Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network. they uses CCS and VW is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. i think they can stand on their own. time will tell though.

World status doesn’t mater as this is North America only. Volkswagen doesn’t have a chance and tbh, I doubt they care that much.

They certainly didn’t care enough to make electrify America good.

They were forced to make EA as part of Dieselgate. If most vehicles is the U.S. are on NACS, they will be forced to switch by market forces alone.

Go check out some car forums for folks that depend on EA (like Lucid). I've never had an issue with EA, but the general consensus seems to be that EA reliability is abysmal, with stations frequently being down (though reviews seem to be on an uptrend starting in 2023, so perhaps it was a pandemic related issue).

As another commenter stated, though, Volkswagen was forced to create EA as part of their Dieselgate settlement, and their behavior in the past hasn't exactly instilled confidence that they see it as something worth investing in.

EA is bad at best. Very unreliable network, especially the ones not near urban centers. Yeah you get reliable charging if you’re near big cities but once you’re out in the middle of nowhere, it can be terrifying. I’ve personally arrived at an EA charger to only find it not working and the next closest one was a 50 mile detour. Thankfully I plan liberally, but I’d be in a very bad spot if not. Someone I know, also had a locking problem where the charger wouldn’t detach. And I’ve seen news items relating to literal bricking of cars by using the chargers.

Having to "plan liberally" is something that makes EVs much less usable on long trips. When road tripping, its fastest to arrive at a charger with a very low state of charge (way less than a 50mi buffer). When I road trip my Model X, I trust that the supercharger will work, and I target arrival at a 3-5% state of charge. This allows me to charge at the fastest part of the charging curve, and to depart when the charge rate starts to drop off.

I have road tripped well over 10k miles in my Telsa over the last 5 years, and I've never seen an entire supercharger site offline (like happens with EA). I'm sure it must happen after natural disasters when grid power is cut, but its not the normal state of operations like it is with EA.

EA is pretty bad. The fact that no one can decide what side the connector should be on also leads to chaos (cars splayed out everywhere around the chargers).

> Volkswagen owns Electrify America the only competitor at scale to Tesla's supercharging network.

The only car manufacturer with a competitive charging network or only competitor period? ChargePoint seems better than Tesla my area. Most of the Tesla stations in this area require a hotel stay to charge.

Those are not fast charging stations, they’re L2 destination chargers.

They can’t compete with Tesla’s manufacturing and operational prowess. Their stations are money pits.

> Seems like it’s happening without government intervention

The federal government has definitely "intervened" by incentivizing interoperability through a $7.5B carrot[1] for interoperable charging networks.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36408329

So why is everyone fleeing the North American standards J1772/CCS1 in favor of Tesla's? What do these car companies stand to gain switching the charging port? They don't own charging networks.

Their agreements with Tesla are not public, so it's hard to tell what the benefits are. However, I have noticed that only American companies have pledged to switch to NACS from CCS (so far), I don't think 3 for 3 is a coincidence.

Also unlikely to be coincidental is the fact that Tesla opened up its spec in 2014 - but only signed its first partner in 2023, a few months after billions of federal dollars were made available to interoperable charging networks.

Those 4 represent like 80-90% of EVs in the US

> Those 4 represent like 80-90% of EVs in the US

I don't doubt they'd like it to remain that way. Starving CCS charging networks of federal dollars that are be relied upon by Japanese, German and Korean manufacturers would be a win for US manufacturers; expanding a Tesla-moat into a US-manufacturer moat. Tesla gets federal dollars, control the standard and keeps its hungriest competitors at bay who most threaten its margins; Ford, GM and Rivian get access to a large network and protection from foreign competition by being invited into the fort.

Cartel-like behaviour is notoriously self-emergent.

Insidiously, this arrangement might even get the US government to look the other way if it is American car companies vs. everyone else despite the original assumption being that CCS networks would get most/all of the federal funds.

First of all, as is, the legislation requires CCS1. If that changes, nothing is stoping foreign CCS networks from adding NACS connectors.

The law does not require CCS, only interoperability. From https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...

> Interoperability of EV charging infrastructure. The requirements relating to interoperability similarly address less visible standardization along the national EV charging network. The FHWA is working to establish a seamless national network of EV charging infrastructure that can communicate and operate on the same software platforms from one State to another. The FHWA establishes interoperability requirements through this final rule for charger-to-EV communication, charger-to-charger network communication, and charging network-to-charging network communication to ensure that chargers are capable of the communication necessary to perform smart charge management and Plug and Charge.

