(by Heisenberg Media)
It wasn’t that long ago that established automotive industry insiders were laughing at electric automaker Tesla. Fewer and fewer of them still find the joke so funny.
On June 20, Rivian, seen as a big potential Tesla competitor, announced that it too would adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS). The news came just a few weeks after auto industry giants GM and Ford also announced they would switch to NACS charging so that their electric vehicles could access Tesla’s increasingly vast charging network.
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Rivian is a relatively small player in the EV field, selling approximately 8,000 of its electric trucks and SUVs in the first quarter of 2023, according to statistics compiled by Cox Automotive. In comparison, Ford and GM sold about 11,000 and 20,000 EVs, respectively, over the same period.
Meanwhile, Tesla sold 161,000 EVs in the United States during the first quarter of 2023, giving it more EV sales than all other auto manufacturers combined.
Despite its relatively small stature in terms of total vehicles sold, given that Rivian focuses only on EVs, and that it is backed by Amazon and thereby represents another proxy for the Elon Musk-Jeff Bezos rivalry, its move to embrace Tesla’s charging technology was seen as significant. By the spring of 2024, Rivian owners will be able to access Tesla’s roughly 12,000 fast-charging stations in the U.S. and Canada with the use of an adapter. Starting in 2025, Rivian indicated it will begin building several of its models with NACS-style charging ports as standard.
Up until about seven months ago, Tesla’s charging port design was proprietary and its Supercharger network could only be used by Tesla owners (Tesla vehicles could charge on Combined Charging System chargers, the leading alternative to NACS, using an adapter). However, in late 2022, Tesla published the specifications for its EV connector design to its website.
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Earlier this month, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at a conference that “opening up the chargers is morally right” and further claimed that allowing other automakers access to Tesla’s charging technology will “help power sustainability.”
There also seems to be quite a bit of money in it, both for Musk and for far smaller Tesla investors, like me. Following news of the Rivian deal, Tesla’s share price climbed by 5.3% to end the trading day at $274.45 — a new high for 2023.
It remains to be seen how well Tesla will be able to monetize its vehicle-charging network once competitors’ vehicles start using Tesla’s chargers in earnest. Still, with GM, Ford, and now Rivian, adopting Tesla’s technology, and with its huge head start against rivals in rolling out a large-scale domestic charging network, it’s now Tesla’s market to lose.
Tesla stock is still quite a bit below its all-time high share price of $414, a level achieved briefly in November 2021. Even so, Tesla stock has been on a tear ever since Musk announced his imminent departure as Twitter’s CEO a few weeks ago. I can’t help but wonder if Musk’s comparative muteness over his disastrous acquisition of Twitter lately is causally linked to Tesla’s recent successes. The Twitter deal, and a series of Musk’s public stumbles related to it, were widely blamed for a troublesome hit to Tesla’s reputation.
For now, though, I suppose Tesla, and Musk, deserve some credit for a series of favorable deals related to the wide adoption of NACS technology. It’s not every day that pretty much an entire industry adopts one company’s way of doing things, and now we all won’t have to deal with in our cars that ongoing annoyance in the smartphone marketplace that half of us can’t charge our phones on the other half’s charging cables.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].