Tesla’s plug becomes the US standard

For years North America had a messy patchwork of EV charging connectors. Tesla's was widely considered the best — smaller, simpler, and backed by the most reliable network. In November 2022 Tesla opened the design as the North American Charging Standard (NACS), inviting the whole industry to use it.

Through 2023, the dominoes fell: Ford, GM, Rivian and then essentially every major automaker announced they would adopt Tesla's connector, and the standards body SAE formalized it as J3400 in December 2023. A connector designed by a single company became the de-facto charging standard for an entire continent.

It is a rare thing for one company's proprietary design to win an industry-wide standards battle on technical merit. That it happened — and that legacy automakers chose to give their customers access to Tesla's network — is a measure of how far ahead Tesla's charging infrastructure had pulled.