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What legal guarantee is there that Tesla won't reverse course in the future? Say a charging station or car manufacturer adopts this connector and then in 5 years Tesla says "well actually, we've got these patents and we're going to start charging you to sell cars/charging stations"? Publishing the specs and saying "we won't enforce patents" isn't a legally binding guarantee
Google “promissory estoppel”
I wish they had gotten more serious about this sooner. They had talked about offering the plug and network to other manufacturers before but there wasn't any movement on it. I expect that now it's too late and we'll be stuck with terrible CCS forever, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
We are still within bounds of choosing the superior connector. It isn't too late like in Europe, especially since US bound vehicles are already using a different plug than their European counterparts
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27907051 TLDR CCS wanted to be backwards compatible, while Tesla planned fast charging to be first class with their standard. At the time, no one was doing fast charging at Supercharger currents (150kw). CCS was bolted on to J1772.
Considering how early that decision was made in the timeline of electric vehicles (how early we still even are) — getting saddled with a backwards compatibility kludge kind of sucks.
Awesome. This should be a world-wide standard. NACS (Tesla) VS CCS is like USB-A 1.0 vs USB-C with Power Delivery: CCS is unbelievably slow and clunky to the point where it might turn people off wanting an EV once they experience the slow and clunkiness.
Tesla said in May that it would be adding CCS adapters to its Supercharger stations, already used in Europe: https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/tesla-add-ccs-connectors-supe... Now they're trying to declare their own charger as a "standard", after launching a $250 adapter in September to use the actual standard plug? Also, obligatory Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOuz_laH9I
The T.C. video is very thorough and worth a watch for all EV related shennanigans.
Awesome. This should be a world-wide standard. NACS (Tesla) VS CCS is like USB-A 1.0 vs USB-C with Power Delivery: CCS is unbelievably slow and clunky to the point where it might turn people off wanting an EV once they experience the slow and clunkiness.
Tesla’s connector has zero marketshare in Europe and doesn’t support 3-phase AC charging. I don’t think there is that much benefit in a global standard given that adapters exist.
I'm not sure how 3-phase fits in, but it didn't prevent being at least as useful as in the U.S.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering how early that decision was made in the timeline of electric vehicles (how early we still even are) — getting saddled with a backwards compatibility kludge kind of sucks.
It’s still early days and certainly not too late to change it.
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I don't see anything here indicating that other manufacturers will start using the Tesla connector. Unfortunately we're already well into the format war with two standards: Tesla and Everyone Else (CCS). Honestly this feels more like a desperate attempt by Tesla to push back on the trend towards CCS instead of a substantive announcement
They might be trying to get ahead of a possible push to mandate CCS, and they don't want to get pushed around like Apple did. I for one am fine with it. The "NACS" is objectively better by almost every available measure, and if the despised Elon Musk wants to give his stuff away, hey I'll take it. Any good reasons why we should reject this proposal?
No idea here. The 1 MW charging claim feels weird since faster charging was definitely a touted benefit of CCS in the recent past. I'm not sure if something changed.
To me, it doesn't really matter one way or another. The CCS connector is bulky, but so is a gas station nozzle and I've never had a problem using one of those. Plus you'll use the CCS connector less often since most charging is done at home with a connector comparable to the NACS one. I'd probably lean towards CCS because it's effectively the same as international standards, it's already the standard, and separating the AC and DC pins probably simplifies engineering on the car side but I don't actually care as long as we all use one connector with an open spec.
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There’s an actual set of specification documents available to download. That’s an improvement. Previously the only public info was their patent filings. It also sounds like they are offering specific parts (inlets and connector cables) for sale since they are providing datasheets on them.
Interesting thanks! I thought the specs were already published. Didn't they say they were going to do that a few years ago or am I misremembering something?
The connector patents were on that list but that wasn’t a real spec.
For context, North America's current "standard" is CCS1, which is not the same as Europe, which uses CCS2. So North America already has its own weird plug. The Tesla plug is definitely better from a usability perspective. Very curious to see if there is a major technical advantage for one or the other.
Ccs1 vs 2 comes down to the fact that the base plug (the ac part) has to be different between the two. Europe supports 3 phase because it's common there, while the NA plug doesn't, because 3 phase is unheard of in residential installations, and it has to support 120 level 1 charging.