In case you haven’t seen the news, another domino fell today: Rivian announced they are adopting Tesla’s NACS.
So, now not just legacy automakers, but a startup has also joined in. But, only North American based companies so far.
Hyundai reportedly is concerned about supporting 800 volt charging, but given how few 800 volt chargers there are in the world that seems not a real concern. VW is in a pickle given their ties to Electrify America, which is court-mandated to use CCS (which also affects Porsche and Audi).
Haven’t heard a peep from BMW or Mercedes yet, but I feel it’s inevitable that they’ll join in. Maybe not for months, or even years, but by the end of 2025 they’ll be forced to change or pull out of the North American EV market, which seems unlikely. Note that Mercedes announced at CES back in Jan that they’re going to do their own charging network, but Tesla has quite the headstart and better hardware economics than anyone else in charging stations.
I suspect the European-run OEMs are at a disadvantage here since CCS is EU mandated there and even Teslas there use it. So, the European CEOs might not really understand just how bad CCS is implemented here in the US. Things might have been different if some government lawyer had put in the VW Dieselgate settlement that Electrify America need not only install CCS chargers, but be required to maintain a SLA uptime metric for them. But, that’s electrons under the bridge now.