Seems like it’s happening without government intervention. It’s hard to imagine now that Ford, GM, and Tesla are on the same standard that the rest will not follow suit.
Considering that nearly all U.S. manufacturers are now switching off of CCS1, this requirement makes no sense since infrastructure is meant to last.
If I were to buy a car with CCS today, and then in 2024, NACS wins, and all cars going forward have NACS, and all charging stations change to NACS as a result... In the year 2030, can I get the port upgraded, are the changing stations obligated to support CCS indefinitely, is there an adapter I can just keep in my car for NACS->CCS that actually works (NACS->CCS is currently not an option... will it become an option?), or is my CCS car just unchargeable?
I'm not sure those statements are mutually exclusive. All new manufacturing produces ewaste. CCS cars will still be chargeable in one form or another until the car itself dies.
The federal government has definitely "intervened" by incentivizing interoperability through a $7.5B carrot[1] for interoperable charging networks.
Also unlikely to be coincidental is the fact that Tesla "opened up" its charging patents/specs to competitors [1] in 2014 - but only signed its first partner in 2023, a few months after billions of federal dollars were made available for interoperable charging networks.
1. IIRC, they included a mutual non-aggression clause for patents, and if a 100-year-old company with plenty of patents like Ford, you may balk at that. I'm speculating that Tesla has been offering much more generous terms than the 2014 offer
I don't doubt they'd like it to remain that way. Starving CCS charging networks of federal dollars that are be relied upon by Japanese, German and Korean manufacturers would be a win for US manufacturers; expanding a Tesla-moat into a US-manufacturer moat. Tesla gets federal dollars, control the standard and keeps its hungriest competitors at bay who most threaten its margins; Ford, GM and Rivian get access to a large network and protection from foreign competition by being invited into the fort.
Cartel-like behaviour is notoriously self-emergent.
Insidiously, this arrangement might even get the US government to look the other way if it is American car companies vs. everyone else despite the original assumption being that CCS networks would get most/all of the federal funds.
> Interoperability of EV charging infrastructure. The requirements relating to interoperability similarly address less visible standardization along the national EV charging network. The FHWA is working to establish a seamless national network of EV charging infrastructure that can communicate and operate on the same software platforms from one State to another. The FHWA establishes interoperability requirements through this final rule for charger-to-EV communication, charger-to-charger network communication, and charging network-to-charging network communication to ensure that chargers are capable of the communication necessary to perform smart charge management and Plug and Charge.
And it's a sensible move if you care about e-waste, given that there are far more NACS vehicles and NACS charging stalls in than CCS1 vehicles and CCS1 charging stalls. (And that contrast becomes even more extreme if you assume that the thousands of unreliable CCS1 stalls would be getting scrapped anyway.)
Meanwhile Nissan and Mitsubishi are still selling brand new cars with CHAdeMO plugs. So much for it being a universal standard.
2. They want to sell cars, and cars with the Tesla connector have access to Tesla superchargers without a dongle.
So GM and Ford wanted to sign deals to use Tesla's charger network to remove a competitive advantage that Tesla had. Tesla apparently agreed to that, but one condition is that GM and Ford had to agree to switch future vehicles over to Tesla's previously-proprietary (and still Tesla-controlled) "NACS" standards instead of CCS. GM and Ford agreed. Rivian appears to have followed suit after GM and Ford agreed.
Other automakers are now evaluating the landscape to see where things will fall. The best alternative was always going to be that we had a unified CCS standard future, but now that GM/Ford have made that impossible, they may decide that it's better to get some leverage by unifying on NACS rather than having a split-standard future.
They certainly didn’t care enough to make electrify America good.
As another commenter stated, though, Volkswagen was forced to create EA as part of their Dieselgate settlement, and their behavior in the past hasn't exactly instilled confidence that they see it as something worth investing in.
I have road tripped well over 10k miles in my Telsa over the last 5 years, and I've never seen an entire supercharger site offline (like happens with EA). I'm sure it must happen after natural disasters when grid power is cut, but its not the normal state of operations like it is with EA.
The only car manufacturer with a competitive charging network or only competitor period? ChargePoint seems better than Tesla my area. Most of the Tesla stations in this area require a hotel stay to charge.