Are electric car chargers universal?

Learn everything you need to know about charging apparatus before getting into the driver’s seat of a zero-emissions electric vehicle.

Image: Car Magazine.

On the rise locally, are chargers for electric vehicles (EV) universal across the board?

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Ever been in a situation where your smartphone is running low on juice but nobody around you has the same brand of device – and there’s thus not a compatible charger in sight? Well, this frustrating scenario is thankfully fast becoming a thing of the past since several cellphone manufacturers have shifted towards a universal option: the USB Type-C charging port.

This begs the questions, what about EVs? Are chargers for battery-powered cars universal or are they specific to each make, like smartphones of years gone by?

In short, will you find yourself stranded at a public charging station with a connector that simply won’t fit your car? Well, in South Africa, that’s exceedingly unlikely to be the case. Most EVs in SA use the same standard Type 2 plug for alternating current (AC) charging. And though some early electric cars came with proprietary connections (and American automaker Tesla has stuck with its own system) for direct current (DC) fast charging, virtually all EVs on the market in South Africa today use the so-called Combined Charging System (CCS 2) plug, which is the standard at public DC charging stations around the nation. So, in a local context, electric car chargers are indeed effectively universal.

Car Magazine reached out to Volvo Car South Africa, a leader in the local EV space, to ask why the Swedish brand and seemingly the industry as a whole have gone this route, rather than each automaker opting to employ a proprietary plug. Greg Maruszewski, the managing director at Volvo Car South Africa, told us the reasoning was simple.

“The number of public charging points in South Africa continues to grow at an encouraging pace. In fact, we’re in the process of installing 20 new 50kW DC charging stations – with AC adapters – at various Volvo dealerships around the country. It makes sense to give our customers access to the larger network of chargers available, rather than limiting them to a specific type,” explained Maruszewski.

Let’s use Volvo’s C40 Recharge as an example. At home, its owner would make use of the standard Type 2 connector for AC wallbox charging, before simply switching to the CCS 2 plug when topping up at a public DC charging station – be it one installed by the likes of GridCars, a South African EV charging network operator, or even a charger branded by another automaker.

So, in the same way that traditional fuel stations use standard nozzles capable of filling any petrol or diesel tank, it makes sense that virtually any EV is able to plug in at any public charging station around the country. Hardware compatibility benefits everyone in the EV game, after all.

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