In early 2023, Ford shocked the automotive industry by announcing a deal with Tesla to adopt the North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug in its future electric vehicles (EV) and give Ford owners access to Tesla’s Supercharger network. Other automakers soon followed Ford’s lead, aligning themselves with what appeared to be the emerging standard for EV charging.
However, the Supercharger network was originally built for Tesla vehicles, not for cars and trucks from other automakers. As a result, the automotive industry had a blind spot around what the customer experience of using Superchargers with non-Tesla vehicles would look like.
Recognizing this, one North American charging equipment manufacturer turned to Escalent to understand this new challenge and uncover opportunities for it to fill the gap.
Escalent’s EVForward® team, in conjunction with our advanced car clinic testing experts, was already working on a new syndicated study to address this. We organized a clinic where EV owners and Intenders—new-car buyers who are more than 15 times likely to adopt an EV as their next vehicle than the average shopper, according to our EVForward insights program—charged one Tesla vehicle and three non-Tesla vehicles at both a Tesla Supercharger and a nearby CCS DC fast charger. We provided adapters to enable participants to charge non-Tesla vehicles at the Supercharger and the Tesla to charge at the CCS site.
Afterward, we debriefed participants to capture their experiences with the different vehicles and chargers. We then compiled their feedback into a detailed report and summary videos, which we shared with EVForward subscribers.
We identified several issues that EV industry players needed to address with their customers to make the Supercharger experience easy and pain-free. These included:
The charging equipment manufacturer quickly acted on these findings, designing and launching an extension cable that makes Superchargers easier for non-Tesla drivers to use, which was well received by its customers and the market.
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