General Motors’ announcement the other day could undoubtedly go down in history for a number of reasons, but if the whole industry starts to make the switch the Tesla’s Charging Connector for North America, it will be a game-changer. The craziest part is that this all just started a few weeks ago with Ford.
Yes, a few weeks ago Ford decided to adopt Tesla‘s charging connector, which it’s calling the North American Charging Standards (NACS). This came months after Tesla already promised to gradually open the network to all other EVs as part of a plan with the Biden Administration, but it seems Ford didn’t want to wait and/or perhaps wanted to be in first.
There’s a little more history before going forward. Prior to The White House working out a plan for Tesla to find a way to make its Supercharger compatible with all other EVs, Tesla tried to get its charging connector and charging standards to be declared the official North American Charging Standards (NACS), but the plan was shot down.
After Ford CEO Jim Farley met with Elon Musk and spoke about the Blue Oval adopting Tesla’s charging standard, he added that other companies would have a hard decision to make. Not long thereafter, General Motors CEO Mary Barra was also talking with Musk and followed suit with Farley.
While Musk and Farley, Ford and Tesla, seem to have a pretty positive relationship, that’s never appeared to be the case when it comes to Mary Barra and Elon Musk, but who knows? Regardless, with both Ford and GM now on board, we can only imagine other brands are quickly hashing out plans for what they’re going to do next. If they all begin to follow, Tesla’s connector may just sort of automatically become the standard.
Tesla already makes up most of the EVs on the road in the US, and Ford and GM are both larger companies pushing forward with big EV plans for the present and the future.
Interestingly, FLO has already announced that it will offer the NACS connector on its public EV charging stations. Other charging networks will likely have to follow to stay competitive. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