The major benefit to Tesla here is that it pushes most of the costs of unifying the continent on a single standard upon third party charging networks. Ford and GM have minimal exposure to that, so they don't care, and it saves Tesla a lot of future heartache.

And it's a sensible move if you care about e-waste, given that there are far more NACS vehicles and NACS charging stalls in than CCS1 vehicles and CCS1 charging stalls. (And that contrast becomes even more extreme if you assume that the thousands of unreliable CCS1 stalls would be getting scrapped anyway.)

Meanwhile Nissan and Mitsubishi are still selling brand new cars with CHAdeMO plugs. So much for it being a universal standard.

1. The Tesla charger is _better_ in essentially every measurable and subjective way.

2. They want to sell cars, and cars with the Tesla connector have access to Tesla superchargers without a dongle.

While there is a lot of activity going on to build CCS chargers, the current state of the CCS charging network is not great. This is a competitive advantage for Tesla.

So GM and Ford wanted to sign deals to use Tesla's charger network to remove a competitive advantage that Tesla had. Tesla apparently agreed to that, but one condition is that GM and Ford had to agree to switch future vehicles over to Tesla's previously-proprietary (and still Tesla-controlled) "NACS" standards instead of CCS. GM and Ford agreed. Rivian appears to have followed suit after GM and Ford agreed.

Other automakers are now evaluating the landscape to see where things will fall. The best alternative was always going to be that we had a unified CCS standard future, but now that GM/Ford have made that impossible, they may decide that it's better to get some leverage by unifying on NACS rather than having a split-standard future.

J1772 won't go away. It's only for Level 2 (AC) charging. It doesn't compete in the DCFC space. CCS1 is what will go away. Apples and oranges.

I bet it will. Why would you bother hampering the design of the charge port door by requiring it to be large enough to cover both J1772 and NACS? The adapter solution is much easier for Tesla and others. And the adapters are cheap.

Yeah, I'm beginning to think you're probably right. Although J1772 is a real standard, NACS is rapidly becoming a de facto "real" standard, and it completely subsumes the purpose of J1772 plus it works for DCFC. NACS is slightly less clunky than J1772 also.

That's basically the same story of how USB BC 1.2 (the old 'battery charging' standard that allowed 5V-1.5A out of USB plugs) came to exist. Vendors were making custom protocols that allowed higher currents than the measly 500mA USB permitted, and eventually the USB-IF threw up their hands and essentially incorporated these industry-made solutions into the USB BC1.2 standard. It wouldn't surprise me if SAE releases some new standard that happens to be NACS...

There has been government intervention. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-open-us-charging-ne...

The government is actually requiring CCS1 (currently) to get that funding. This may change as more dominoes fall as others adopt NACS.

Considering that nearly all U.S. manufacturers are now switching off of CCS1, this requirement makes no sense since infrastructure is meant to last.

Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?

If I were to buy a car with CCS today, and then in 2024, NACS wins, and all cars going forward have NACS, and all charging stations change to NACS as a result... In the year 2030, can I get the port upgraded, are the changing stations obligated to support CCS indefinitely, is there an adapter I can just keep in my car for NACS->CCS that actually works (NACS->CCS is currently not an option... will it become an option?), or is my CCS car just unchargeable?

They all speak the CCS protocol so it’s a matter of a simple passive adapter.

At some high level of charging speed, won't the adapter need active cooling and temperature monitoring?

I wouldn't imagine so; a short, rigid adapter could have very thick conductors which would have low resistance relative to flexible cable. And being a passive adapter, it would be easy to make very heat tolerant.

The current high speed connectors are actually water cooled.

Correct, but that is necessary in order to get a relatively lightweight and flexible cable to carry huge loads. It’s not nearly as important for an adapter which is, for the DC pins at least, a solid bus bar encased in heat resistant plastics.

I was thinking that the contact resistance would create quite a bit of heat as well, and if there's nowhere to dissipate you can get quite hot. Even if a high temp plastic can take it, you might burn the person handling it.

> Are the chargers/ports on cars easy enough to swap out, or are we manufacturing ewaste?

I'm not sure those statements are mutually exclusive. All new manufacturing produces ewaste. CCS cars will still be chargeable in one form or another until the car itself dies.