Last month there was a big surprise announcement from Ford CEO Jim Farley and Tesla’s Elon Musk. On Twitter Spaces, the pair announced that starting next year Ford vehicles would be able to use about 12,000 Tesla charging stations around the country. That was good news for Ford as the non-Tesla segment of the charging industry hasn’t been getting great reviews. It was also big news for Tesla since it was a step toward making their chargers the defacto standard. Because in addition to opening up the charging stations, Ford announced that starting in 2025 all of its electric cars would include the Tesla style charging plug so they wouldn’t need any adapters to use the Tesla stations.
There are currently two different charging standards in the US and the Ford partnership meant there was now momentum toward making the Tesla-style chargers (known as NACS) the defacto standard. As I said at the time, “Other companies that want to avoid being left behind may now feel pressure to also adopt the Tesla standard and make a deal with Musk.” Well, it didn’t take long.
Thursday, General Motors held a similar announcement on Twitter Spaces.
General Motors will follow crosstown rival Ford Motor in partnering with Tesla to use the electric vehicle leader’s North American charging network and technologies.
Under the deal, GM vehicles will be able to access 12,000 of Tesla’s fast chargers using an adapter and the Detroit automaker’s EV charging app, starting next year.
GM, like Ford, will also begin installing a charging port used by Tesla known as NACS, or the North American Charging Standard, instead of the current industry-standard CCS, in its EVs starting in 2025.
I listened to a bit of the announcement and the tone of it was very different from the Ford announcement last month. I described that one as a love fest. Ford’s Jim Farley seemed to be winging it and having a good time chatting with Musk about the auto industry. By contrast GM CEO Mary Barra’s statement was shorter and sounded very scripted to start off.
One reason why this relationship is probably a bit more strained than the one with Ford: Politics. Both Ford and GM are union companies which means both have been embraced by the current White House while Tesla, which is not a union shop, has been conspicuously shunned. The most egregious instance of this came when President Biden made a big show of thanking Mary Barra for electrifying “the entire automobile industry.”
There’s a fairly long list of Biden embarrassments at this point but this has to be up there near the top. GM is nowhere near being the leader in this segment. It sold a total of 39,000 EVs in all of 2022, the year after Biden made this dumb statement. Last year, Tesla sold more than 1.3 million cars (it will be close to 2 million this year). But again, Tesla hasn’t bent the knee to the UAW so they are persona non grata at the Biden White House.
But reality has a way of making itself known despite what politicians claim. The fact that both Ford and GM have partnered with Tesla and embraced their standard shows who the real leader is and also which standard is actually better. This is a seismic shift in the landscape and you can bet it didn’t happen because the legacy automakers were feeling generous. They have belatedly realized they are way behind and need help.
Update: If you don’t know who Sandy Munro is, he’s an old school automotive engineer who is considered an expert in manufacturing. He used to work for a GM supplier and then for Ford but now he has a consultancy business. One of the things he’s known for is buying and tearing apart cars and then offering a very detailed engineering and design critique of how they were built. Munro was initially a critic of some of Tesla’s body work but later became a fan as he saw them make big improvements. Anyway, here he is on the GM announcement.
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