Press release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230706787814/en/
Looks to be the same as Ford, GM, Rivian, Polestar (Volvo): Adapters for existing Mercedes EVs next year, with native support in 2025 MY vehicles. Mercedes routing will include the Tesla network in its on-board navigation and support vehicle integration into the Tesla billing system
Note that Mercedes has confirmed its prior Jan 2023 plan of building its own charging network: 400 locations with 2500 stalls in the US. My read is that they think they can provide a better charging experience:
350 kW of charging power. Intelligent charge-load management will allow each vehicle to charge at its maximum capacity keeping waiting times to an absolute minimum. The optimized station layout will ensure plenty of space around the vehicle as well as unhindered charging from either side. Where feasible, charging points will be covered for protection from the weather.
The locations and surroundings of the Mercedes-Benz charging hubs will be carefully selected with wider customer needs in mind. Our best possible charging experience will therefore come with food outlets and restrooms situated nearby. Facilities will also be equipped with surveillance cameras and other measures to provide a safe and secure charging environment.
The extra room around charging stalls will help not only with different port locations, but with vehicles that are towing or have hitch mounted bike racks.
And a special perk for Mercedes owners:
Mercedes-Benz customers can pre-book a charging station from their car
Tesla owners, for instance, could charge there, but can’t “pre-book.” That does seem a bit of a logistical challenge to me, but maybe Mercedes can pull it off without having chargers sitting idle with people waiting to charge but can’t because the Mercedes that reserved it is still a few/several miles away.
Astute readers will have noticed that these Tesla NACS adoption press releases talk about “12,000” charging stations, but that Tesla actually has over 19,000 charging stations in North America. The difference is that only the V3 and above stations support the CCS protocol. Tesla’s older V1 and V2 chargers don’t, so only Tesla vehicles work there. These are slower chargers, but the V2’s are fast enough that it’d be rare that you’d notice a difference of more than a minute or two of total charging (battery has to be very low to use that additional charging speed).
Anyway, the real news remains that Tesla’s charging plug/port continues to gain widespread industry adoption. It’s interesting that the Silicon Valley startup legacy automotive literally laughed at in 2015 (I was at CES 2015-2017) is now the company legacy companies come to for charging support.