GM announces it will also adopt Tesla’s NACS connector | Hacker News Reader

GM announces it will also adopt Tesla’s NACS connector

electrek.co

44 pointswilg13 comments

Tesla, Ford, and GM.

We now have at least a North American standard for charging electric cars. I hope this becomes a standard for all high-power DC.

Europe already has wide deployment of CCS2, including in Tesla vehicles. I don't think they're gonna be persuaded to change.

Note that CCS2 isn't even electrically compatible with NACS. CCS2 support requires a three phase onboard charger (not just single phase like in north America), and the DC pins are separate (which requires a different arrangement of contactors in the car, and extra conductors to the charge port).

because Europe doesnt allow anyone else to compete

Everyone’s allowed to compete, what’s frowned on is incompatibility.

Yes, there’s a grey area where a new connector might be innovation, but usually a custom connector is an anti-competitive move.

I understand what you are writing, but the sentiment is not helpful. Competition is not related to compatibility. There is no need to constrain one with the other. Some competition leads to incompatibility which is best for the consumer, some doesn’t. You can’t tell until the market has been given a chance to have its say. When companies coalesce around a design which was previously incompatible with other standards, that is how you know the market is having its say.

I think the big difference here is that NACS is a Tesla connection, and all of which are at Tesla superchargers, which if the industry uses that would hand the charging network to Tesla, unless Tesla allows everyone to use their connector.

So unless the NACS connector is free for any other company to use, then competition is being infringed, regardless of how good the connector is.

The NACS connector is both patent free and royalty free.

The only advantage Tesla has is a large deployed base of both chargers and cars.

I’m mean, when that happens, that’s great, but in practice most of the time firms use licensing and legal barriers to prevent interoperability and competition. Just look at the utter mess that is video calling.

In the consumer world, the only other high voltage high power DC thing you might encounter is solar panels.

They could theoretically have an NACS connector on them, but it would be quite a change to the solar industry. At the moment, solar panels are 'dumb', and all the smarts are in the inverter. If solar panels used the NACS connection, they could report temperatures, serial numbers, etc to the inverter.

I was wrong about GM balking the NACS after Ford announced it will adopt the standard. This is great news for all EVs. Now we just need those Germans to follow us..

Any chance of this being adopted outside North America?

Yes. But id depends on where. Currently China, US, Europe are all going in different directions. Lots of things undesided in lots of smaller markets.

The Pan American Highway needs NACS chargers. But then we would need to change its name to PACS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway

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