On May 25th of 2023, a historical day in personal transportation since the horse stopped being the primary means of “getting around” (other than walking), Ford announced they are unconditionally surrendering to Tesla and admit they are so far behind that it is quite impossible to catch up with the Musk juggernaut. The CEO of Ford announced that they are dumping the CCS charging method and came hat-in-hand to Musk for access to the Tesla charging system and will adopt the Tesla-invented NACS charging methodology. Floundering with failing EV Mustang sales and absurdly short ranges of their pickup trucks (about 85 miles towing), they don’t have the cash to build their own charging system, and feel no other company on the planet has the money, scale or reliability to challenge Tesla. Owning a car using the CCS system effectively means that you can’t drive very far from your home as the CCS ecosystem is utterly unreliable. There are countless stories of other electric cars getting to a mandatory charging point while travelling and finding the chargers are either broken, disconnected or actually missing. Great for auto clubs like AAA roadside towing … not so much for the non-Tesla owners. Outside of Tesla, the CCS commercial charging stations have over a 91% failure to provide charging. (I’ve seen estimates of over 95%) whereas the 20,000+ Tesla charging stations in the US have over a 99.9+% up-time. Rivian owners in particular are finding themselves on tow-trucks as their insanely electricity-thirsty SUVs find themselves “out-of-juice” with no functioning stations anywhere remotely near them. As a result, their use is limited to no more than about 100 miles away from their homes or risk being stranded. YouTube is filled with angry owners’ stories of not being able to actually use them as intended and being stranded on the side of the road or worse, off-road somewhere.

Update – June 9th – After the Ford surrender, GM, Hyundai, Stellantis, Rivian and the startup Aptera followed suit, admitted defeat, and came begging to Musk. Lucid Air will try to hang on to the old CCS system until people simply refuse to buy a $250,000 car that is only good for around 200 miles away from their home charger. This effectively means the end of CCS as every major car company quits the old, slow method. I can only assume that the CEO of Lucid, as an ex-employee of Tesla, didn’t want to admit another failure and that’s the reason they’re going to wait … but without question, Lucid will have no choice other than to also come begging to Musk. He couldn’t cut it as an engineer at Tesla and now his charging standard failure is eminent. However, VW will be the largest loser as it helped to cobble together the failed CCS charging system in the US after the “diesel-gate” scandal. Eventually, if they want to keep selling cars in the US, they will have no choice but to bow to his will. The Japanese companies aren’t stupid and realize that their success is linked to Tesla and its’ charging standard … so it’s just a matter of time … however, owners using the borderline defunct CHAdeMO system are really in a tough spot … you’re not going to be able to use the car for anything but around town driving since there is literally almost zero of their charging systems on highways or anywhere else. Oh wait! … more correctly, for CHAdeMO users, nothing changes. These poor folks can eventually purchase an adapter ($500 t0 $2,000) to use a Supercharger, but the speeds will probably be pretty lousy as the CHAdeMO standard is pitifully slow.

An interesting note: less than half of all Superchargers will available to non-Teslas, and that appears to be (at the moment) how it’ll remain in future. Additionally, they will pay more and have a monthly subscription fee for the privilege/safety of Tesla reliability. (unknown if they will have a 2nd additional subscription fee from their manufacturer) However, Tesla owners have full access, a seamless Tesla app for payment and pay less …

And as every non-Tesla EV owner becomes more indebted to Tesla at each charging stop, they’ll see less and less reason to keep driving a brand that is not an innovator or leader. Why drive an EV that just isn’t as safe, reliable, functional or has access to ALL of the Tesla Superchargers in a rapidly arriving EV world? You simply don’t meet any other owners that are as fanatical as Tesla owners … ever met anyone that raves about their Chevy Volt, Chinese-made Volvo or Nissan Leaf? Wonder why?

As I share with non-Telsa owners, remember my electric car parable: if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes …