Sometime in 2024Perhaps as early as February, six electric vehicle charging companies will face liquidation.
Over the years, they have had little competition apart from each other, which is to say, not much competition. Soon, though, they’ll have to compete with Tesla’s acclaimed Supercharger network.
From a charging perspective, the EV world was previously split in two. There’s Tesla, and then there’s everyone else. Tesla owners enjoy widespread, fast and reliable charging services. Others have made do by piecing together accounts from several different companies, but none have a reliability rating comparable to Tesla’s.
Then, in May, the wall came down. Ford signed an agreement with Tesla to allow its electric vehicles to use 12,000 Supercharger stations (a subset of the network). Starting in 2024, existing owners will be able to charge at these stalls using an adapter, and Ford says that by 2025, its future electric vehicles will replace the Combined Charging System (CCS) plug with Tesla’s plug, also known as Charging standards for North America (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
Other automakers soon followed. General Motors follows, then Rivian, Volvo, Mercedes, Nissan and pretty much everyone else. Volkswagen was one of the last companies to adopt the plug, which isn’t surprising considering the company owns a majority stake in Electrify America, which was supposed to be the CCS equivalent of the Supercharger network.
Electric vehicle owners like me had and still have high hopes for an “Electrified America.” The company, which was formed out of the Volkswagen Diesel settlement, is the first non-Tesla network to prioritize nationwide DC fast charging at speeds that can support modern electric vehicles. When Electrify America’s best chargers work, they’re really fast, even faster than most of Tesla’s superchargers.