By Umar Shakir , a news writer fond of the electric vehicle lifestyle and things that plug in via USB-C. He spent over 15 years in IT support before joining The Verge.
The state of electric vehicle charging in North America is way too much like smartphone charging wars — but focused on much more expensive hardware. Like USB-C, the Combined Charging System (CCS, Type 1) plug is widely adopted by almost every manufacturer and charging network, while, like Apple and Lightning, Tesla uses its own plug but with wider availability across its Supercharger network. Car Battery Charging Companies
But as Apple is forced away from Lightning, Tesla is on a different path where it’s opening up the connector, renaming it to North American Charging Standard (NACS), and pushing it to become the USB-C of electric vehicles in the region. And it might just work: Ford and GM lined up as the first two automakers to adopt the NACS port, which is also now being recognized by the automotive standards organization SAE International.
Europe solved this by forcing all companies to use CCS2 (Tesla included), while EV owners in the US, for years, have dealt with fragmented charging networks requiring different accounts, apps, and / or access cards. And depending on whether you’re driving a Tesla Model Y, a Kia EV6, or even a Nissan Leaf with the ailing CHAdeMO connector, you’d better hope the station you stop at has the cable you need — and is operational.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is leaving out a nice pool of $7.5 billion to give every major fast-charging network from ChargePoint to Electrify America the chance to build reliable EV infrastructure.
North America can become a great and convenient place to own an electric vehicle, but how long will that take? Find out by reading all the news about electric vehicle charging right here, so come back and plug in often.
Imagine buying a new car, and suddenly, most gas stations are broken. That’s a reality new electric vehicle owners are finding when it comes to EV charging stations supplied by significant players like ChargePoint, Electrify America, and EVgo.
Many stations often result in customers leaving without a recharge thanks to unreliable or damaged hardware, and the situation is growing worse over time. For some EV owners, it might feel like the companies behind the charging networks are asleep at the wheel. But occasionally they stick their heads up to let us know they realize there’s a problem, and they’re laboring to fix it.
The hotel chain announced a new deal with EV Connect to install branded electric vehicle charging stations at its hotels in the US and Canada.
Renting or traveling with an EV will be an easier choice if you know there’s somewhere to charge it, and Marriott may also need to compete with Hilton, which just announced a new charging deal with Tesla.
In new US EV charging news, the automaker will adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) port in its next-generation EVs starting in 2025. Current and future I-Pace customers will also get adapters to use the 12,000-plus Tesla Superchargers beforehand, but there’s no timeframe for availability.
Jaguar is joining the likes of Ford, GM, Rivian, Volvo, Polestar, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Fisker, and Honda on essentially the same deal to get on Tesla’s winning connector.
If you were holding off on buying an EV because you didn’t know where to start on getting a home charger installed, Hyundai’s new deal might help you out. The automaker is now offering a free home electric vehicle charger plus up to $600 off the installation cost with the purchase or lease of select Hyundai EVs.
Hyundai is offering up the ChargePoint Home Flex Level 2 charger on the Hyundai Home Marketplace. The charger is currently listed at $549 on the website and supports up to 50 amps, which could get you around 37 miles of driving range per hour of charging. The additional $600 installation credit applies only to services ordered through Hyundai’s website.
EV owners fed up with the often broken, discombobulated charging experience in the US are about to get a lifeline from the federal government.
The US Department of Transportation is authorizing $100 million to “repair and replace existing but non-operational, electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure.” The investment comes from a $7.5 billion pot of money for EV charging that was approved as part of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The department has already approved around $1 billion for the installation of thousands of new EV chargers along major highways in the US.
Ford, BMW, and Honda are joining forces to create a new vehicle-to-grid company that aims to help EV owners save money by sending energy back to the electrical grid.
The new company, ChargeScape, will “create a single, cost-effective platform connecting electric utilities, automakers and interested electric vehicle customers.” Through that platform, EV owners “earn financial benefits through a variety of managed charging and energy-sharing services never before possible with traditional gasoline-powered vehicles.”
