Dealers Scramble to Adapt to Sudden Spread of Tesla Chargers

On May 25, Ford announced that starting early next year, owners of its battery-electric vehicles would be able to use an adapter to charge at Tesla stations, which use the proprietary North American Charging Standard connector. By 2025, Ford says, all its BEVs will come equipped with a built-in NACS connector.

General Motors followed, announcing in early June that owners of its BEVs would be able to use Tesla’s charging network and that the NACS connector would be built in to its BEVs beginning in 2025. Since then, many other automakers and charging station manufacturers have jumped on the NACS bandwagon.

While this is good news for BEV owners, it is somewhat of a betrayal for dealers. Manufacturers compelled dealers to install charging stations with CCS-standard connectors in order to sell BEVs, say industry experts.

“If I were a dealer that had already made an investment in CCS charging equipment, I would be calling manufacturer representatives daily asking when they will be covering the cost of retrofitting” the existing connectors, Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst, mobility ecosystem at Guidehouse Insights, tells Wards.

Dealers may be doing that, but they declined to comment to Wards. The manufacturers are circumspect on the topic.

“Our standards for dealers have not changed as a result of this announcement” about Tesla chargers, Ford Model e communications director Marty Gunsberg says. “The equipment defined in the current Charging Standards fully supports Ford’s existing CCS EV offerings and, when combined with a NACS-to-CCS adapter, will support future Ford vehicles equipped with a NACS inlet port.”

Sanaz Marbley, director of strategic technology communications at General Motors, says chargers using CCS connectors will be “an important resource for EV drivers for many years to come. As GM transitions from the CCS standard to the North American Charging Standard, charging adapters will continue to provide interoperability.”

Adapters will be “made available” to allow customers to access NACS connectors, Marbley says without elaborating.

Many automakers have existing agreements with charging equipment companies to allow access to CCS charging networks. Both GM and Ford have agreements that allow owners of their BEVs to access charging at EVgo, Electrify America and ChargePoint stations, among others.

The problem is that those charging stations often don’t work. The 2022 J.D. Power Electric Vehicle Experience Public Charging Study – the most recent available – found one out of five respondents did not charge their vehicle during a charger visit and that 72% of them indicated it was due to the station malfunctioning or being out of service.

Respondents included 11,554 owners of battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The study was conducted from January through June 2022.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s NACS charging station network is not only extensive – with more than 12,000 Supercharger connections across the U.S. and Canada – but also reliable.

In early results from J.D. Power’s 2023 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience Public Charging Study, customers gave Tesla charging a 734 satisfaction score on a 1,000-point scale. The average was 558, says a J.D. Power spokesperson.

“I for years have felt the charging experience is Tesla’s greatest competitive advantage,” Loren McDonald, CEO of EVAdoption, a data and consulting firm, tells Wards.

In his discussions with dealers, says McDonald, they “get that the future is electric (but) they don’t understand charging. The manufacturers are telling them to add a bunch of equipment, but (the dealers) don’t trust them.”

Installing chargers is expensive, especially the DC fast charging type. They can typically range from about $100,000 to $300,000 per charger but can be lower or higher depending on the power level of the chargers, labor, and construction and utility costs.

For Level 2 chargers the cost typically ranges from about $5,000 to $20,000, but can also be higher or lower, with the need to upgrade electrical panels often being a key variable, says EVAdoption's McDonald. 

If a dealership already has chargers installed, it may not be all that complicated to add NACS connectors to the existing charging infrastructure, he says. The additional connector can be installed on the same post as the CCS connector.

Several software companies provide an operating system that makes the charger work with the NACS connector and most have an open protocol, he says.

“From a dealer’s perspective, they just need to make sure the hardware they buy has two cables and two connectors. That way they are good to go regardless of what (connector standard) shows up to charge,” he says.

The Tesla connector moved one step closer to even more widespread adoption when the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) said late last month that it would standardize NACS, ensuring that “any supplier or manufacturer will be able to use, manufacture, or deploy the NACS connector on electric vehicles and at charging stations across North America,” according to an SAE press release.

“Standardizing the NACS connector will provide certainty, expanded choice, reliability and convenience to manufacturers and suppliers and, most of all, increase access to charging for consumers,” Frank Menchaca, president of Sustainable Mobility Solutions, an innovation arm of SAE affiliate Fullsight, says.

Rather than wait for the inevitable, analyst Abuelsamid recommends dealers start installing NACS charging capability now, while the number of BEVs being sold is relatively small. He predicts the CCS standard will become obsolete.

“By end of 2026, there will probably be no new vehicles shipped in the U.S. with a CCS port,” says Abuelsamid.