Volvo Cars Adopts Tesla's NACS Port in the United States, Canada and Mexico
media.volvocars.com
media.volvocars.com
The Supercharger network is one of their remaining competitive advantages. Other manufacturers were behind for years on efficiency, range, etc. but are now catching up - and other manufacturers are far better at making an actual _car_ than Tesla. Build quality, quality control, durability, comfort, noise, etc.
Unless Tesla is so confident that their manufacturing skills will give them a continuing and durable cost advantage - that makes up for the fact that they haven't innovated or even improved their basic vehicle design for the past 10 years - I don't see how this works to their advantage.
The list of Manufacturers on board at this time: Ford, GM, Rivian, Volvo (and presumably Polstar).
Hyundai and Stellantis are considering it. If they join, and it'd be silly not to at this point, that's about half the car market right there. Now it's just up to the German and Japanese automakers.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775208/tesla-nacs-elect...
That's such a tough market, though. They make thousands of dollars per car they sell. Fast chargers are for road trips, which means most EV owners don't rely on them day-to-day. Making the same thousands of dollars of profit from fast charging is no small task. And given it has to be made over the long haul, it's even harder to get the same value.
Combine that with the fact that there are already lots of non-Tesla fast chargers and there will be ever more going forward, and I think this business decision looks risky. I can only interpret it as a statement on what they think is going to happen to their new car profit margin.
I think it's also that the EV market needs better charging stations, that are more reliable as the existing charging brands have a bad reputation. Tesla also needs charging stations to work for non-tesla vehicles or the trust in a EV would drop.
Are they really "far better"? My wife's Tesla hasn't had any issues in the last 3 years. The build quality is great. Every time I have a chance to take the Tesla over my Kia, I do it because it's so much more pleasant to drive it.
Over the years I've had many cars. I am struggling to think of one better than the current Tesla that we have.
Someone mentioned Teslas look like half an egg, and now I can't think of anything else when I see one.
Stepping back though, one can get a performance Model 3 very inexpensively, relatively, and as far as I can tell or have seen, no other manufacturer outside of Porsche (with BMW making some minor inroads) has electric cars close to as fast.
So if given a choice between a ridiculously fast Tesla and a, say, much slower Volvo for the same or more money, I’ll go with the Tesla. Not that I base the entire purchase on acceleration performance, but all else being relatively equal I will be driving a Tesla until others catch up.
Anything that does 0-60 in under 10s is fast enough for me. I’d rather have a quieter and more comfortable ride. I have an actual race car to race on an actual track and don’t need to endanger myself or others going Plaid speeds on public roadways.
I have a 5 year old Avalon Hybrid that was in the bodyshop and rented a Tesla for a month and it was awful. Brand new and it felt like I was driving a Wish.com golf cart. The only redeeming feature was the supercharger in my building.
I would very much /like/ to own a Tesla, but I hear so many bad things about loose panels, road noise, touchscreen interface, problem getting repairs, and even that the Subaru's adaptive cruise control is better than the Tesla. It's hard to justify moving away from a brand which has been absolutely reliable though.
So I'm very interested in hearing that your experience is that the Tesla has actually been better. If you don't mind: which Tesla model/year do you have experience with? I'd be interesting in determining if they're getting better, or started out great and perhaps getting worse.
That acceleration isn’t useless.
I also think it would be a very cool experience to drive a race car on a track, and I’m glad you get that experience. But I don’t see my interest in that extending or being prioritized enough to make the time and financial investment for such a specific thing. But your framing is again problematic, probably unknowingly, because having a car that can go fast and “going Plaid speeds on public roadways” with the race car comparison conjuring images of irresponsible drivers is almost entirely orthogonal to actually owning such a car.
Ok.
Off the top of my head, the Ford Mach-E GT and the Kia EV6 GT are also sub-4 second cars.
I expect the blinding acceleration to become just a feature most EVs have some version of. Even the Bolt is pretty quick for a compliance car (nearly as fast as a VW GTI, the quintessential hot hatch).
Personally, having owned a Model 3 Performance, I finally figured out that there was such a thing as too much power. It's a great party trick, but as a practical matter I think I'm quite happy with anything sub-5 second.
NACS for Ford doesn't mean a Supercharger experience. Tesla's tight integration will continue to yield fruit for at least a few more years.
https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...
Allegedly once a physical adapter comes out all existing CCS Fords will be able to access the Supercharger network with Plug and Charge.
The Supercharger will still be talking to a Ford-built port connected to a Ford battery run on Ford software. I’m optimistic. But it’s not as tight as Tesla all through.
