CCS1 Versus Tesla – VHS vs. Betamax for EVs?
By Edward A. Sanchez – Aug. 4, 2021
Those of us old enough to actually remember the Reagan presidency and recall seeing the Berlin Wall come down in real-time as opposed to on historical documentaries, will also remember a time when Blockbuster Video stores were as common as Starbucks today, and where one video format dominated for the better part of two decades: the VHS tape. Although arguably a completely apples-to-oranges analog, we’re seeing a similar format war play out today with EV plug standards between CCS1 and Tesla in the U.S.
VHS’s domination of consumer video tapes was never really questioned by consumers. Once it established itself as the de facto standard, it was just accepted that if you wanted to play a video, it would be VHS. In the earlier days of video tape, it was a different scenario. For a while, there were two competing standards: VHS and Sony’s Betamax.
Betamax didn’t necessarily lose the war – in fact, it was still widely used by television studios until a few years ago. Its time limitation of 60 minutes was not an issue for TV stations, where news segments and even entire broadcasts were rarely longer than an hour. But for home movies, this was an issue, where the typical theater release was around two hours, give or take.
The company credited with creating VHS, Japan’s JVC, reportedly even approached Sony about adoption of the standard, and making a playback machine for it. But at the time, Sony was so invested in Betamax that it saw adoption of VHS as an admission of failure and capitulation to what it saw as an inferior format.
Fast-forward to today, where adoption of electric vehicles is happening faster than many anticipated, and conversations and hypothetical debates that once only played out at wonky academic and policy conferences are now turning into real conversations about implementation.
The modern EV plug standards came into being for all intents and purposes in the early 2000s. Japanese Tier 1 supplier Yazaki submitted a proposal for what would later be known as the SAE J1772 standard to the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the policy entity long at the cutting edge of EV public policy in the United States.
CARB settled on J1772 as being the preferred alternating-current (AC) charging standard, and mandated that all plug-in vehicles from model year 2006 and later adopt the standard. The SAE Motor Vehicle Council officially adopted the J1772 standard in 2009, with committee members including Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Rivian (yes, they were around then) and, ironically enough, Tesla.
Rivian might only just now be cresting the EV hill with the release of its R1T coming soon, but the company existed enough in 2009 to be part of the SAE council that decided upon the J1772 standard. (Image courtesy Rivian)
As EVs moved from short-range urban commuter vehicles to larger, longer-range models, the need for a fast-charging standard emerged. The idea for a “combined charging system” was proposed at a German engineer’s conference in 2011. The first public implementation of CCS was installed in Germany in 2013 and was quickly adopted as the de facto DC charging standard in Europe. An adaptation for markets with predominantly 120V AC systems (North America and Japan) was implemented as the “CCS1” standard.
However, Nissan, in association with the Tokyo area electric utility company TEPCO, had created its own DC charging standard, CHAdeMO, which roughly translated, means “Let’s have some tea” in Japanese. CHAdeMO is unique in that from its inception, it included a provision for two-way charging, something that was suggested as part of CCS but was only mentioned as an “extension” of the standard.
Nissan’s initial decision to utilize CHAdeMO on vehicles like the Leaf was not without reason. Now, however, the company is beginning to transition its U.S. fleet to CCS1. (Image courtesy Nissan)
Nissan, one of the biggest proponents and adopters of CHAdeMO, recently quietly capitulated to the predominance of CCS in markets outside of Japan by announcing its upcoming Ariya electric crossover would be adopting the CCS standard in Europe and North America.
The lone holdout in the standards wars (at least in North America) is Tesla. It has stubbornly stuck to its proprietary (and arguably superior) plug and port standard. Some have criticized Tesla for adopting a proprietary standard and effectively excluding everyone else. Tesla and its boss Elon Musk have countered by saying while the rest of the world was bumbling and debating about standards adoption, the company didn’t want to be held up by bureaucracy and committee politics, and therefore adopted its own standard.
CCS has already decisively “won” in Europe, with all new long-range EVs – Teslas included – having a CCS2 charge port. Despite its arguably inferior design to the slim, integrated Tesla plug, it’s looking like CCS1 is on the cusp of “winning” in North America.
Language in the infrastructure bill currently in U.S. Congress explicitly states that any companies or municipalities that want to be able to access funds as part of the infrastructure package must make their network compatible with “more than one brand of vehicle,” a thinly-veiled reference to Tesla. Tesla has effectively acknowledged this with a promise to open its Supercharger network to all EV brands in the coming years. How specifically it’s going to be implemented remains to be seen. I’ve already covered a few potential scenarios in a previous post.
So there’s a good likelihood that an elegant, integrated, easy-to-handle format will be superseded by a bigger, clunkier, uglier standard. There is a good likelihood that future Tesla models will have a native CCS1 port behind their charging doors. Am I necessarily happy about this turn of events? No. Objectively, the Tesla standard should have won, in my opinion. But if universal adoption of CCS1 in North America means faster adoption of EVs by consumers and the general public, then that’s a goal I can get behind.
()Main image courtesy Tesla)
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