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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Not all Tesla's can speak CCS. Older Teslas need a $400 retrofit to be able to use the Tesla CCS1 adapter. https://shop.tesla.com/en_ca/product/ccs-combo-1-adapter

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Not much of a practical problem until some other charging network builds out enough NACS chargers that a Tesla driver would try using anything other than a Supercharger.

Looks like the cutoff for this is vehicles before May 1, 2019.

It’s more like may 2020. I don’t know anyone who got a car delivered in 2019 ( mine included) that has support for ccs

Were these vehicles _built_ after May 1, 2019 or just delivered after that date?

Once you have the retrofit, you can use existing CCS fast charger with an adapter. So it is useful in that sense..

I had the retrofit done on my 2018 MS. Have never once successfully charged at a non-Tesla charger. I'm not sure if it's me or the charging stations, which are somewhat known to be less reliable in general than Tesla's.

I bought the adapter off the gray market when it was only being sold in Korea, and promptly ran to my local EA station to try it out. Of the four plugs, only two worked, and one of those was loose and would glitch out if I didn't hold it against the car by hand.

I haven't charged via CCS since. It lives in the car as an emergency backup, but frankly I wouldn't plan a road trip stop at a CCS station if you paid me.

FWIIW that is the experience of using an EA station with a car that came with a CCS plug.

I got the $450 adapter for my 2016; There's one charger I really wanted to use and otherwise I think it'll waste space in my trunk. I still haven't used it at that charger but I did test it at a CCS1 charger; it worked though it was a terrible experience - the CCS1 plug is silly huge, the payment processing was terrible, and it charged pretty slowly.

I think they're retrofitting the existing supercharger network to speak both "NACS" (really CCS1) and the OG supercharger protocol. My car, with the retrofit, will be able to (HA! good luck believing it'll actually work) charge at an EA or other DC Fast charger setup, possibly. Non-updated OG S/X cars will just get an error (probably I will also, because these other DC Fast chargers simply don't have skin in the game -- they're malicious compliance).

L2 will be nice -- I'll not have to use the dongle to charge at public chargers.

Yeah, only ~80% of Teslas in the US support it without modification.

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