Other legacy companies have loads of baggage, and they cannot compete. [1]
Supercharging is no longer the moat they must have, and they are willing to drain it to increase more revenue from the access instead.
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[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23771407/ford-f150-lightn...
Theoretically yes, but in action they are hemmed by their regulators as they are quasi-public owned and operated.
According to what I've read most gas stations make very little profit if any on gas sales. It is the things they sell in the accompanying convenience store where they make their money.
An average ICE "charging" at a gas station adds mileage around 15x faster than the fastest charging EV at a Supercharger. If you convert an existing gas station location to an EV charging station that means that the number of cars you can handle per hour goes down by more than an order of magnitude, which means your convenience store sales will go down.
The convenience store sales probably won't go down by an order of magnitude because there are usually a significant number of people who come just for the convenience store and don't refuel their car. Still, I'd expect that at a lot of locations that drop of in convenience store visits from people who are there to refuel will be enough to make that location not profitable.
There might be something I’m missing, I just don’t see why this would be anything close to a durable advantage for Tesla.
North America is behind on EV infrastructure. The current fighting over which plug to use will delay it by some more years. In Europe there are many fuel station style charging locations. For example:
- Shell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR2M5W6saAk
- Circle K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TVohXHjLro
- GridServe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoN4WCpuxHY
- BP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1PZJtnuiIU
> 15x faster than the fastest charging EV at a Supercharger
Shell's new station has 400 kW CCS chargers, but the problem is on the battery side more than the charger side. EVs can't make full use of the charger's available power across the whole charge curve. Better, fast charging batteries are needed.
It probably doesn't, apart from some kind of bragging rights about how their charge connector standard won in North America (which however facile, is important to the most zealous among their customer base).
Tesla was forced to open their charging network to become eligible for federal tax credits. If Tesla starts preferencing or discounting charging for their cars in their network going forward, they will lose those credits and perhaps get in other trouble.
Given that, they are making the best of the situation by partnering with their competitors, who themselves failed to have Tesla's foresight about the importance of a comprehensive charging network - even after Tesla clearly demonstrated the value in that. Remember, VW was forced to create Electrify America as part of the Dieselgate settlement.
You need a broader perspective. Europe is a bigger EV market than North America is at present. European charging networks that are going strong, offer faster charging than Tesla, and are growing include Fastned, Circle K, EnBW, Ionity, Shell, BP, etc.
They've had the benefit of Europe standardizing on CCS type 2 Combo. When everyone can build to the same standard it drives investment and development.
No, it's a mechanically different plug.
> What point are you trying to make, exactly?
That every other company that has tried to charge EVs has not utterly failed. Your perspective is narrow and it has caused you to believe a falsehood.
And the plug is mechanically different in that it has one fewer pin due too... drum roll please... no 3-phase support. But it is mechanically different, so you can win there too, if you like. Look at you! Winning all the pedantry awards today. So much fun. I mean, we're not having a damn conversation about anything, just arguing over every single word I say that you can possibly find an issue with, but to some people, this is as much fun as you can have.
Pi is exactly 3.
I don't have much use for your sorrys. It's better you think about what you're saying rather than running around in ignorance. Your narrow outlook prevents you from seeing better alternatives.
> And the plug is mechanically different in that it has one fewer pin
No, Type 2 has a different shape and two more pins than Type 1. CCS type 2 is used in more countries than any other EV plug.
Have a read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Charging_System
Broaden your horizons.
Like I said, you are right about everything. I'm an uncultured imbecile. I'll start reading more, going to museums. I'll travel the world. Europe is paramount when considering US charging infrastructure. The shape of a connector is the most important part. Can we move on and have you tell me your point? What do you actually have to say about Volvo adopting NACS?
It is when you want an example of how to do it right. Europe is a long way ahead of North America in EV infrastructure because of sensible standardization.
Learn from Europe. Europe does EV infrastructure better.
That said, this is definitely making me interested in a non-Tesla for our next EV. Tesla's tech is unrivaled, but the competition has better hard products.
Once the competition's lane-keeping/"smart" driving catch up to Tesla's APv2, I think I'm out. Even though I absolutely love using FSD beta.
Not really. Tesla chargers are slow and low voltage compared to other charger manufacturers. Other charging networks are deploying 400 kW chargers. Like FastNed has deployed 400 kW chargers from EVBox and Alpitronic:
- https://fastnedcharging.com/hq/fastned-and-evbox-join-forces...
I wonder if Tesla has figured that out for third-party automobiles yet. (I mean, I assume they have, but I assumed the other charge networks would be able to obtain working credit card readers, and that definitely didn't happen.)
Is there a reference for this somewhere? I didn't know this was a problem.
