Compared to CCS, Tesla made a ton of smart decisions with their charging setup:
- All Teslas have their charging ports at the rear left side. This means that charging cables can be very short. Longer cables would cause tangles, cost more, and be harder to cool.
- Tesla's protocol has built-in payment. You plug in and charge. With CCS it varies. Sometimes you use a credit card. Sometimes you download a mobile app and sign up for some account. Sometimes the planets align and CCS's plug-and-charge works.
- The CCS plug is much bigger. If you look at the connector sizes[1] or adapters[2], the CSS plug is comically huge. Tesla had to redesign the tail lights on the Model S/X to fit CCS Combo 2 ports.
- Every exposed contact is a potential failure point, and CCS exposes more contacts than Tesla's charging port.
- CCS has two different plug dimensions which are used in different regions, so a European CCS vehicle brought to North America will need an adapter (and vice-versa).
- If your vehicle only supports AC charging, you cannot charge with CCS Combo plugs. They won't fit. Since some Teslas were made before the CCS Combo standard took off, older Model S/X's used a CCS Type 2 port. So now every Supercharger in Europe has two plugs: CCS Type 2 & Combo 2.[3]
1. https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/connector_co...
2. https://www.notateslaapp.com/images/news/2021/ccs-adapter.jp...
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eu-tesla-supercharge...