Tesla and Hilton are teaming up to install up to 20,000 electric vehicle charging stations at Hilton hotels and properties. The project will kick off in early 2024, and the chargers are slated for installation at 2,000 locations in the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Hilton states this is the largest planned EV network by any hospitality company. On paper, there are enough chargers to have 10 installed per location, but distribution may vary, as Hilton says that “at least six” will be installed at any location. According to the company, EV charging availability is playing a major role in 2023 in converting searches to stays on Hilton.com.
GM is recalling 9,423 chargers that came with the Chevy Bolt EUV to repair a glitch in the software (Recall number: N232407300). The charger might not stop the flow of electrons when the ground connection is lost, possibly causing a brief shock when unplugging.
Chevy has plenty of time to make sure the next Bolt comes with better chargers.
Honda announced today that it’s adopting Tesla’s electric vehicle charging connector for its future vehicles. The Japanese automaker was one of the holdouts to accept the competing (and winning) standard, joining the likes of Ford, GM, Rivian, Volvo, Polestar, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, and Fisker.
Honda is planning to implement Tesla’s plug, now known as the North American Charging Standard (or NACS) in a new electric vehicle slated for 2025. The automaker, like every other manufacturer on board with NACS, is promising the availability of a CCS Combo to NACS adapter before 2025 so existing models (and soon-to-be-released ones like the Prologue) will have access to Tesla’s vast and reliable Supercharger network.
The two companies arranged a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday in Richardson, Texas, for a four-charger station (one of 50 locations agreed upon nationwide) that can handle up to 350kW charging speeds — fast enough to charge up an EV while you stand in a long ATM line.
A representative for EVgo, Terry Preston, tells The Verge there are now 15 operational locations at Chase branches across California, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania. The more chargers, the better.
Electric vehicle research organization Recurrent collected battery health data on over 12,500 US Tesla vehicles measured over five years.
Its assessment of the data shows no “statistically significant difference in range degradation” between EVs charged only (more than 90 percent of the time) at high-speed DC chargers versus primarily using AC ones (less than 10 percent use of fast chargers). It might not hold up all other EVs and charging situations, but it’s something.
Mercedes-Benz announced its first electric vehicle DC fast charging hubs will launch in the fourth quarter of 2023, with the first station locations coming to Atlanta, Georgia; Chengdu, China; and Mannheim, Germany. The so-called “Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging Network” will have 2,000 chargers installed worldwide by the end of 2024, the automaker said.
At the beginning of this year, Mercedez-Benz announced it would go halfsies on spending about $1 billion with solar company MN8 Energy to build out a major worldwide charging network for electric vehicle owners. At the time, its plans included the installation of more than 2,500 DC fast chargers provided by ChargePoint at 400 hub locations in North America.
Earlier this week, Google Maps reportedly demoted gas stations in the points of interest categories list for electric vehicle owners while using Android Auto. Google confirmed the changes, which it noted have been available to EV drivers since 2022.
“To help people get the most relevant information when navigating, last year we added the ability for EV drivers to see a shortcut for charging stations instead of gas stations on Google Maps for Android Auto,” Google spokesperson Pearl Xu told The Verge. Xu added that the feature has also been live for vehicles equipped with Google built-in vehicle software since 2020.
Comcast Smart Solutions, the company’s commercial connected infrastructure division, will offer connected EV chargers made by NovaCharge, at commercial and residential complexes where it has its large-scale Comcast Business and Xfinity Communities set up.
So if a landlord / building owner with Comcast service wants EV chargers on the property, they could have one less vendor to deal with. And if Comcast does well with support, perhaps it won’t need to offer charger decommissioning options.
Electric vehicle owners are overall not satisfied with the reliability of the charging infrastructure available in the US, according to a new survey conducted by JD Power. In some cases, things are looking even worse than last year.
The survey finds that 20 percent of survey takers have, at least once, arrived and departed a charging station without gaining any range on their EV. This is attributable not only to broken charging equipment, but also due to long queues of people waiting to charge.
R1T and R1S owners can now enroll in EVgo’s Autocharge Plus service, joining GM vehicles, Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Kia’s EV6, Polestar 2, and more.
Charging EVs with any network has meant fumbling through apps and cards, but EVgo’s working on improving its customers’ experience. Rivians can easily charge on the Adventure Network — and will have Tesla Supercharger access next year.
Fisker is the latest automaker to adopt Tesla’s charging connector for its future vehicles. Following the marching band of major automakers, Fisker is going to add a Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) port to its first vehicles in 2025, the company announced today.
