Stellantis adopts Tesla standard: Electric transition accelerates. The maker of Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler is the latest in North America to announce its move to the charging connector invented by Tesla.
But there is still work to be done before a truly high-quality electric charging network is available.
A major inconvenience for electric vehicle (EV) owners will soon be no more, thanks to a recent announcement from Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler producer Stellantis, one of Detroit’s Big Three automakers.
This week, the company said it would add the Tesla-designed charging connection system, called the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, to its electric cars by 2025.
In most cases, the new connector will complement an older one called the Combined Charging System, or CCS, and an even older one called CHAdeMO. These were designed by a skilled group of engineers, but they tended to be slower, clunkier, and in many cases harder to start than Tesla’s competitor.
One step closer to the electric transition in cars.
Stellantis was the last domino to fall before the Tesla connector declared victory. Ford announced that it would add it to its electric vehicles in May of last year.
Since then, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Honda, the Hyundai Group, Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, and others have followed. In fact, only a handful of startups in the sector continue to resist.
The result is that in 2025 even more vehicles will use many of the same electric charging stations.
Surveys suggest that current electric car owners in the United States, early adopters with a relative tolerance for initial difficulties, are often frustrated by the public charging experience. Chargers with broken plugs, unreliable payment systems, and software incompatible with the cars they are trying to charge are common on the streets and highways.
Finding the appropriate public charging station is a mental challenge for individuals, according to Joseph Yoon, a consumer insights analyst at the automotive research company Edmunds.
“Did you have to Google where the nearest gas station was?”
Due to these factors, the complexity of acronyms and standards may appear like EV mysticism, yet it will prove to be a crucial element in the shift to electric vehicles.
Now, finally, the United States achieves some normalization in recharging, in the same way as Europe and China. Not surprisingly, those places are further along in adopting electric cars. The change would help convince more potential drivers that electric is better and not so different from what they are used to in a gasoline model.
For Tesla, mastering its charging standard, which it cleverly renamed in 2022, is a big victory. It is, symbolically, a recognition by other automakers that their Supercharger network is both the longest-reaching and most reliable in the United States. It is also an implicit recognition that the more compact design of the NACS is superior.
More importantly, it is a potential source of stable “recurring revenue” that would be reflected quarter after quarter without much fuss. One analyst estimates that they would amount to $20 billion by the end of the decade.
This is particularly favorable because Tesla warned earlier this year that it anticipated a slowdown in sales as it ramped up production of its Cybertruck and a new, cheaper vehicle.
Not a win for Tesla Superchargers.
There is still much to be resolved on the technical side of electric vehicle charging. Stellantis’ announcement clarifies some of the complications: although the company assured that it would incorporate the Tesla standard, it did not specify whether its electric models would use the Tesla Supercharger network.
He also did not mention whether the charging standard would be adopted in the future outside the United States. “Although we do not have more details at this time, the company continues to study all options that make charging simpler and more convenient for our customers,” Dan Reid, an automaker spokesman, mentioned in the email.
Instead, the company cited future use of the upcoming IONNA charging network, a joint venture of BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis, which will reportedly feature some 30,000 DC fast chargers in the United States and Canada later this year.
In fact, more careful readers will note that Stellantis’ press release about its connector change carefully omitted both the T-word and NACS, which is what the electric car maker-that-must-not-be-named decided to call your charging system.
Another complication: Having the same connector doesn’t necessarily mean that all EVs and chargers in North America speak the same “languages,” either between chargers and the networks that support them, or between vehicles and the chargers themselves.
Getting these standardized protocols in order will be necessary to reach the holy grail of the electric vehicle: for any car to plug into any charger at any time and pay automatically, like when you fill up a tank of gas, without using cash or a credit card.
Once that happens, electric models will truly outperform the alternatives. “It will be a big boost for the adoption of EVs,” highlights Yoon.
