Earlier this year, SAE International (formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers) announced a new acronym that sounds innocuous but may just change the world: J3400. That formalized the U.S. auto industry's shift toward Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS for short) charging connector and began the long process of creating more universal standards to help move toward a fully electrified future.
While it sounds like a lot of inside baseball, it merely means this: in a few years, pretty much every new EV sold in America will likely have Tesla's style of plug and be able to natively use its vast Supercharger network—something previously exclusive to Tesla drivers. The move represented a huge shift for the global automotive industry, while at the same time offering consumers more choice and availability for public EV charging.
That’s why our jurors selected the NACS standard, and the transition to it, as our inaugural Technology of the Year winner.
(Welcome to The Breakthrough Awards, InsideEVs' year-end awards program recognizing the EVs, people and technologies that are paving the way for our clean energy transition. Read about the awards and the other contenders below.)
Technology That Makes Public Charging Nearly Seamless
As Editor-in-Chief Patrick George noted during his recent Tesla Cybertruck experience, the Tesla charging experience is just better.
“Breaking out of my typical thinking around EV charging drove home just how ubiquitous Tesla's network is, and why the rest of the U.S. auto industry moving to use that network and Tesla-designed plug natively is such a game-changer,” he said.
That game changer means that more people will have easier access to a wider public charging network, and it's a very important step towards an electrified future. Because manufacturers now have a standard for charging, they can begin to offer a wider array of electric vehicles for consumers with a variety of needs and wants, at a variety of price points.
“I think the biggest thing is that NACS offers manufacturers the value of interoperability and more choice in how they develop their vehicles,” Frank Menchaca, President of Sustainable Mobility Solutions at SAE International said in an interview with InsideEVs, comparing the experience to plugging in a new appliance. “You don't expect to have to make a choice between which plugs you use, and I just think it's inevitable that as this industry matures, that this will be seen as a, you know, kind of a key aspect of making it simpler and making it more dependable.”
How NACS Came To Be
Tesla superchargers comprise nearly 75% of the U.S. quick charging infrastructure. Recent data from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation shows that the US currently has more than 200,000 public chargers offering a mix of charging ports. Prior to the NACS standardization, every other non-Tesla owner had to look for charging elsewhere because of the proprietary design of the plug.
Tesla originally designed the proprietary charging port so that only Teslas could use the Supercharger infrastructure. In 2021, that design seemed destined for obsolescence since the federal government chose to subsidize Combined Charging Systems or CCS connectors used by non-Tesla automakers. CEO Elon Musk then decided to make the design open-source and rename it the North American Charging Standard or NACS for short, and that opened the door for Tesla to strike a deal with the government to open its chargers to other automakers.
Tesla currently still holds a lot of the power when it comes to getting adapters into the hands of consumers, whether you drive a Chevy, Rivian or a Hyundai, and that’s been a significant bottleneck, especially after Musk randomly fired the entire Supercharger team in the spring. Despite that, uh, mercurial hiccup (I’m being kind here), Tesla managed to open 2,800 new Supercharger stalls globally in Q3, a 23% year-over-year growth. In Q2, following the firings, there was a 31% year-over-year decline in new chargers. Despite this, the Supercharger network is still adding stalls faster than any other U.S. network. But not everyone can access them.
Automakers have been subject to the delays and whims of Tesla in getting the NACS adapters into the hands of customers who are chomping at the bit to get onto the Supercharger network. That’s led to the rise of knock-off adapters which are extremely risky to use.
Menchaca says that SAE is just finalizing some details about the NACS standard and starting to work on standardizing plans for the adapters (specifically) so that automakers can manufacture them themselves rather than rely on Tesla. Menchaca said that those plans should be finalized within a year. GM claims to already have an additional (unnamed) adapter supplier, but adding more suppliers should speed things up. Plus, the adapter era may not last long. Soon, the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be the first non-Tesla vehicle on the market to get native NACS charging, a sign of a larger transition to come.
Why NACS Is A Game Changer
While the sheer number of Tesla charging stalls matters significantly, there’s one major reason that NACS also won out in the standards fight: It can support 277-volt charging.
That means that it can handle common industrial voltage that can be dropped down from power poles or up from bollards on the street without a need for additional infrastructure or power delivery. That’s a huge deal, as existing 240-volt chargers require expensive hardware to work with industrial power supplies.
As Menchaca pointed out, the adoption of NACS also helps people who live in multifamily units get access to charging without the need for additional power. The EV Buyers Guide channel on YouTube has a great explainer on why this alone is such a big deal.
Ultimately, NACS offers a quick path to full electrification and charging access if the American customer (and government) stays on the current path. That’s been put into question in the light of President-elect Trump’s threats to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, and eliminate the federal $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases, and we’ll have to wait and see what kind of chilling effect his mandates will have on the EV business and growth. But, as Menchaca points out, technology that does good in the world will have value outside of the profits it brings for big corporations.
“An innovation is only an innovation if it materially helps people solve a real problem,” Menchaca said. “So there may be flashier innovations, you know, flying cars or whatever, but, but the question I always ask of an innovation is, ‘what is it doing to actually help the lives of people, solve a problem, to do something they couldn't do before?’”
He continued, “Technology for technology's sake, is nice, and you always need some research and development, but technology that actually solves a problem gets my vote. This falls squarely in that, in that it helps to solve a very real problem of charging an electric vehicle and that has a domino effect. It allows consumers to be more comfortable with electric vehicles, which means that we start to move toward a lower emission vehicle with a lighter carbon footprint. It's all part of this sort of scaffolding of advantages.”
Abigail Bassett is an award-winning and experienced freelance journalist, writer, on-air talent and television producer with more than two decades of diverse experience. A winner of numerous awards, including two Emmys, her bylines have appeared in The Atlantic, Elle Magazine, National Geographic, Travel & Leisure, Fast Company, Inc., Fortune, The Verge, TechCrunch, CNN and more.
