TESLA logo on a charging station at on May 26, 2023 in Merklingen, Germany. Harry Langer/ | Defodi Images | Getty ImagesIn a matter of weeks, Ford Motor, General Motors and Tesla appear to have shifted the tide on the electric vehicle-charging infrastructure in North America.Tesla owners have long enjoyed reliable charging away from home at the company’s Supercharging stations, the largest charging network in North America by far. But the charging industry at large has been fragmented, and non-Tesla owners haven’t had it as easy.related investing newsAll of that will soon change.Last month, Ford announced it had made a deal with Tesla that will allow Ford EVs to use Tesla’s charging stations with an adapter — and that starting in 2025, it will make Tesla’s charging tech standard on its own EVs. It was a surprising partnership between rivals, and on Thursday, General Motors said it struck a nearly identical deal with Tesla.So why would Ford and GM join forces with Tesla, a company long seen by investors as a threat to the established automakers?And what does it mean for EVs?Unified chargingTesla’s Superchargers use a proprietary plug design, called the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, that doesn’t work with non-Tesla EVs. Most other EVs and charging stations in the U.S. use the public domain Combined Charging System (CCS) plug standard.Currently, Tesla EVs can use CCS chargers with an adapter, but only Teslas can use NACS chargers.That means while Tesla owners have access to the company’s plentiful and reliable fast-charging stations, drivers of non-Tesla EVs that use CCS have faced a mishmash of networks and often-unreliable equipment.The shortcomings of CCS have been a growing concern for Detroit automakers as they ramp up EV production in hopes of selling their electrified models to the masses.In a study last year, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley checked 675 CCS fast chargers in the San Francisco Bay Area and found that almost a quarter of them weren’t functiona …
