Nissan is officially the first Japanese automaker to plan on adopting Tesla‘s charger plug for EVs. In 2025 the Nissan Ariya, and any other EVs the company has by then, will use the North American Charging Standard (NACS) and be able to access Tesla Superchargers. As a holdover, 2024 Ariyas will get an adapter.
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Nissan joins a quickly growing list of big car companies pivoting to NACS for EV charging, including Ford, GM, and Mercedes-Benz. Click here to see the full list of brands running this type of charger—eight at the time of this writing including Tesla.
The 2024 Nissan Ariya currently uses the Combined Charging System 1 (CCS1) for DC fast charging. Offering an adapter for these cars to minimize the pain early adopters will feel was a great move. Sure, it’s a little more annoying to use an adapter than to have native compatibility, but it’d be far more inconvenient to have the only model-year Ariya that was excluded from Tesla’s vast charging network.
I haven’t seen any interesting background details on how the deal between Nissan and Tesla went down yet. In fact, Tesla’s media site makes no mention of the agreement at all. No real surprise there; Tesla owners probably won’t be completely chuffed with the idea of having to share charge stations with even more EV operators.
Meanwhile, Nissan didn’t have much more either, just promising more details about the NACS rollout “at a later date.” But the automaker is still planning on sticking to its commitment of making “more than 40% of its U.S. vehicles sales … fully electric by 2030, with even more to be electrified.” Two new EVs, both of which are slated to be built in Canton, Mississippi are planned to start assembly in “late 2025.”
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