Six Major Automakers Are Banding Together To Build Their Own American DC Fast Charging Network

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To many, the worst part about driving an EV is the public charging experience. Tesla network notwithstanding, it’s common to find broken or damaged charging stations putting a hitch in road trips. Hell, I’ve experienced it firsthand driving a Genesis GV60 to Detroit and back. Everyone’s been asking: What will it take to get a decent non-Tesla charging network around here? How about a coalition of six automakers intent on rolling out its own charging network from sea to sea? Stellantis, General Motors, Hyundai Motor Group, Honda, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are banding together to build a network of 30,000 DC fast charging stations from coast-to-coast.

2024 Silverado Ev Wt

Two of those brands are particularly eyebrow-raising since General Motors and Mercedes-Benz have committed to Tesla’s NACS charging connector. If this gets off the ground, owners of cars from those makers should have the best of both worlds. Come to think of it, Tesla owners should also have the best of both worlds since these new stations will supposedly be equipped with both CCS and NACS connectors and accept all EVs. Well, all EVs that don’t use CHAdeMO, but that’s basically a dead standard anyways. The alliance also claims that charging stations will be located near amenities, such as food and toilets, critical stuff for road-tripping.

Ram 1500 Rev Front Three Quarters 1

So far, this joint venture seems like a lot of talk without much in the way of details. For example, the joint venture doesn’t even have a name yet — just one of the more generic taglines I’ve heard in the past six months. I mean, “We charge North America” is fine, but isn’t that what everyone else has been trying to do?

Large 53016 2023ioniq6

Secondly, specifications of charging stations haven’t been divulged yet. How much power are we talking here? A DC fast charger can tap out at anywhere from 50 kW (borderline unusable) to 350 kW (excellent), which leaves a lot of range in between. It’s likely that the proposed stations will fall within federal funding clauses of 150 kW chargers, but many of these automakers either currently sell or are working on 800-volt architectures that can benefit from 350 kW fast chargers, so greater performance would be swell.

2023 BMW 7-Series i7 xDrive60 rear three-quarter shot

Finally, there’s no word on payment methods other than using vehicles’ plug-and-charge capabilities. Please, please, please offer point-of-sale card readers. If the true mission is to make charging better, it should be just as easy to buy a full charge as it is to buy a coffee.

The rear three-quarter view of a white Mercedes-Benz EQS SUV

The alliance claims it will have its first stations up and running in the summer of 2024, which sounds aggressive but is actually rather trivial. A year or so to build a few charging stations shouldn’t be a huge deal. I’d argue that the branding aspect is far more important because Americans will need a way of knowing about this new network, and that takes absolute ages. Still, if the groundwork gets laid now and both uptime and service prove better than major non-Tesla providers, this could be the giant leap forward EV charging needs. Those are big asks, so lets just see how this all plays out before we all get too excited.

(Photo credits: Chevrolet, Stellantis, Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes-Benz)

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82 thoughts on “Six Major Automakers Are Banding Together To Build Their Own American DC Fast Charging Network”

  1. I don’t know why everyone wants to fight the NACS connector. It works, it has an established network, and we know that it will work for the foreseeable future.

    I’m all for other brands coming together to create a Tesla type network on the road. Having more options is always a good thing, especially if it shuts up the “there won’t be enough infrastructure for us to switch!” crowd.

  2. I see this as a pretty serious condemnation of the existing non-Tesla charging providers. You know the car companies don’t want to deal with this, but it’s become clear that the market isn’t going to solve this problem for them and at the moment public charging infrastructure is Tesla’s biggest advantage over everyone else. Which also explains why everyone is adopting their charging standard. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

  3. They should have retracting bollards to protect the spots at the charging stations so brodozers can’t do their ICEing bullshit or at least cameras.

  4. Lovely, but what about the maintenance needs for these thousands of future chargers? Will these automakers create their own joint maintenance company or contract with another company which can reliably maintain and repair them? What about security and protection from vandals and copper thieves? Else, littering the landscape with broken and vandalized chargers won’t help the cause.

  6. Maybe part of the answer is to partner up with truck stop operators across the country. They’re located along the majors routes of travel and already zoned for something like this, with the utilities mostly in place. You could get a meal or a shower while your car is charging.

  7. I know they exist in places, but around here I see zero gas stations with chargers. Why not? They’re already in the business of fueling cars and servicing car fueling customers and they’ve already got conveniently located real estate. They just need to add electric to their lineup of fuel sources.

