SAE International works with Tesla towards standardising NACS for industry-wide adoption after Ford, GM, Rivian, and ChargePoint jump ship from CCS-1

The Society of Automotive Engineers International has today announced that it would be partnering with Tesla to standardise the North American Charging Standard for industry-wide use. The SAE plans to evaluate the design and safety of the NACS connector to ensure its reliability and performance across a wide variety of vehicles. In doing so, the SAE will rework the NACS connector into a new, standard ready for wider adoption. It will also work to reach a consensus-based approach to maintain and validate the NACS standard.

The new SAE NACS connector standard will be developed on an expedited timeframe - SAE

In recent months, a number of electric vehicle brands have announced that they will be moving away from the somewhat-flawed CCS-1 connector to Tesla's smaller, more convenient North American Charging Standard (NACS). The response to this large-scale shift to NACS has mostly been positive, but some — particularly the Charging Interface Initiative (CharIN) non-profit organisation — had a somewhat negative reaction to the industry shift to a semi-proprietary standard.

Although Tesla dubbed the NACS connector a “standard,” it is not one that had been reached through industry consensus. The SAE standardization process is intended to assure reliable and consistent performance for any EV model or charging network. - SAE

One of the criticisms, somewhat appropriately, levelled at NACS by CharIN was the fact that NACS wasn't truly an open standard, because, despite Tesla having declared that it was an open standard and having published detailed specifications for the plug, it hadn't been evaluated and standardised by third-party certifications organisations. This move by the SAE to standardise NACS largely rectifies this problem.

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