Tesla Offers its Proprietary Charger Design for All

Tesla’s innovative and cutting-edge designs of its EV components have made it a tour-de-force in this ever-growing EV market. This is especially true in the North American market where the American EV marque aims to further entrench its market dominance by sharing its proprietary charging technology and design for third parties to use and adopt.

Announced sometime last week, this revelation sees Tesla opening its proprietary charging standard – first introduced in 2012 – for other companies and manufacturers to adopt. Said charging design, dubbed as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), boasts a much smaller and more compact package than the standard Combined Charging System (CCS) used by the majority of EV brands nowadays.

The NACS was originally designed to accommodate both AC charging (single phase) and DC fast charging, in spite of being smaller in size than the CCS. Tesla claims the NACS is capable of up to 1 MW of charging capability, or twice that of the CCS’s current capability.

Plus, the NACS also comes standard with two configurations, namely the 500-Volt and 1,000-Volt, with both being mechanically backward compatible. In lay man’s terms, third party brands won’t need to alter their existing 800-Volt or 900-Volt EV battery systems in order to accommodate the NACS plug.

As mentioned earlier, Tesla’s NACS only supports single-phased AC charging, which has hindered it from being widely adopted in other markets such as Europe where three-phase circuits are utilised for higher power charging (11-22 kW). For the record, NACS AC charging currently supports about 11.5 kW of power. This fact probably explains why Tesla only opted to share NACS for North American markets, for now.

Furthermore, NACS – prior to this revelation – is already the most common charging standard used throughout North America. Tesla further claims that NASC-enabled vehicles (i.e. Teslas) currently outnumber CCS EVs two-to-one, while its NASC-bearing Supercharging network now amounts to around 60% of the total of North America’s current charging network. Both figures, all in all, display Tesla’s firm chokehold in the North American EV market, and this adoption will surely further tighten it.

As for now, no official announcements or statements were made by other third-party entities in adopting NACS. Aptera, an American EV start-up, has applauded the idea of adopting NACS, with the marque previously suggesting a region-wide charging standard to be created by specifically nominating Tesla’s NACS as a rightful candidate for it.

With Tesla’s willingness to share its charging design, it is now up to the manufacturers and brands whether they’ll adopt Tesla’s NACS for their upcoming EV models, or would they rather just stick with the ‘traditional’ CCS plug. Mind you, the NACS’s huge current market share and significantly better performance are perhaps enough to convince EV makers to side with their ‘sworn enemy’.

Will this revelation mark an exodus for EV manufacturers in North America towards adopting the NACS? If so, then does it mean the inferior CCS plug will be extinct sooner than expected?