EV fast-charging networks face a challenging 2024

Sometime in 2024, presumably as early as February, half a dozen electrical car charging companies will face a reckoning.

For years, they’d little rivals except for each other, which is to say, not so much. Shortly, though, they’ll must take care of Tesla’s much-lauded Supercharger group.

The EV world, from a charging perspective, was beforehand reduce up in two. There was Tesla after which there was all people else. Tesla owners cherished widespread, speedy and reliable charging. Everyone else made do by cobbling collectively accounts from a wide range of fully completely different companies, none of which could boast reliability rankings wherever near that of Tesla’s.

Then, in Would possibly, the wall fell. Ford signed an agreement with Tesla to offer its EVs entry to 12,000 Superchargers, a subset of the group. Starting in 2024, present owners may have the power to price at these stalls by means of the usage of an adapter, and in 2025, Ford talked about its future EVs will swap the Blended Charging System (CCS) plug for Tesla’s plug, additionally known as the North American Charging Commonplace (NACS).

Completely different automakers rapidly adopted swimsuit. GM was subsequent, then Rivian, Volvo, Mercedes, Nissan, and nearly all people else. Certainly one of many ultimate to undertake the plug was Volkswagen, which isn’t a shock given its majority possession of Electrify America, which was presupposed to be the CCS equal of the Supercharger group.

EV owners like myself had —and nonetheless have — extreme hopes for Electrify America. The company was primarily based out of the Volkswagen diesel settlement, and it was the first non-Tesla group to prioritize nationwide DC fast charging at speeds that may assist modern EVs. When Electrify America’s biggest chargers work, they’re actually fast, faster even than practically all of Tesla’s Superchargers.