Anecdotally, 90% of the time I've been unable to charge at a Blue Oval certified network (I drive a BMW, but the list of networks is well-known), it has been a payment issue, not a CCS issue.
Also, the Biden administration recognized that this was a problem, and built a payment availability SLA into the inflation reduction act.
So, to compete effectively, chargers should have deployed in useful locations and made charging convenient. Using gas station-style card readers would have worked fine, and they are a mature technology. No one needs to install an app or create an account to buy gas, and charging should have worked the same way.
The one counterexample was that I found an EA terminal with a working credit card reader, but it did not work reliably.
For instance, you had to tap Visa, but insert chip for MC, and swipe Amex (I might have those constraints wrong), and if you did the wrong thing, the charge circuit computer state machine would get confused with the unexpected payment error, and put your car computer into a "busted charger" timeout mode. A re-attempt would cause most CC companies to issue a fraud lockout for that kiosk.
Also, these issues were compounded by the CCS connector EA uses being a bit out of mechanical tolerance, so the machine has a sign saying to pull up during handshake to get the computers to talk.
The same EA kiosks work reasonably well (> 90% success on first handshake) if you pay with the app.
I've used chipped cards at Chargepoint work on many occasions.
And I've never had a plug and charge session fail at EA.
I've had chargers fail at:
* EVGo at Warner Center
* The greenlots at The LADWP on Ventura and Corbin(ish)
* Flo at reseda and oxnard
* Blink or whatever at Kaiser and DeSoto
* Blink at the Ikea and burbank
To name a few. Tons more floating around in my head between my two EVs. Every single one of them likes to fail at some arbitrary time when I'm far away from my car
What is nice about the Tesla charging map is that I can see how many slots are available so I don’t drive somewhere only to find out the charger is in use or broken.
So, the map will incorrectly tell you not to use that charger.
A good chunk of the problems in charging stem from the fact that we allowed basic infrastructure like payments to be locked up within these private companies, rather than mandating standards.
My point is that a IoT payment protocol should have been a part of the EMV standard, the same one that lets me use my credit card while overseas. We shouldn’t have to rely on such a huge government-backed effort specific to every specific business sector where a device might need to pay for a service.
It does exist and I've used it many times. Its the exact same protocol.
we could call it a "credit card"
Yes, Tesla's will still have plug-to-pay, but that's on top of NACS, not part of NACS. NACS is just CCS with a different (smaller) handle.
The Technology Connections guy made a good explainer about all this the other day, if you don't mind a slightly-get-off-my-lawn youtuber persona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjny4u5THpU
That persona is part of TC's schtick, but the video itself was major cringe. TC does not like Tesla, and watching him forcibly eating crow + that persona that comes across as "I am right, even when I was very wrong" = 50 painful minutes.
It felt more like all of the chargers networks wanted to become something more like of Japan's prepaid IC card system for the trains. I think their dream was to have drivers buy into a reoccurring subscription for super charger access, and become big enough to be the One Charger Network to Rule Them All.
Whether this new announcement changes anything for the Canadian charging networks, I don't know. Some of the operators had already entered into cross subscription agreements with each other to try and alleviate the pain points. Part of me thinks that they'll run to the federal government and ask for protection against Tesla's network if they view it as too great a threat, but they could also end up playing nice with with each other as well.
Next few years is going to be interesting to watch either way.
All these unreliable fragmented networks that think they're precious enough to demand downloading a crappy app and registration deserve to go out of business.
When my car needs 20 minutes to recharge, I hate spending 15 minutes fighting someone's dumb password policy just to start charging.
In EU there's Ionity and Fastned that always work and always accept contactless payments.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/27/tesla-ele...
A GM executive was on the news saying how Canadians complained in a survey there were not enough charging stations. I say BS. This sudden study appears and contradicts the 10:1 ratio of CCS to Tesla charger in my town?
It's estimated America will need around 2mm EV chargers by 2030; it currently has about 160k [1]. Every charger currently deployed is less than a tenth of what we need in seven years. That's not quite tabula rasa, but it's close.
CCS lost because it prioritized backward compatibility in an environment where most of what's needed must be built. The difference between sticking with existing infrastructure and retrofitting is, in the grand scheme, a rounding error and so properly ignored.
[1] https://electrek.co/2023/01/09/heres-how-many-ev-chargers-th...
There are more CCS stations than Tesla, though there are more NACS ports [1]. Tesla also has the first-mover advantage in having sited prime locations. The deciding factor, however, was reliability: Tesla's Superchargers work.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/673190/nacs-ccs1-locations-chargi...
