Ford Motor Company said it has agreed with Tesla to allow its electric vehicle owners to gain access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers in North America in early 2024.
The tie-up between the rivals makes Ford the first major carmaker to embrace Tesla’s proprietary charging standard, giving the carmaker access to the biggest network of high-speed Superchargers in the US.
Access to charging stations is considered one of the main hurdles so far to broader acceptance of electric vehicles, analysts have said.
Tesla said last November it would open its proprietary charging design to other carmakers and charging network operators.
A Tesla-developed adapter will provide Ford EVs fitted with the Combined Charging System (CCS) port access to Tesla’s V3 Superchargers. Ford will equip future EVs with Tesla’s own charging standard, removing the need for an adapter for direct access to Tesla Superchargers, starting in 2025.
“The idea is that we don’t want the Tesla supercharger network to be like a walled garden. We want it to be something that is supportive of electrification and sustainable transport in general,” Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said during an online Twitter Spaces conversation with Ford CEO Jim Farley.
“We love the locations, we love the reliability, your routing software, the ease of use of the connector, the reliability of it,” Farley said.
“Tesla storms through the train station like 300kmph Shinkansen,” Farley said, referring to Japanese bullet trains. “We’re learning a lot.”
Tesla had 17,711 Superchargers, accounting for about 60 per cent of total US fast chargers, which can add hundreds of miles of driving range in an hour or less.
Farley announced the partnership during the Twitter Spaces conversation. Twitter is owned by Musk.
Farley said earlier at a Morgan Stanley forum that “on the infrastructure side, I think it’s room for some collaboration between the car companies, which is totally unnatural for us.”
Farley added, “I think we need to start – I mean, I think the first step is to work together in a way we haven’t, probably with the new EV brands and the traditional old companies.”
For example, he called it “totally ridiculous” that the industry has multiple plugs for its charging networks and “we can’t even agree on what plug to use.”
Musk earlier this month tweeted: “I think Ford’s overall strategy with EVs is smart. The electric F-150 (Lightning) has high demand.”
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