Tesla Superchargers may not rule the world after all (but they easily could)

Last week's news about 福特 adopting Tesla charging plug led to many cries about the near term death of CCS...but not so fast!

As Adam Wilkum pointed out in this post, 800-volt vehicles can't charge as fast at Tesla Superchargers as they can at other DCFC stations that are 800V capable (assuming all else equal with charging speeds). From the original article titled "The Crazy Reason Why 800-Volt EVs Would Not Be Able to Fast Charge at Tesla Superchargers":

“To enable other electric vehicles to use the Supercharger network in the U.S., Tesla needed to provide an adapter from its NACS to the CCS plug that almost all other EVs use. That’s how we ended up with the Magic Dock, an intelligent dispenser that deploys the NACS-CCS adapter as required for non-Tesla EVs. However, other problems exist when a non-Tesla tries to charge at a Supercharger. Some are related to the charge port position and the short charging cord, which pose challenges for non-Tesla EV owners.

But other issues came into focus after Tesla started the pilot in the U.S. Soon, it became obvious that owners of EVs equipped with an 800-volt architecture were out of luck. These include Lucid Air, Hyundai Ioniq 6/Kia EV6 and other E-GMP-based EVs, and Porsche Taycan/Audi e-tron GT, among others. Lucid Air EVs are the most impacted, with owners complaining that they could only reach 50 kW at a Supercharger, which is unacceptable for a modern EV.”

Kyle Conner covered this in his technical and excellent Youtube post "Slow Charging For ~800-Volt EVs At Tesla Superchargers With Magic Dock Explained". In this post, he highlights two issues:

1) Slower charging for high voltage (ie 800V) cars using Superchargers for V2/V3 Superchargers.

2) Current output limitations of using Superchargers with CCS (here's a primer I wrote on this topic). Tesla CCS adapter (Magic Dock) and Supercharger post is nameplate rated at 350A (which Tesla goes over in controlled conditions)

And he says that he doesn't know of any non-Tesla EV's charging above 150 kW at Superchargers...which is great for 2023...but in the future there will be many sites capable of delivering much high power to 800V vehicles.

So, maybe Superchargers aren't currently the bees knees for ALL EVs after all..but - and here's why I said "they easily could" in the title - if any company has shown it's capable of quickly making engineering changes and product iterations to improve performance, it's Tesla . Of course there may be infrastructure constraints with sites (ie the utility doesn't have any more power available for the specific Supercharger location) but if not constrained, Tesla could easily upgrade sites with new versions of Superchargers that can charge 800V vehicles faster.

Another challenge Supercharger sites will face is congestion (while acknowledging that Tesla is amazing at deployment and they are continually to rapidly deploy). But that's outside the scope of this post.

Of course, all this doesn't matter that much if existing large charging networks like Electrify America and EVgo can't improve the common perception among many EV drivers that they aren't reliable as EV drivers will sacrifice speed for charging certainty.

But it does leave the door open for other Charge Point Operator competitors to create fast, reliable charging experiences that could actually be superior to Superchargers (at least for 800V EVs).