It makes MUCH more sense to use J1772 by default in those 2M chargers, since every EV other than Tesla currently uses that standard, and Tesla can easily use an adapter.
So CCS hasn't "lost". In fact, it's likely to remain a standard. In fact, there are some 5,200 CCS charging station locations in the US, compared to only about 1,800 Supercharger stations. [1]
A stronger position in the market only amplifies itself. Beta was better in every way than VHS, but VHS had a lead in popularity, and network effects eventually resulted in the death of Beta.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/673190/nacs-ccs1-locations-chargi...
I'm sure wherever these reviewers are doing their reviews, they're getting bad experiences. But personally I've never once had a problem. Maybe bad maintenance is more of a localized thing?
Think of it this way: The Supercharger network has to be reliable, because there's only one station every ~100 miles or so. The CCS network can afford to be a bit less reliable because it's more redundant. And even then, the "less reliable" typically means that one out of four available chargers in a location is out of service, not that the location itself is unusable.
And there are apps that lets you see the status of chargers at a location, so you can check in advance whether a particular location is working. If a location seems to be in poor repair, you can always plan around it.
Sure, but in the smaller print on that diagram it mentions that there are twice as many superchargers. CCS stations are typically small, superchargers typically large.
As long as there are chargers available at a particular station, why should I care how many are sitting unused?
I've been by many Supercharger stations where there were no cars charging at all. Sometimes I see one or two, but the majority of the time most of the chargers are empty.
The number of locations indicates the flexibility of the charging network. There are CCS chargers in places where Superchargers don't exist, meaning you have more places you can go with CCS than you can go with a Tesla.
And that isn't a hypothetical. I've driven down to the Carlsbad Caverns with my family in the past, and I wanted to do it again with my electric car. For a long time, southwest New Mexico had NO fast charging stations for any brand of charger, but in the last year it's gained enough CCS chargers that I could comfortably drive back to the caverns without worrying about range. And there are still no Superchargers within a hundred miles. (Note I'd be coming from Colorado, so driving down from the north side of the state--you could probably make it TO Carlsbad from a west Texas Supercharger, and then make it back to the same Supercharger, but that would be many hours of driving out of my way.)
Would I like to see more redundancy at every location? Sure. But to me it's more important that there are chargers available where I want to go than that there are a ton of redundant chargers at every location.
Maybe if I lived in LA and wanted to be able to drive to SF I would have different priorities.
Conversion of existing CCS1 chargers was one of the things SAE supposedly considered in making the decision. NACS "speaks CCS software over Tesla-designed hardware" so it's mostly just a hardware change at one end of the cable. (Tesla made some smart decisions when they decided to standards track NACS.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775208/tesla-nacs-elect...
As long as I can charge my car (Ioniq 5) moving forward, it doesn't really matter.
CCS has higher speed charging than is available at Superchargers, at least for my car, though, so I hope the NACS standard has the ability to support the higher charging speed.
100 DC fast charging plugs would be a lot, I'm guessing most of these 100 are actually J-1772 L2 AC plugs and not CCS combo 1. It's pretty cheap to get an adaptor for J-1772 <--> Tesla in either direction for AC usage, so in practice AC plugs are basically universal.
DC adaptors are much more expensive due to needing really high kW capable connectors and often require active communication within the adaptor.
(AIUI, the comm protocol is (will be?) CCS/IEC 61851?)
Something like that [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/27/tesla-ele...
Is Volvo properly described as a European car maker? I thought it was owned by Geely. (EDIT: Missed the merger being called off [1].)
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/25/business/geely-auto-volvo-int...
I wasn't aware nationality was determined by minority ownership
From the 2022 report:
> Volvo Car AB (publ.), with its registered office in Gothenburg, Sweden, is a publicly listed company on the Nasdaq Stockholm Stock Exchange. The largest owner, holding 82 per cent of shares and capital, is Geely Sweden Holdings AB, owned by Shanghai Geely Zhaoyuan International Investment Co., Ltd., registered in Shanghai, China, and ultimately owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Ltd., registered in Hangzhou, China.
https://vp272.alertir.com/afw/files/press/volvocar/202303076...
Who are the remaining CCS adherents?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/23/23771215/hyundai-investor...
That said, there are two CCS standards, one for (older) Japanese and American vehicles (SAE J1772), and another widely used in Europe (IEC 62196 Type). Both have been designed to be as backwards compatible with older charging standards as possible.
European Teslas ship with CCS Type 2 so I doubt this will have any impact on Volvos outside the USA.
VAG created Electrify America as part of the dieselgate deal, and since it's the largest CCS network if they switch CCS is pretty much officially done in north america.