Good. Great. As long as there's just one, I don't care which.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/27/tesla-ele...