You Might Need a Dongle to Charge Your Electric Car

As automakers commit to Tesla’s charging port, consumers with incompatible vehicles will need expensive adapters.

By Noah Kolenda

12/29/2024

A Tesla Model Y uses a J-1772 to NACS adapter to charge at a PlugNYC curbside charger. (Noah Kolenda)

Just like in 2012 when Apple ditched the 30 pin connector in favor of Lightning, or in 2023 when it did it again for USB-C, the auto industry is having its growing pain moment when it comes to the port that charges the electric vehicle in North America.

As 2025 looms nearer and nearer, we’re approaching the timeframe that automakers gave for switching the charging port on electric vehicle offerings away from the current, bulky “Combined Charging Standard” port, known as CCS, for Tesla’s “North American Charging Standard” port, known as NACS to finally unify to one standard–but there’s a small problem, there’s already thousands of cars on the road with the old charging port.

In a survey of former Tesla Model 3 owners conducted last summer, Bloomberg found that EV drivers around the country have been ditching their Tesla’s left and right. They’re thrilled their preferred automaker finally makes an EV, they’re looking for a style of vehicle Tesla doesn’t offer, or most-reportedly because they’re becoming more worried about CEO Elon Musk’s “increasingly erratic behavior.” But that means they’ve been losing their NACS port for a CCS port on any other comparable vehicle.

That’s a big loss as the patchwork of CCS fast chargers just isn’t as stable as the Supercharger network. Further, most DC fast charging installations usually only host two to four stalls, whereas most Supercharger installations host eight or more charging stations.

Dumping a vehicle brandishing a T on hood lost drivers a massive Tesla advantage: access to its high-powered Supercharger network–until recently. Earlier this year, Tesla opened its Superchargers, a network of nearly 26,500 fast chargers scattered throughout the US that allow drivers to reach anywhere in the continental US, to non-Tesla vehicles through various means. It achieved this either by Tesla-installed “Magic Docks,” a Supercharger retrofit that leaves a CCS dongle attached to the charger when it’s unplugged from the station, or via a driver-provided CCS to NACS adapter. This is all eventually leading to other brands adopting the NACS port natively in their vehicle, more than a dozen of which have committed to over the coming year.

Worry about the transition in consumers and industry analysts brewed this April when Musk fired Tesla’s entire Supercharger division and left the tech in the hands of its energy team. This left people to question the company’s ability to continue its expansion and upgrade of the network. Further, a recent post on X (formerly known as Twitter) from the TeslaCharging revealed adapters will be the company’s main focus, no longer installing new Magic Docks as the port transition proceeds.

That transition has been just about as bumpy as you could expect. Besides simply expanding and opening their network to others, Tesla is also in charge of producing the official CCS to NACS adapters, but has been slow to act in getting their competitors’ customers the hardware they need. Experts from J. D. Power have cited the firing of the Supercharger team as cause for the further delays in the transition.

“A lot of those people were working with these other auto manufacturers on these transitions,” Brent Gruber, executive director of EV practices at J. D. Power, told the Financial Post alongside a glaring report from the firm that satisfaction scores of the network had dipped.

Tesla has opened its network to five rival automakers so far–Ford, General Motors, Polestar, Rivian and Volvo–through scarcely available and costly adapters, or via about 100 stations with Magic Docks scattered throughout the nation before it quit installing them. For drivers whose automaker isn’t providing adapters for free, this will likely be a multi-hundred dollar expense.

Even when everything goes according to plan and a non-Tesla driver has an adapter or is at a Magic Dock station, the growing pains are still felt greatly as they run into another problem: where their charging port is located. Since Tesla has been designing every model of its vehicles for more than a decade with its charging port on the rear drivers side of the vehicle, it’s allowed it to keep its cables short. That benefit is quickly turning into a curse as other models join the stations, having to park creatively to even use the chargers this was all for. This is something Tesla says will be rectified with its version four chargers, which will host longer cables, but Tesla hasn’t exactly been known for its speed in upgrading its infrastructure.

Tesla began launching updated these chargers in October of 2023, boasting about the longer cables and credit card readers for cars incompatible with “plug and charge,” a part of the handshake that automatically takes a drivers payment method. Unfortunately, these new chargers are only hosting the external changes, their new, more powerful internals are not coming until next year. This has resulted in sluggish installations, only accounting for just shy of 150 of the 2,500 Supercharging stations that have been installed since the announcement.

While the first non-Tesla EV to bear the Tesla-developed port was set to launch this quarter, the refreshed 2025 Hyundai Ioniq5, it’s unclear if any have been delivered to customers yet. That means just about every modern non-Tesla electric vehicle is going to be waiting around on Tesla and hoping that their adapter will one day soon show up. Even though third party adapters are available, you probably shouldn’t use them because they likely lack critical safety features, and automakers specifically won’t warranty your vehicle if you’re caught charging with one. While this move one day will be a positive one, if you’re currently driving a CCS car, you should probably get comfortable at that Electrify America station while you wait on your adapter and the updated Superchargers.