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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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