Toyota joins NACS charging standard in US

As of 2025, Toyota will equip its battery-powered electric cars with the NACS charging port in the US. The news follows in the slipstream of BMW’s announced switch, putting increasingly more pressure on the remaining automakers sticking to CCS.

The list of carmakers joining the standard introduced and used by Tesla keeps growing. After Rivian, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Polestar, Fisker, Jaguar, Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis, also Toyota has stated that it will adopt NACS for both all-electric Toyota and Lexus models. This grants its owners access to the 12 000 Tesla Superchargers in North America.

A three-row electric SUV

But as more and more automakers are making the switch, the overseas battle between CCS and NACS, reminding of tech wars between VHS and Betamax from the eighties, is turning out in favor of the latter. Beyond Tesla, several charging point providers have also announced transferring to NACS.

Toyota will not make it a standard across its entire BEV range as of 2025 but states that it will start introducing it on specific models, including Lexus and an already determined all-new three-row electric SUV that will be assembled at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK). Customers who have bought one of the models with CCS will be offered an adaptor.

As for a motivated choice, Toyota claims that the NACS switch offers its North American customers access to more charging options, especially DC fast chargers, boosting confidence to travel over longer distances.

Better functionality than CCS

The Tesla Supercharging network, exclusively using NACS, accounts for 62% of the total fast charging network in the US. It has a higher dependability rate, as a quarter of CCS connectors reportedly malfunction, whereas it’s only 4% for the NACS standard, according to a study by American news site Electrek.

A further advantage of NACS is that it is much smaller than CCS, as it cleverly utilizes AC pins for DC charging. It has a better performance rate, is easier to plug in, and can reach 900 A (instead of 500 A for CCS), but it faces higher safety challenges because of pin sharing. This latter complexity initially hindered many automakers from adopting NACS.

But their numbers are now dropping dramatically. The big names sticking to CCS ports are the Volkswagen Group and Stellantis, accompanied by some smaller Asian brands like Mazda and Subaru. It’s worth noting that Stellantis currently doesn’t offer any battery-powered models in the US.