  8. “A year or so to build a few charging stations shouldn’t be a huge deal” Sure! Provided none need building permits, utility transformers, or control of appropriate real estate it should be pretty straightforward. I imagine the joint ventures’ 0 employees should be able to bang it out pretty quick.

  9. Two of those brands are particularly eyebrow-raising since General Motors and Mercedes-Benz have committed to Tesla’s NACS charging connector. 

    Honda for me. They don’t even sell an EV yet.

    1. no one, and there is no plan. The ev train isn’t going anywhere until we get serious about our energy supply and electric grid. No one ever wants to hear that though because why face reality?

      1. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.Ever since i saw a graph depicting how much each type of vehicle *actually* reduces greenhouse gasses.
        This gives an unfair advantage to gas cars because all the gas delivery infrastructure is already built, but even so it’s shocking how little EVs will achieve.
        Anyways,long story..um still long, you’re right.Until we have genuine green power supplies,EVs will only help a little.

      1. There are almost two dozen turbines literally behind my house. They barely ever work, come to fix them multiple times a year, break a few days later. 60-80% haven’t worked in over a year now. Ski place down the road has one that is broken and GE makes it and guess what, they stopped making them and so it hasn’t been able to be fixed. They are great accent pieces, but they aren’t a real solution.

        edit: I am a solar owner, and not against green, just a realist about where it is at and its potential to actually power our grid without destroying every view and forrest in america. The mountain top behind me has been destroyed completely.

        1. The bigger question is why the turbines behind your house are such complete shit because that is not common. There’s a 900kW turbine in Denmark that was built by teachers and volunteers 48 years ago and it still works.

          1. Yours was built by people who CARE and mine was built by a corporation trying to get as much subsidy money they could while the getting was good.

            I would suspect, yours was built with more care, been maintained and taken care of well too. I would bet ours don’t get paid that much for maintenance so they don’t do it until they have to.

    3. Yawn, this tired argument again. And just as widely debunked as the “well when you count power plant emissions EVs are worse!” argument. Will we need to generate more power YES. Do we have literally decades before we need more infrastructure on a major scale- YES. In the near term, there’s plenty of available power, particularly as home EV charging frequently happens at night (and utilities incentivize this with lower rates at night). Even a quick google search dispels this nonsense immediately.

  11. Just to be clear, I give 0 Fs about being near to restaurants or malls… those are the worst experiences possible (other than SCs at a target with bad hours). What I care about is being near to 24/7 convenience stores. Aka WAWA, Sheetz etc.

    That and true POS or instant authentication SC style car based payments. It really needs to be one step.

  12. “Please, please, please offer point-of-sale card readers. If the true mission is to make charging better, it should be just as easy to buy a full charge as it is to buy a coffee.”

    PREACH!

    1. If the true mission is to make charging better, it should be just as easy to buy a full charge as it is to buy … gasoline.

      Same as coffee is true too, but gasoline is the standard.

  13. A few ideas:

    I’m pretty sure it makes sense to have two tiers of chargers, with a premium paid for the 350kW ones. The electrical setup of these things (in terms of grid capacity, transformers, etc) probably makes it prohibitive to go all-350kW if you’re going to have a large number of chargers at a station, which leads to…

    The rollout should begin ASAP with big, great, “halo”-type stations to establish the brand, whatever it may be. Eventually you need enough chargers in enough places to approximate the ready availability of gas, but in the short term, you need to build awareness, and the way to do that is to build the type of megastations that premium convenience chains like Sheetz have, which leads to…

    Not every one of these stations needs to provide full convenience—a big benefit of chargers vs gas is that you don’t need the large footprint that helps justify running your own store—but I think it’s part of the brand/value proposition. IMO they’d be wise to partner with regional convenience chains to provide the supply chain and logistics know-how, but I don’t think it should simply be a Kum & Go with Charging by SGMHHBMWM-B (possibly not the name they’ll use, we’ll see). I think the goal of this effort is for these brands to be able to leverage their charging network in their EV marketing, rather than having to say “you can use Tesla’s excellent network, but don’t buy a Tesla, trust me.” And if that’s the case, then the new brand has to become familiar, coast-to-coast, and associated with a premium store experience. Doesn’t have to be a crazy Buckeye’s thing, and I don’t know what balance you want between the familiarity of limited Wawa branding vs. the centrality of the new brand, but I think that there’s no reason not to mention these partnerships when the press releases go out.

