Look, I sympathize. When General Motors said it would adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) for its elec...

Look, I sympathize. When General Motors said it would adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) for its electric vehicles back in 2023, we knew this meant adapters. But we never could have imagined how many adapters we would get.
Today, GM announced three additional adapters to help EV owners charge at home or in public. And while I’m sure that GM thought it was presenting the information as clearly as it could, I can’t help but wonder what normal, non-EV owners must think of all this.
The new adapters are intended to help customers transitioning between the old CCS way of charging to a future dominated by Tesla charging. The vast majority of automakers have committed to adopting the NACS standard for charging, acknowledging that Tesla’s Supercharger network is superior to the mostly CCS-equipped third-party charging stations that exist today.
But the changeover has been slow going. The 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 was the first non-Tesla EV to go on sale with a native NACS port. But to the best of my knowledge, there haven’t been any others. GM says its upcoming Cadillac Optiq-V will be its first EV with a built-in NACS charging port, but that vehicle won’t be available until later this year. The 2027 Chevy Bolt will also have a native NACS port, out next year.
In the meantime, there’s a growing family of dongles to address this weird, in-between place we’re in right now with EV charging. There’s the typical CCS-to-NACS adapters that most automakers are selling to their customers. And now there’s the NACS-to-J1772 adapter for Level 2 charging — J1772 being the part of the CCS plug used for slower charging. And when GM starts producing EVs with native NACS ports, there will be two more adapters available: J1772-to-NACS dongles for slow charging and CCS-to-NACS ones for fast charging.
Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge