for a few years, many charging stations support CHAdeMO and may be legally required to do so.

On top of all this, the Tesla connector is generally considered to be superior. (While I am a frequent critic of Tesla's full self-driving offering, its charging products deserve high praise.) A single small plug does both slow and fast charging up to 250kW, and the new version supports up to a megawatt. The CCS and CHAdeMO connectors are bulky monsters, much bigger and heavier than the NACS. All NACS cars support a data protocol to handle plug-and-play billing—though only through Tesla—while only a small number of CCS cars have started to support that. The CCS connector was the first to support 800v and 350kW, but only at a few stations, and that advantage is ending.

Ford's CEO indicated that Ford owners will all get the adapter for free, including current owners. They will be able to pay for charging at Tesla SC using the Ford app—they will not need to install the Tesla app the way that CCS drivers must do when they visit one of the few Tesla stations with a built-in CCS adapter.

That's good, but it's not the Tesla plug-and-play experience in which drivers just plug in and walk away without doing anything else. For that to happen, Ford cars would need to either speak Tesla's protocol or Tesla SC would need to speak the "plug and charge" protocol, which most existing Fords do support. It is likely Tesla will do that (though there are apparently license fees which might get in the way, and the protocol is fairly bulky and committee designed, like the CCS connector itself.)

Tesla's plug-and-play experience is not just a smoother experience. A significant fraction of failures to charge at CCS stations relate to billing and authentication problems. For unknown reasons, charging vendors have had a hard time getting that right. In an ideal world, all cars will, after setting up billing, be able to just plug in and walk away 100% of the time.

Current Ford cars have the charging port in front of the driver's door. That's a difficult place to reach with the very short cord on Tesla chargers, and it's on the wrong side of the car to boot. It is unknown if the adapter provided to Ford drivers will include a segment of cable to solve this problem. Even so, unless it's a very long segment, Fords will use the charger to the left of the car, not the one to the right used by Teslas, which could cause Fords to block stalls for use by Teslas. There is a simple solution—Fords can be told to use the stalls on the right of a bank of chargers while Teslas keep to the left (facing the bank from the parking). If need be, this can even be enforced, only allowing Fords to authenticate at the rightmost available stall and directing them there in the app.

One presumes the new Ford models with NACS sockets will place them either at the front right or rear left to match Tesla charger geometry.

The connector is good, but the real attraction is Tesla's Supercharger network, which Ford drivers will get access to. It has more charging stalls than all the CCS networks (though this has recently evened up), and they are generally more reliable. Tesla (and Ford NACS) owners can purchase a low-cost adapter, which lets them use CCS stations, so NACS drivers have access to more than twice the charging stations, but they rarely use the CCS stations because they are less reliable (though they are sometimes cheaper or more conveniently located depending on where you are).

The surprising difference in bulk between the Tesla NACS (dark) and CCS (gray)

The harsh reality is that a cross-country road trip in a Tesla today is a greatly superior experience to one in a CCS car. Enough so that buyers who care about road trips have to really hate Tesla to get anything else.

Access to this network, though, does not come with using the connector. Ford and Tesla have made a deal to allow that. Terms of the deal are not disclosed, but there is a risk to NACS Ford owners that if that deal should terminate, they might be left unable to use it. Tesla has said it plans to open up its charging stations to all comers, but at present has only committed to putting adapters at about 10% of its stalls in the next two years. (Ford drivers will get access to all stalls, not just 10%, via the adapter.)

In Europe, laws made Tesla abandon its connector for the European version of CCS, and some but not all Tesla Superchargers in Europe can be used by other cars. They all have the same connector, but not all will serve other cars.

For a company making a new EV, with the choice of putting NACS on it or CCS, the answer is obvious—as long as it can assure access to the Superchargers for its drivers permanently. What customer wouldn't want to be able to charge at more than twice the stations with higher reliability? If the adapter that lets CCS cars charge at Tesla SC becomes available to all, and access to the SC network is available to all, that could change the equation, but NACS would still be the better choice for physical reasons.

