At last, a charging standard that has made Japan an outlier in the electric vehicle industry (and made using the Nissan Leaf and recon Japanese-market EVs in Malaysia more complicated than it needed to be) looks to be going the way of the dodo. Mazda has announced it is abandoning the CHAdeMO port on its EVs that will be launched in its home market from 2027 onwards.
But those of you hoping for CCS2 ports on Japanese grey imports will be disappointed – Hiroshima said it will instead use the North American Charging Standard (NACS), which is a different connector again. The move, the company continued, will allow its cars to charge up at Tesla Superchargers in Japan, which use the NACS connector that Tesla itself pioneered.
Mazda is following in the footsteps of Sony Honda Mobility (SHM), which became the first Japanese carmaker to announce the adoption of NACS for the Japanese market, in this case for its Afeela range of EVs. Given that Mazda is the first mainstream company to do so, this news will likely create a domino effect that sees the rest of the industry desert CHAdeMO en masse.
CHAdeMO has long been the thorn in the side of the electric vehicle industry. Its use is mostly limited to just a single market and it has often lagged behind other standards such as Europe’s Combined Charging Standard 2 (CCS2) in terms of charging speeds, although later updates have sought to fix that. The port adds an extra layer of complexity for recon EVs imported here, as they require adapters for charging at CCS2 stations that are commonplace here – although the move to a NACS port doesn’t change that.
Japan’s anticipated switch to NACS will likely see a similar exodus in South Korea, which uses the US’ CCS1 connector, with the desire to hook up to Tesla’s Supercharger network again being the driving force. The CCS1 standard appears to be dying anyway, with carmakers gradually switching to NACS in the US, too.
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What is chademo for? The country’s automakers don’t believe in EV to begin with. The sooner they realize this the better. Remember Betamax, Minidisc and memory stick?
Not just chademo…China ev standard is another game altogether called gbt