Ford and Tesla recently said that Ford’s electric vehicles will finally be able to use Tesla’s charging network, the best in the industry in the United States. GM and Tesla said on Thursday that GM’s electric vehicles will eventually be able to do the same, perhaps because GM and Ford aren’t trying to befriend Tesla CEO Elon Musk to make some short-term good news. For both Ford and GM, this means making their EV Superchargers ready or adaptable, although most of the rest of the world seems to prefer the Combined Charging System (CCS) standard ) than, as Teslas are fitted in Europe.
The US federal government also prefers CCS, probably because it is preferred by almost every other non-Tesla electric vehicle manufacturer and because there is a common charging standard that makes it easier to build a national charging network. , because America is switching to electric cars, too, kicking and shouting. You might think that two of America’s Big Three linked to Tesla might change some minds at the White House on the matter, but, according to a Reuters story on Fridayno, because that would make no sense.
The White House on Friday said electric vehicle charging stations that use Tesla’s standard plugs will be eligible for billions of dollars in federal subsidies as long as they include a connection to the national CCS charging standard.
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This is the first time the Biden administration has directly connected Tesla with its $7.5 billion effort to build new high-speed chargers on about 7,500 miles of the nation’s busiest highways.
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“Earlier this year, we developed minimum standards to ensure that all motorists are accessible, reliable and affordable for charging electric vehicles, and we require interoperability. to promote competition. Those standards provide flexibility for adding both CCS and [North American Charging Standard, or Tesla’s]as long as the driver can count on a minimum of CCS,” White House spokesman Robyn Patterson said in a statement to Reuters.
Now, CCS is not no growing pain of its own in the US, because we’re still not fully committed to electric cars, but that’s more of an American problem than a problem with the specific CCS, which Europe uses quite commonly.
Perhaps relevant here is comparing the electric vehicle charging situation to mobile phone charging, such as the space where Apple emphasizes its proprietary Lightning connector for iPhones in the United States.S. while the rest of the world insists that USB-C is faster, simpler, more widely recognized and better.
In other words, it’s American exceptionalism at its best, so I guess it’s not too surprising to see GM and Ford also go with Tesla in the EV charging space. Maybe that doesn’t matter either, because it’s unusual to travel abroad with one’s EV, unlike one’s phone. However, these things repeat and there will be another better, faster, smarter charger after CCS and Superchargers, in about a decade, by that time in the United States, perhaps all we’ll have a huge variety of dongles in our EV chest that won’t be annoying at all. Maybe one day we will settle on a single charging standard, and maybe that standard is the same standard that the rest of the world uses.
