Nissan Ariya spells end of the road for electric vehicle charging “plug war”

As I have been predicting for some time, with the majority of EV manufacturers (including Tesla outside of the US) adopting the CCS (Combined Charging System) as the standard for DC charging plugs and sockets – the days of the CHAdeMO DC charging standard appeared numbered.

However, along with the announcement of the new Nissan Ariya EV came the slightly more quiet one that the Ariya will come with a CCS charging port – thus signalling the end of the EV charging ‘plug war’. Until now, Nissan has been the major proponent of CHAdeMO – so the swapping of camps by Nissan is big news.

Given the AC plug war ended some time ago with all manufacturers adopting the Type 2 standard (outside of 110V AC countries like the US and Japan), it is now a simple ‘mopping-up’ exercise for the remaining EV manufacturer using CHAdeMO (Mitsubishi) to also decide to make the change.

This still does not entirely end the plug-war though, as China uses the GB/T standard for DC charging –  which is similar to CHAdeMO, but uses a slightly different (and incompatible) shaped socket to CHAdeMO.

Given Chinese EVs do not have a significant market share outside of China yet, by the time they do the CCS system will have become the only standard in all other markets, so the chances of GB/T (or  the proposed, but yet to be developed, melded CHAdeMO and GB/T standard) taking root anywhere else now is effectively nil.

However, for owners of CHAdeMO socket cars – this is not the sudden end of your capacity to DC charge. Almost all DC fast chargers here in Australia have leads for both, and Nissan say they will continue to build the Leaf with CHAdeMO for the foreseeable future.

Whether this situation will last as more and more DC chargers are installed is an interesting question.

In the longer-run, it is likely that CHAdeMO leads will remain but they will limited to perhaps one or two of the smaller 50kW chargers in a location, with the larger capacity chargers reserved for CCS socket cars only. (Not that this will be an issue regarding charging speed as all CHAdeMO equipped EVs sold in Australia charge at less than 50kW).

This also throws up into the air the future of the Nissan V2H/V2G (vehicle to home/vehicle to grid) system before it has even released for sale. After all, as who is going to be interested in installing a system that cannot be used for anything after the current model Nissan Leaf?