And I dug deeper into the 'plug war' in North America. 

The headline everywhere is that the Tesla plug won with Ford, GM saying they will adopt it. And most people just leave it at that.

But did Tesla actually 'win'? All the advance high voltage cars are staying with CCS, so only the last gen 400V class cars are moving over.

Gets even more interesting in the fine details. 

Tesla has agreed to give up their patents, well relinquish control of them at least, to the SAE, that's a require step in order for the plug to become an industrial standard, which Elon has named the North American Charging Standard, NACS for short.

But that's only the physical plug, and Tesla had to quietly modified the design slightly in order to support higher voltage, i.e. more than 400V, to try and entice the advance EVs to adopt the plug.

And here comes the juicy bits. Tesla is 'modifying', well 'adopting', or 'updating', depends on how one wants to see it, their communication protocol to the CCS standard. The NACS will only speak CCS, not Tesla. No more propriety walled garden for Tesla.

Using CCS as the communication protocol is a major concession from Elon, he HAS to adopt the industrial standard communication protocol in order for NACS to become an industrial standard plug. He really doesn't have a choice, every other car makers are on the rectified CCS standard, it's easier for one manufacturer to change than everyone else change for one company. Now with the standardize charging communication protocol, every other EV maker can just produce a simple physical plug adapter for them to use the Tesla plug. 

From now on, every non-Tesla EV fast charger network will have to compete against the almost bulletproof Tesla network, which means they will all need to step up their maintenance game to fix broken chargers and such. That was the biggest knock on the current CCS system, chargers don't always work and when they actually do work, they may not supply the stated power to the car. This is a big win for consumers. 

This 'war' just for the North America market, in Europe Tesla already uses the CCS standard as dictated by the EU, and the European physical plugs had always been different than the North America plugs anyways because of voltage and phase.

So who actually won the plug war in North America? Surprise! It's actually CCS and not Tesla. 

Tesla won the physical plug battle but loss the charging standard war. 

 

 

 

 

 


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