For customers of Fisker’s Ocean SUV — of which 22 have been confirmed delivered as of June 23rd — the company will be providing an adapter to enable access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in the first quarter of 2025. The adapter will convert the widely used Combined Charging System (CCS) port that’s on most EVs, including the Ocean, into Tesla’s leaner and now standardized NACS port.
In a social video, Jim Farley levels with EV customers saying he had a “reality check” during a road trip when he stopped at a “low speed” charging station, gaining only 40 percent charge in 40 minutes in his F-150 Lightning. He later charges at a “nice” 350kW charger (though the truck can’t do more than 155kW).
Farley eludes that adopting Tesla’s NACS connector is the solution, but the adapter needed to enable current Ford EVs to use Tesla’s Superchargers won’t come until next year.
German Android blog SmartDroid reports Google Maps isn’t showing gas stations as a category while navigating in an EV using an Android Auto phone connection. Instead, the top item is now EV charging stations.
Google’s been updating Maps to include more electric vehicle navigation features, following the route planning tools it has built for Waze.
ChargePoint, which bills itself as the world’s “largest and most open” charging network for electric vehicles, is announcing a series of new initiatives to improve the reliability of its 245,000-strong network of chargers. “We expect these multimillion dollar investments to deliver network reliability of nearly 100 percent once fully implemented,” the company writes in a press release.
The announcement comes as US drivers of electric vehicles continue to have issues finding reliable places to charge their cars when away from home. One study from last year found that one in five respondents was not able to charge their vehicle after arriving at a station, with the majority blaming chargers that were malfunctioning or out of service.
A Tesla driver from California thought they could quietly borrow some joules in the EV-barren town of Ekalaka, Montana — population 400 or so — but their Model Y ended up on the front page of the local newspaper, dubbed a UEV (or unidentified electric vehicle). “Borrowed Volts,” read the article title in the Ekalaka Eagle, which mentions that it might be the first electric vehicle ever to charge in the town.
“It was just sitting there, so I plugged in,” the driver told the Montana Free Press.
We like to talk about range anxiety, but the reality is we’re dealing with charging anxiety when it comes to EVs. It’s great that an electric vehicle can cover 300 miles on a charge, but if the infrastructure is sparse and, in many cases, not working correctly, the ability to cover hundreds of miles on a single charge just means you’re hundreds of miles from home if things go sideways.
Yes, the infrastructure is improving, and a big driver of that is government-funded financial initiatives for charging station companies to improve uptime. Automakers are adopting Tesla’s NACS (North American Charging Standard) after the initial push by Ford — a company that sent employees out into the field to see how well the charging network was working and seems to have determined not well enough and signed a deal with Tesla.
An installation proposal in the UK (shared on r/teslamotors) seems to confirm Tesla’s moving up from its 250kW V3 stations to 350kW on the V4. It could technically be even faster.
Current Tesla vehicles only support 250kW max, but 800-volt EVs like the Kia EV6 could take advantage. And those longer cables are certainly helpful. Charging a non-Tesla in Europe is easy and dongle-free.
A new group of automotive super friends is banding together, promising to build the next big North American electric vehicle charging network. These worldwide automakers — BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis — announced a planned joint venture today to erect easy-to-activate DC fast chargers along US and Canadian highways and in urban environments.
The grand plan for the currently unnamed partnership is to install “at least” 30,000 high-speed EV chargers by 2030, with the first ones to open summer 2024 in the US. The collective plans to leverage National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funding in the US and will also use other private and public funding from state and federal sources to build out the network.
Nissan is announcing support for Tesla’s winning charging connector for the North American market. The automaker is not only the first Japanese brand to agree to add the charger but also the first Asian one. Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) is the port that many major automakers, including Ford, GM, Volvo, and Mercedes-Benz, have accepted to use in the US.
For Nissan in particular, this is a big deal. The company is one of the pioneers of the electric vehicle revolution thanks to its early release of the Nissan Leaf in 2010. Nissan currently uses two different port standards for its models: CHAdeMO on the Leaf and CCS1 on the Ariya. “We are happy to provide access to thousands more fast chargers for Nissan EV drivers,” Nissan Americas chairperson Jérémie Papin said in a press release.
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