The almost $5 billion that last year’s infrastructure law provided to upgrade electric-vehicle charging will come with a set of system requirements for stations built with that money, starting with support for the Combined Charging System (CCS) connector in most non-Tesla vehicles and for DC fast-charging speeds.
The Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration announced the proposal Thursday and published an 82-page Notice of Proposed Rulemaking detailing these standards.
In addition to requiring CCS and DC fast charging (at least 150kW), these stations must be able to accommodate at least four EVs at a time and provide data feeds about availability and rates in standard formats open to third-party apps.
The concept of a network of fast-charging stations that provide real-time updates about their status may be familiar to Tesla owners, who can tell the navigation system in their vehicles to direct them to the nearest available Supercharger for a quick “refueling.”
Competing electric-vehicle manufacturers and charging-network operators have been working to provide similar experiences, and the Biden administration aims to accelerate that by raising industry standards through these regulations.
“These new ground rules will help create a network of EV chargers across the country that are convenient, affordable, reliable and accessible for all Americans,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.
Tesla owners will be able to use these new charging stations with the adapters included with every vehicle, but that AC connector supports a much slower charging rate of just 19.2kW. Tesla’s v3 Superchargers max out at 250kW but also come in 150 and 72kW versions.
The DOT proposal does not mention Tesla at all. It does call out a third charging standard, the CHADeMO connector used on the Nissan Leaf and a shrinking minority of EVs, saying that stations built with federal funds may include one CHADeMO plug.
Looking down the road, the likeliest solution to the car industry’s version of an electronics format war is Tesla adopting CCS too. The company already plans to add CCS connectors to US Supercharger stations, and European-market Model 3 cars already come with a CCS port. But the EU mandated CCS as a standard years before it turned its sights to gadget charging and set USB-C as the standard from 2024 on, while the DOT rules still won’t require electric-vehicle manufacturers to use any one connector.