South Korean automakers Kia, Hyundai and luxury auto brand Genesis announced Thursday that their electric vehicles in the United States will have Tesla-style charging ports, starting in the last quarter of 2024. This will allow owners of those vehicles to seamlessly use Tesla chargers.
The brands join Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Honda and others in pledging to switch over to Tesla’s North American Charging Standard.
In 2025, Hyundai will begin providing adapters to owners of older Hyundai models with the Combined Charging System ports their EVs are currently built with. The adapters will allow these EVs to also use the Tesla-style chargers.
The three South Korean automakers are all part of Hyundai Motor Group, although Hyundai and Kia operate as separate companies in the United States.
This marks an especially significant development for the Tesla charging system. Counted together, Hyundai, Kia and Genesis would be the second-best-selling EV manufacturer in the United States after Tesla, according to figures from Kelley Blue Book. The three brands together sold 37,800 EVs in the first half of 2023. (Tesla sold more than 330,000 in that period.)
Hyundai currently offers three fully electric models in the United States. The Ioniq 5 and Ioniq 6 are built using shared EV-specific engineering and both have won multiple awards. The third, the Kona Electric, is an all-electric version of the Kona compact SUV. Kia offers the EV6, which shares its engineering with Hyundai’s Ioniq SUVs; and the Niro EV, which shares engineering with the Kona. Genesis sells fully electric versions of its G80 sedan and GV70 SUV, as well as the the electric-only GV60 SUV.
Not long ago, Tesla’s charging system was proprietary and only usable by its own vehicles. But CEO Elon Musk announced in late 2022 that he was inviting other automakers and charging companies to use his company’s system and its charging design standards. Ford and then GM were first to announce the switch from CCS for EV fast charging to Tesla’s technology.
Various charging companies, such as EVGo and Chargepoint, have also said they will build chargers that, in addition to charging vehicles using the CCS standard, would charge ones with NACS ports without the need for an adapter.
Having more automakers and charging companies using its standard has been seen as a win for Tesla. For one thing, analysts have pointed out, it could allow Tesla to argue it should have access to federal funds to support charging infrastructure since the NACS is no longer just for charging its own vehicles.
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