    Getting back to the first point, extra $$ for the faster chargers is totally reasonable: if you’re in a hurry, you pay more to get out of there faster, but if you’re stopping for lunch, then save a few bucks, even if your car has the architecture for 350 kW. Maybe a perk for brand purchasers is that, when you pay through the Kia app, all chargers cost the same. As for credit cards, I’d be curious to compare business cases between some sort of limited availability vs just putting one on every damn charger. Long term I think cards are on their way out, but there’s something to be said for simple familiarity—no app, no need for a phone at all.

    1. Most convenience stores in the northeast have very limited parking. They’d rather have someone using that parking space to buy beer and lottery tickets than sitting in their cars for a half hour checking instagram.

  14. God, everyone wants their own extended universe now. Hopefully, they all have stand alone chargers first so I know their origin stories!

  15. I fully expect the next big announcements on this joint venture will be adding an EVSE manufacturer, a Charge Point Operator and a e-Mobility Service Provider to the joint venture. Those choices will tell us a lot about the specs of the charge stations, the speed of the rollout and other big missing details.

  16. This is obviously great news…glad to see these OEMs take some direct action instead of relying on EA, etc.

    Where the hell is Toyota?

  17. > in the summer of 2024, which sounds aggressive but is actually rather trivial.

    I respectfully disagree about the triviality of this undertaking. They have to design, manufacture and install massive amounts of very large hardware, write a ton of software, identify locations and sign agreements with private landowners and local power companies, and on and on. And you know Tesla has already sewn up the easiest/cheapest locations.

    And this is all AFTER all these different automakers with different kinds of vehicles and different corporate agendas incorporate the software into their cars and duke it out over how to design payment mechanisms, whether stations should be pull-in, back-in, pull through to accommodate trailers, long or short cables located on the left or right….and on and on.

    I’ll eat my shirt if these people have that all worked out in one year.

    1. Speaking as someone who works in project management for utility companies, they’ll be lucky to have anything up and running in 3 years.

      1. Considering Ford already has Level 3 Fast charge stations that they sell to fleets, it should be no more difficult than agreeing to the already in place charging port design and connecting via Ford PRO or whatever app they decide to call it.

        the DC fast charger from Ford is 30K not counting infrastructure install costs, but that gets you 120 KW with 2 CCS-1 connectors, I mean the Ford network is already out there, so I figure ford just needs the other guys to help boost the network since they are going broke trying to sell EV’s all the while missing the mark on quality everywhere else.

        1. I expect it to be quite a bit more difficult that that, actually:

          -Does the Ford hardware/software play nice with all vehicle brands?

          -What permits are required to install them for use by the public?

          -Will they be installed on private land, and assuming so, will the land be purchased or leased? How will those negotiations be handled?

          -How will payments be processed and handled?

          -Who is responsible for maintenance and upkeep?

          -Can the proposed locations handle the expected current load, and if not, what is the plan for upgrading service in the area? How will this be arranged with the local utility?

          This is 5 minutes of brainstorming, I’m sure there’s more to iron out that I just haven’t thought of. But it’s not merely a matter of buying off-the-shelf components and hanging them up in a parking lot somewhere.

          1. Indeed. And definitely let’s not forget that all seven of these automakers have giant legal departments that have to justify their existence.

          2. In practice grid upgrades in the area are almost never required for a 4-8 stall fast charger (outside like downtown SF or NYC. The Venn diagram of “nice place to shop” and “couldn’t squeeze another 500 kW in isn’t zero but it’s small) but just the local hookup still can take a year, and you are otherwise dead on with the big ones.

    3. You also forgot to mention building the grid infrastructure to support it. Which is in the hands of privatized utilities that super don’t want to invest in things like that.

  18. Here’s what they need to do: Make EV charging as simple as a gas station!

    Hear me out: Imagine if gas stations were run like EV charging locations: No cash or credit card payments, just mobile apps, and you need to download a separate app for each brand. Pumps located in the far reaches of parking lots, with no protection from the weather and no security, and little to no lighting at night. No human being on staff to help disabled people fill up, to report broken pumps, or to make sure people are not hogging pumps after filling up. Once you finally got a pump, the gas trickles out so that it can take upwards of an hour to fill up. No one would want to get gas.

    Fix this, and you’ve fixed EVs.

    1. Also even at the fastest charge rate, which incidentally hurts the battery if used as the only method of charge and/or done too often, nobody wants to wait longer than a bathroom break and soda cup refill to juice up the ride. That along with the wear and tear on the roads due to lugging around massive batteries and the cost prohibitive price points generally all lead to a hard sell on EV’s

    1. ^^ This. The whole public charging situation would be basically solved if every gas station that already currently exists, just replaced a pump or two with a charger. As EVs take over just keep swapping more of them.

