Honda & Acura Join Team NACS In 2025, Adding Tesla's EV Port And Supercharger Access

Nearly two months after Nissan became the first Japanese automaker to adopt Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS), its compatriot Honda has also joined the ranks. On Thursday, Honda announced that future Honda and Acura electric vehicles (EVs) will also use the increasingly popular NACS charging standard. However, consumers holding off on their purchases to get a NACS-ported Honda EV will need to wait until 2025, when the company plans to release the first of its EVs with the NACS charging port. This is because Honda's transition to NACS will happen in a phased manner.

In the press release announcing the development, Honda also confirmed that it will continue to equip its cars with the CCS port until the first of the NACS-compatible cars arrive in 2025. For consumers worried about ending up with incompatible charging ports when the switch happens, Honda confirmed that it's working on developing a charging adapter that will make these older cars work with the increasingly popular NACS standard.

Interestingly, the news of Honda agreeing to adopt the Tesla-led NACS connector system comes barely a month after Honda became part of a consortium of seven major automobile brands that came together to create a new EV charging network across North America. Other companies part of the consortium include BMW, General Motors, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis.

Anyone following the North American EV space will be aware of the recent developments surrounding the NACS, which is gradually displacing CCS as the de facto charging standard across the U.S. and the rest of North America. There has been increasing activity in this space in the past few months alone, with several manufacturers adopting NACS. Recent entrants into the NACS fold include Volvo — which confirmed its NACS intentions in June — General Motors (June 2023), Ford (May 2023), and Rivian (June 2023). As outlined earlier, Nissan — which has been in the EV space for nearly a decade — also joined the NACS brigade in July 2023.

With Honda also joining the NACS brigade, pressure is mounting on the handful of players — including the likes of Volkswagen, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW — that are yet to commit to this increasingly popular charging standard.

Meanwhile, the trio of Tesla, the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, and SAE International is still working on the standardization process that is mandatory for NACS to be adopted as the default EV charging standard across the U.S. — a process that is expected to be completed before the end of 2023.