Every six months, the automotive research company JD Power surveys some 5,000 US electric vehicle owners about their experiences driving their battery-powered cars. The latest edition of this survey, out this week, found that EV’s perennial bugbear is still bugbear-ing. In fact, it’s got worse: Drivers say they are even more dissatisfied with the availability of public charging stations than they were a year ago.
In North America, additional charging stations are on their way, thanks in part to a US federally funded program that seeks to get at least half a million more in the ground by 2030. But in this messy middle period, automakers have come up with another solution: Let Tesla take care of it.
Tesla has the most widespread and dependable charging network in the United States. (In fact, the new survey found that upscale EV drivers are more likely to be happy with public charging—and the majority of them drive Teslas.) It also has a unique charging plug, called the North American Charging Standard. Nearly every global automaker has now pledged to add that plug to its electric vehicles, allowing its drivers to tap into the Tesla charging network.
Ford piloted the “let Tesla take care of it” model last May when it announced it would adopt that plug. Its EVs will come with the connector standard by 2025. And starting today, existing drivers of the Mach-E Mustang and Lightning pick-up truck owners will get access to a hearty chunk of Tesla’s supercharger network, courtesy of free adapters that they can now order off a website Ford just launched. The adapters will be gratis between now and July; after that, they’ll retail for $230, Ford says. The company expects the adapters to begin shipping in late March.
Ford regularly surveys its own drivers and “their main pain points have to do with public charging,” Ken Williams, the automaker’s director of charging and energy services, said on a call with reporters this week. The adapter will give Ford drivers access to 15,000 new chargers, bringing the total up to 126,000 chargers and more than 28,000 fast chargers across the US and Canada. (That doesn’t include every charger in the Tesla network; Ford drivers won’t get access to older Tesla charging stations, and Tesla has reserved a select few newer ones for its drivers only.) Drivers will be able to access and pay to charge at the stations through Ford’s app.
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