You make it sound like Tesla voluntarily made the decision to share. They probably thought they had a moat.

The decision was completely voluntary, not following your logic.

If your argument is that they were afraid of a competitor, that may be valid, but doesn't make their actions any less voluntary.

It was not entirely voluntary, that's the point. The US government pushed very hard for an interoperable standard, and conditioned a big pile of IRA funding on supporting a fully-open standard. That was the carrot. The rest of the industry (manufacturers and chargers) also standardized and started building cars and charging infrastructure with CCS connectors. The farther this process went, the less likely it would have been that Tesla would have been able to force a switch, and so they would have had to (expensively) update their new and older cars to this standard. This was the stick.

But yes, it was all done through encouragement and coordinated coercion. Nobody showed up at Tesla's HQ with guns and forced this to happen.

More like voluntarily pushed or strong-armed by the prospect of governments mandating Tesla support a different connector thus forcing more complexity in their cars and chargers.

They offered their patent to others very early on, before it crossed regulators minds.

They offered their patent conditioned on a reciprocal patent grant (or agreement not to enforce any patents against Tesla) from the takers, as far as I understand. The difference with NACS is that they genuinely opened the connector and removed that requirement.

Arguably there's no evidence for Tesla ever wanting to use its plug as a moat. The Tesla connector pre-dates CCS1 as a standard. By the time that it was clear that the rest of the industry would converge on CCS1 in North America, the investments made by Tesla (and its customers) on their connector was far too great to contemplate shifting.

Whereas in other markets, the business case for converging on CCS2 was more compelling. Europe chose to compel CCS2 as their standard, but in Australia, Tesla pivoted to CCS2 without any government pressure.

> I don't understand how it's not a win for Tesla.

It's a win for Tesla insofar as they won't have to bear the burden of transitioning to a different plug standard, and their customers won't bear the burden of consumer confusion and frustration which come with transition.

> Nobody really lost there, either

One might argue that the main losers are the charging networks which invested in CCS1 infrastructure. They'll have to work even harder to remain relevant, all while gaining Tesla as a direct competitor and having to deploy NACS across the country.

> One might argue that the main losers are the charging networks which invested in CCS1 infrastructure.

The infrastructure is the same. North America has picked CCS as its charging standard. All that's changing is the plug on the end.

Here's a practical example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-0xRTduPI