Tesla’s Supercharger network has become the North American Charging Standard and tons automakers are building their EVs with this network in mind. While this is good for mass EV adoption, it’s turning out to be a headache in practice.
First spotted by InsideEVs, owners of GM EVs like the Cadillac Lyriq, Chevy Blazer EV and Fords F-150 Lightning are using Superchargers to juice up. These owners have found that using the Superchargers isn’t as easy as they might have thought. The problem, as InsideEVs points out, is a combination of short charging cables and EV charging ports that aren’t in the same place.
With Tesla, no matter the model, the exterior charging port is always in the same location: On the driver’s side rear fender. The Superchargers are all made for ease of charging Teslas. Other automakers have different port locations. GM Ultium platformed EVs (including the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX) all have their charging port on the driver’s side fender, just behind the front tire. Same for the Ford F-150 Lightning and Mustang Mach-E. Hyundai and Kia EV charging ports are on the passenger side rear fender. Suffice to say, none of this works for non Tesla vehicles that have to use Superchargers and Tesla owners hate it.
…owners of non-Tesla EVs are often unsure of how to actually park when they pull up to a charger. One Blazer EV owner on Reddit complained about the charging cable being too short. Another Cadillac Lyriq owner posted a photo of an extremely overstretched cable, albeit last year at a Magic Dock location. A separate Lyriq owner was spotted taking up three separate spots (as Tesla showed how not to do in the illustration above). It’s not clear if this was due to the cable not reaching or because the owner wasn’t sure how to properly park the vehicle at the charger. Regardless, there’s clearly both an education issue and an infrastructure issue at play here.
Tesla seems to be aware of the issue as under Tesla’s support page for Supercharging other EVs there’s a section titled “Does the Supercharger cable reach all EVs”? Tesla’s solution is to just simply double park, which is what people have been doing. Tesla does mention that it’s rolling out newer V4 Superchargers that will address this problem; current Superchargers have cables that are just 6.5 feet long while the newer V4 Superchargers will have 10 foot cables. Until those chargers are rolled out, a lot of people are going to be pissed seeing non Tesla EVs taking up two and three spaces just to charge their car.