One important issue for drivers of 800 volt CCS cars (Lucid, Taycan, e-Tron, Ioniq 5 and a few others) is that Tesla SCs only do 400v at present. It has an 800v version now but it is yet to be deployed. Some of those 800v cars, notably the Lucid Air, include a low-capacity 50kW 400v to 800v converter and so can't charge quickly at 400v stations (CCS or Tesla.) CCS stations were initially also only 400v but the 350kW stations and the newer 150kW stations do 800v. While those cars will still get value from Tesla stations, they will prefer the 800v stations where they can get them.

The standards war has gone slightly differently for lower speed charging in homes, offices, parking lots and hotels. All Teslas come with a simple adapter that lets them use J1772. Tesla owners tend to have NACS chargers in their homes—they are actually cheaper to buy than J1772 and offer a button to end the charging session, but this is not true in public charging stations. Tesla gave out NACS slow chargers to a large number of hotels, so these are still popular in that area, but otherwise public stations use J1772, though the most frequent way it is used is to plug into an NACS car via the adapter. The J1772 connector is just a little bit bulkier than NACS—it's nothing like the large heft difference between CCS and NACS. (CCS is effectively J1772 with two extra large pins added on the bottom.)

There is so much J1772 out there that it will stick around for a while. These stations are low cost and money to retrofit them will not be available. Fast-charging stations are expensive, and if NACS becomes the new standard, they can adapt to adding such a cord or switching to it. Over time, the reverse adapter that lets a J1772 car use a NACS slow charging (level 2) station may become cheap and common, allowing new level 2 to use NACS just as the hotels do.

To the rest of the EV industry, Tesla is the competition, or even the enemy. As such, they may resist a move to NACS as the primary connector. However, with the sign-on of Ford, it becomes less likely that Tesla will cave in and switch to CCS the way it did in Europe, absent a legal requirement. The use of NACS by Ford means Tesla has a solid claim on the billions in subsidies for the installation of "standard supporting" charging stations. It's valid, too—it seems strange to argue that what defines a standard is having the most corporations on board rather than the most drivers. As long as Tesla remains open with the NACS, it should now have access to that money, though currently the rules also require charging stations to follow stupid 20th century practices like having screens and credit card readers and assuring 150kW to each stall rather than having more stalls with better sharing, which Tesla—with good reason—doesn't currently do or want to do.

It's also unclear just how eager Tesla will be to give up its big advantage in the charging network. Will it be willing to guarantee lifetime access to that network to those who buy a car with NACS, even if Tesla and the maker of that car get into a fight?

Following Ford, other vendors may also adopt NACS, others may not support the change. The presence of the $175 (or less) adapter that lets NACS cars use CCS—highly recommended for any Tesla from the last few years—means that NACS owners who care can use the CCS stations, and as such there is not as big an incentive for CCS station managers to add NACS plugs. (Pre-2021 Teslas and a few later ones need a retrofit controller card to use this adapter.) As such, companies like Electrify America, the largest operator of CCS stations, are taking a wait-and-see about adding NACS.

If they were operated as businesses, they would not do this—the majority of cars use NACS and at present don't have the adapter, so they are turning away their business. But EA was created to fulfill the Volkswagen dieselgate penalty and does not run as a pure business. EA has reiterated that it supports CCS because most manufacturers use it, which suggests it cares more about manufacturers than drivers. On the other hand, because the Tesla drivers already have a network they prefer—even at a higher price—EA feels less push to support them.

Because of the adapters, it won't be a calamity if there continue to be two "standards." That's particularly true if the NACS adapter for CCS cars that Ford owners will all receive becomes available to any driver. In that case, any driver willing to spend a modest amount will be able to charge at any charger, providing Tesla is willing to let them connect. It will just be less convenient when using the adapter.

The author has done consulting for EV OEMs discussed in this article, and owns a modest amount of TSLA stock.