      Considering all the oil companies keep saying they want (and need to) transition to becoming green energy companies, I can’t for the life of me imagine what they’re waiting for.

      1. And this is pure fucking fantasy.
        I’m friends with a small gas station owner. I very much get the skinny on this stuff. Gas stations work because the average time at the pump is under 10 minutes, even when they go into the store. When somebody sits at the pump for 30 minutes, it doesn’t just tie up the pump, it blocks the flow of traffic as well. They do not like the big diesel trucks with 50 gallon bed tanks. And the average store-only customer is in and out within 5 minutes. Including time to park.

        And there is no car that charges in 10 minutes. Cars sit at chargers for hours. Fouling traffic and/or taking up very valuable store parking spots. In the time it takes to charge a BEV, they have easily lost as many as 30 customers from that single car alone. And just like gas? It would be at-cost or at a loss. Except with no possibility of turning it around with a cup of coffee or a lottery ticket. Because again; they’ve lost 30 other sales for that one singular car.

        And then there’s the cost. 250kW, 350kW charging stations are not cheap. They are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars after equipment, paying to upgrade utility services, rewiring the entire location, and so on. For something that will never do anything but cost them money.

        Nevermind the common sense that they also can’t be collocated with pumps, ever. Spark sources and gasoline vapors do not mix.

        1. We should assume charging will get much easier and faster in the coming years as the tech evolves. I’m sure the CBA for a small station owner vs, like, Speedway is very different. The large chains would be wise to think about being able to incorporate the necessary infrastructure into their business model, even if the profit realization isn’t quite there to start. Their investment could also contribute to bringing costs of the tech down which will hopefully make it more pallatible for independent operators.

      2. Please, no. We don’t need to rebuild gas station networks as electric. We should be pushing to place more chargers at places people want to be. When you don’t have to bury large tanks in the ground (DC fast charging and L2 charging each have their install requirements, of course, but they involve less digging and more tapping into existing grid), you can offer charging at tourist attractions, sit-down restaurants, shopping centers, parks, etc. When you go somewhere you are likely to spend time anyway, you should be able to charge.

        Of course, capitalism demands we turn them into another revenue stream, so we’ll see charging stations built up and businesses built to capitalize on the people waiting for cars to charge, but I can dream.

      3. Most stations around me seem to have about 4-6 pumps. Considering it would take at least 3x as long to charge as to fill with gasoline and that electric cars are still a small portion of the vehicle fleet in the US, the cars would have to charge a lot quicker or be much more common before I’d pull a pump for a charger.

    2. It is really surprising that efforts like these aren’t done in cooperation with some of the big chain gas stations/travel stops. Places like Buc-ees, Love’s, T/A travel centers would be perfect to work with to add charging spaces, or at a place Buc-ees, replace 30 of the 170 pumps with chargers. These places generally have plenty of land and are located on major travel routes.

      1. I agree that big travel centers would be a good location for these. They generally have enough stuff to browse in their stores to keep drivers occupied while they charge.

    3. Mostly, they are impossible to deal with, quite small scale, often rather shady, sitting on small parcels of land full of pipes and profoundly contaminated soil. The c-store and travel center *chains* are doing it fairly quickly.

  21. 150-350 kW seems like setting the bar too low for a moonshot effort like this.

    That’s still 12-30 minutes to charge a 100 kWh battery from 10-80%. Too slow for people on the move, and will cause backups at chargers during holiday rushes. Fine for in town or top-up charges, not so great for people in a hurry on the highway.

    The cry for 1000 mile rated ranges is going to only increase if this is the best we can do on chargers.

    1. 15-20 minutes is completely acceptable to me, especially if it’s at say, a NYS Thruway style rest stop. If I’m plugging in and heading in to go to the bathroom, charging isn’t going to impact my travel time by a whole lot.

      It’s the backups you state that are the issue. 15 minutes, even 30 minutes isn’t really that big of a deal. But if you’re in a line for ages waiting to charge, and depleting your battery for the right to sit in a parking lot to do so, you’re not going to be too happy with your EV.

      Ideally, a station would be a parking lot, with every space, a connection. But let’s say only 15 cars can be charged at any time. Well, at least you could park, be plugged in and in a queue so that when your turn is up, the car begins charging even if you’re inside getting some crappy rest stop food.

