Sometime in 2024Perhaps as early as February, half a dozen electric vehicle charging companies will face a reckoning.
For years, they had little competition except from each other, which is to say, not much. However, they will soon have to deal with Tesla's much-praised Supercharger network.
The world of electric vehicles, from a charging perspective, was previously divided in two. There was Tesla and then there was everyone else. Tesla owners enjoyed widespread, fast and reliable charging. Everyone else got by by cobbling together accounts from several different companies, none of which could boast reliability ratings anywhere close to Tesla's.
Then, in May, the wall fell. Ford signed a deal with Tesla to give its electric vehicles access to 12,000 Superchargers, a subset of the network. Starting in 2024, existing owners will be able to charge at those spots by using an adapter, and in 2025, Ford said its future electric vehicles will swap the Combined Charging System (CCS) plug for the Tesla plug, also known as as the North American charging standard. (SNAC).
Other automakers soon followed suit. GM was next, then Rivian, Volvo, Mercedes, nissanand almost everyone else. One of the latest adopters of the plug was Volkswagen, which is no surprise given its majority ownership of Electrify America, which was supposed to be the CCS equivalent of the Supercharger network.
EV owners like me had, and still have, high hopes for Electrify America. The company was founded out of Volkswagen's diesel deal and was the first non-Tesla network to prioritize DC fast charging nationwide at speeds that could be supported by modern electric vehicles. When Electrify America's best chargers work, they're really fast, faster than even most Tesla Superchargers.
