As part of Volvo Cars’ aim to be a fully electric car maker by 2030, the company is the first European car maker to sign an agreement with Tesla, giving current and future electric Volvo car drivers access to Tesla’s vast Supercharger network across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
This is tragic. The infrastructure for CCS1 far exceeds NACS on a location count basis and having manufacturers switch to this plug type is anti-progress.
12,000 superchargers is counting stalls, not locations. Why are we counting fuel pumps instead of gas stations? That’s not how strong network coverage is defined.
There’s less than 2,000 NACS DC fast charging locations in the US & Canada but there’s over 6,500 CCS1 DC fast charging locations in that same area.
You can see the lack of infrastructure NACS offers on a state-by-state basis here: https://public.tableau.com/views/EVFastChargingPlugStandards/PublicDCFastCharingPlugs
The number of stations is important, because if there’s one station at one location and it’s already occupied… You’re boned until that person is done… And my car takes 2h to charge at a 50kW station.
I did a 5000km trip across the north shore of the St. Lawrence, and thankfully I only had to wait for a charger twice… But it was a pain in the ass to wait 30-45 minutes for the person before me to finish charging so that I could charge for an hour or two so I could make it to my next destination.
With an 8-stall supercharger station, there’s someone completing their charge every 8 to 10 minutes… With a 20-stall supercharger station, it’s usually less than 5.
I’m trying to say that location count is more important than stall count. Stall count is still important, but a wait is a minor inconvenience in compsrison to not being able to travel on the north shore of the St Lawrence too far north of Baie-Saint-Paul because all the northern charging stalls are concentrated in that one location
Having driven all the way to Havre Saint Pierre with many, many detours on route, it’s less of an issue than you’d think. There are 50kW chargers every 50km or less, and L2 chargers in every tiny town.
I get that this is about Tesla and Superchargers, but their network will continue to expand at an insane rate, because now every station they install will mean more revenues for Tesla – each and every day/week/month – now, and in the future.
I think with Ford and GM adopting NACS, CCS1 is dead in the US. It’s just a matter of time until CCS plugs will be replaced and older cars will need to use an adapter.
I’m just happy that there will be a single standard. I’d have preferred that it wasn’t the one that tesla can exert some control over, but it is a more user friendly connector.
It makes no sense to replace 75% of the infrastructure.
Replacement happens at the stall level, not location level. There are a lot more NACS stalls than CCS.