      Seems expensive.

      1. Yeah while I tend to make the quickest stops possible, I can understand the case for 20 minutes (above that I get really skeptical of people being OK with it).

        But the cascading effect when the roads are busy is going to be a really really big deal. It takes 5 minutes to clear a gas pump and a normal highway type station might have 20 pumps. Which means 240 cars can fill up per hour, give or take. Most charging stations I’ve seen have 5-10 connections, call it 8 on average. Now if it’s 20 minutes to fill up, you’re only getting 24 cars through per hour, literally one tenth of the gas station throughput. That might not matter on a weekday, but the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas is going to have multiple hour waits if EVs take off.

        1. if a gas station is that busy, nobody is getting to a pump and then leaving it after 5 min, more than a few are sitting there and then even going inside for a total at pump time of at least 15 minutes anyway.

          1. I purposely left stuff like that out because the same will be true of charger plugs.

            Unlikely someone will be there to move their car the second it’s full.

            1. True, but I’d say that your throughput for gas vehicles will be more significantly impacted by the person going in for things. If my charging stop takes 20 minutes, and I take 25 minutes, I’ve slowed down the next plug by five minutes. If I fill up and take 25 minutes in the store with my car at the pump, I’ve blocked the pump for an additional 25 minutes (assuming I didn’t wander off with the pump going).

              So we figure some people are going to slow things down, and it takes about 4-5 times as long to fuel. But the slowdowns are likely less impactful. So a full EV conversion is probably 4 chargers for every pump you would have had at a travel center, along with a reduction in non-fuel parking (if it takes 20 minutes to charge, there’s less likelihood of someone getting into a spot after fueling).

              And that assumes you don’t see an increase in charging stations at tourist attractions, parks, and other places people might go anyway, which could cut into your customer base. There, it gets tricky, since you also end up selling fewer overpriced snacks or the like.

              And the local gas station in a populated area is really going to have trouble converting, since home charging cuts into their customer base.

              There’s a lot that goes into this, and I think the solution is going to be a lot more places with chargers more than a lot more chargers at a place. The travel centers will likely survive and have to be massive charging centers, but I think we’re likely to see a lot of gas stations go away and a lot more places selling refueling.

              1. If I fill up and take 25 minutes in the store with my car at the pump, I’ve blocked the pump for an additional 25 minutes (assuming I didn’t wander off with the pump going).

                No offense to you, but anyone who does this is a complete and total jerk. Fill the car and move it to a parking spot. I do that even when I’m only going to be in the store for five minutes.

                1. I’m not a person who does this, but it happens a lot more often than I would like to see (sometimes they manage to block a second pump with a trailer, too). And doing the math on pumps vs chargers means accounting for these sorts of people.

                  I am with you on the moving to a parking spot if you’re going in for anything other than to activate the pump if paying cash or something.

          2. you are also missing the point, if the max throughput is a 10th of a standard gas station then it only takes a tenth of the max gas station volume to make the ev stations full, so that is always going to seem busy when comparatively it is not.

        2. 20 minutes is still a lot if I have that “oh shit, I need gas” moment when I head off to work. I’m optimistic in our ability to get this thing down to 10 mins or so in the nearish future, though. That would solve a lot of this.

  22. I still believe the best path forward standard wise is NACS as its being ratified as an actual standard my SAE. That being said I would not want a Tesla monopoly on charging across all brands. An open standard and open charging. I actually wish that there was legislation requiring public charging accept any vehicle that can plug in. Tesla opening some and not others can create confusion for the public.

  23. Random Detroit VP: “Sir, now that we have committed to the Tesla standard, if they raise Supercharger prices they will make all the money, right?”
    CEO: “Holy shit!”

    1. I mean, they’ve gotta be happy about selling the cars and also the fuel that the cars need to move. Surprised this didn’t happen sooner.

      1. it’s the old chicken and the egg thing with Demand. If there is not EV charging stations then nobody wants to be the guy suck finding one, so the demand drops. honestly Tesla had to kind of do this to make the ownership of the vehicles possible.

  25. Technically it’s 7? Hyundai & Kia are being identified separately, but then if you add Genesis it’s 8? Though break all the others out too in the “Automaker” context and its like 20…

      1. But it’s different because Mazda and Ford didn’t have a completely overlapping lineup the way Hyundai and Kia do. I can only think of two vehicles between the companies that don’t have a direct parallel version. Those being the Kia Carnival and the Hyundai Ioniq 6.

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