North American Charging Standard

The North American Charging Standard (NACS), currently being standardized as SAE J3400 and also known as the Tesla charging standard, is an electric vehicle (EV) charging connector system developed by Tesla, Inc. It has been used on all North American market Tesla vehicles since 2012 and was opened for use to other manufacturers in 2022. BMW Group, Fisker, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai Motor Group, Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian, Toyota, and Volvo Cars have announced that starting from 2025, their electric vehicles in North America will be equipped with the NACS charge port. Background After initial testing allowing non-Tesla EVs to use Tesla Supercharger stations in Europe in December 2019, Tesla began to test a proprietary dual-connector "Magic Dock" connector at select North American Supercharger locations in March 2023. Magic Dock allows for an EV to charge with either an NACS or Combined Charging Standard (CCS) version 1 connector, which would provide the technical capability for almost all battery electric vehicles the chance to charge. While most of Tesla's North American Supercharger locations currently provide exclusively NACS connectors—only 10 locations supported the CCS+NACS Magic Dock as of June 2023—it is expected that Tesla will outfit many North American Supercharger stations with both connector standards after 2023 as a temporary solution, in part to gain access to several billion dollars of infrastructure build-out subsidies available from the US Federal government for charging stations that include the CCS1 connectors during the mid-2020s. History Tesla developed a proprietary charging connector for the Tesla Model S in 2012, and used it on all of their subsequent EVs: the Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. The Tesla Semi, however, uses a different and higher-power connector to quickly charge its larger battery. As part of its business strategy, Tesla also built the Supercharger network across the United States and later built substantial charging networks in a number of other countries where Tesla sold their cars. In November 2022, Tesla renamed its previously proprietary charging connector, sometimes informally called the Tesla charging standard, to "North American Charging Standard" (NACS) and opened the standard to make the specifications available to other EV manufacturers.