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I think the timeline is a bit off. When Tesla designed its connector, Type 2 wasn’t yet the established European standard. Tesla had shown its proprietary connector by 2011 and shipped it in 2012; Type 2 wasn’t selected as Europe’s common connector until 2013.

When Tesla later engineered the European Model S, it needed three-phase AC and adopted a modified Type 2 connector, which fitted behind essentially the same tail light door.

But that’s all history now.

Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs: NACS is exceptionally compact and well suited to North American single-phase AC plus DC fast charging, while Type 2 is larger but supports Europe’s widespread three-phase AC.

> Arguably both markets ended up with good solutions for their needs

Only because everyone aimed too low. NACS (as mentioned before) doesn’t cleanly support adapters or detachable cables. And CCS Combo 2 is unnecessarily clunky. And you end up in a rather awkward position if you ship a car from the EU to North America or vice versa.

It ought to be entirely straightforward to design a standardized cable, NACS at one end and with a new interface at the other, that can attach and detach from a compact and weather resistant charge port. It would be fully compatible with all NACS vehicles, and it would achieve this by negotiating voltage and current limits with the EVSE at the other (newly specified) end.

It could even be cheap in a low-current version — it would basically be an extension cord, with two 12AWG hots and a ground plus a couple of little wires and the whatever inexpensive electrical parts are needed to declare its capabilities. If you can buy an e-marked USB-C cable for a few dollars, the latter won’t cost much.

It wasn't a matter of aiming low. NACS is arguably the perfect connector for the North American marketplace, or as perfect as anyone could reasonably expect for a standard of this class. The only other option on the table was a migration to CCS1, which would have been an objectively worse choice in literally all respects. CCS1 is more cumbersome, more fragile, and never enjoyed any numerical/incumbent advantage, peaking at 31% of deployed vehicles and plugs.

Shipping a car between the USA and Europe is an extreme edge case for wealthy people and the marketplace can solve for the issue of adapters and dongles where the need arises.

(For reference, I'm in a CCS2 marketplace.)

European Model S has Type 2 in that location, only ones that don't fit is the Type 2 CCS with giant DCFC pins below the regular Type 2. NACS is just Tesla doing Apple.

NACS is far less clunky than CCS. And don’t get me started on ChaDeMo - my best guess is that whoever designed it thought that big heavy awkward gasoline nozzles where cool and wanted their EV chargers to be at least as massive.

I think massive CHAdeMO plugs might have been for ultra rapid charging that never rolled out. There are brochures of 350kW+ watercooled CHAdeMO charging test equipment floating online, noted as plug limited to 200kW, dated at least as far back as 2015. That was when Tesla was still rolling out V2 150kW. So the plug overall dimensions and pin sizes are probably way overspecced for what it is in practice.

ChaDeMonis basically dead now other than for existing cars. A typical U.K. service station will have 20 ccs chargers for every chademo, and nobody is deploying the latter for new places.

Means existing chademo cars will have less value as time goes on.

> 3-phase charging (which I admit has always seemed like a silly feature

Well, 3phase is more efficient as you have less losses in the cabling.

May save you 5-10% on the bill.

3 phase has a property that the total power is (with fully balanced loads and no harmonics) constant. But n phases, equally spaced in phase angle, each an RMS voltage V from ground, with RMS current I per phase in phase with the voltage to ground, gives power n•V•I. (I’m assuming that n>=2 so that there is no neutral current.) There’s no savings for n=3 vs n=2.

There is a savings over the system in which you use 2 of 3 phases, which gives unbalanced phase angles. And that system is widely used in the US in non-single-family installations. But if you have a bunch of chargers, you put 1/3 of them on each of the pairs of phases, and everything balances back out at the panel whenever a decent number of chargers are in use.

Maybe, if a a car could rely on having 3 phases, it could avoid some ripple filtering by taking advantage of constant supply power (no 2f component), but cars need to be able to charge from a single phase even in Europe.