Here’s my understanding from outside the bubble of EV ownership.
There are two useful ways to charge an EV. You can use a 220v alternating current outlet very much like one you might have at home for an electric dryer or water heater. Or you can use high voltage DC current (something like 200 volts up to 600 volts or more). In terms you might have seen or heard before, the AC is a “Level 2” charger and DC is “Level 3.” (Yes, there is a level 1 - which is pretty much useless so I will ignore it.)
AC gets the job done, but can take a few hours. Perfect for charging at home overnight, or at work or a hotel or any place where you will be for several hours. DC can be a whole lot faster, charging a car up to near full in less than an hour for the higher voltages to perhaps 2 hours at the lower DC voltages.
Then there are the plugs - the plug a car has that you need to use to connect a charger. (Kind of like the different USB plugs we’ve had in cell phones over the years.) There are several competing standards out there around the world. In the US we currently have two survivors - the Tesla standard (NACS) and the other one, CCS. (There is also CHAdeMO, which has lost the standards war, but still needs to be supported because there are cars out there still using it.)
One thing to keep in mind with these plugs is that they are not just for the power delivery. There are additional connections that allow the car to communicate with the charger while the charge is in progress. These allow for some charge optimization (faster or slower as needed) and for billing (particularly in Teslas, where the car identifies itself to the charger so you never need to pull out a credit card). Probably some other stuff, too.
With plugs, there are also adapters. (Remember getting an adapter to use your old 30 pin iPhone devices on a “new” phone with the lightning port?) Adapters are available to convert between your car and the charger if there is a mis match. Adapters usually entail a loss of efficiency in some way - slower charging because of loss of the communication that is needed for the fastest charging rates to be done safely, or the need to actually pull out a credit card to pay for the charge, for two examples.
One data point is that Tesla chargers could not be used to charge a non-Tesla car. The charger simply refuses to work. The news lately tells us that Tesla has reached an agreement with a couple of car makers that will allow those cars to use Tesla chargers. I haven’t seen the details, but I suspect that involves those car makers installing a Tesla charge port in their cars. Which is why we won’t see anything for a couple of years yet. New model cars will need to be tweaked to communicate with Tesla chargers. I don’t think adapters will be allowed, just cars that natively support the Tesla charge standard - NACS.
So Tesla has their (proprietary for now) charging network that only Teslas can use. And there are other charging networks, like EVgo and ChargePoint and Electrify America that all the other cars use. The latest news has a bunch of car makers getting together to create another charging network. This will be the first to support both CCS (the non-Tesla plug) and NACS (the Tesla plug).
After reading over this before posting, maybe I’ve gone into the wrong details here. But I’ll leave them anyway.
The short version is that there are places to go where you can plug in your EV, and there are different plugs that different EVs need. When talking about the places, those are the charging networks. When talking about the plugs, that’s the charging standards.
–Peter
