Every legacy automaker has now signed on. The CCS1 connector, for North American passenger vehicles, is a legacy interface, supported on existing cars, not specified on new platforms. The North American Charging Standard won the connector war so completely that “won” undersells it. The connector question is closed.

The reliability question is wide open.

The dirty secret of public EV charging in the US is that Tesla’s Supercharger network has an uptime number in the high nineties, and almost every other network has an uptime number that, if it described an airline, would result in congressional hearings. The reasons are not mysterious. Tesla owns the stations end to end, payment, dispenser, cabling, software, and the same team that ships the car software ships the station software. Every other network is a stack of vendors held together by middleware that nobody owns.

NACS as a connector does not fix this. NACS as a movement might.

What changes in 2026

Three things, all of them more important than the plug shape.

First, the payment layer. Tesla’s “plug and charge” experience, pull up, plug in, walk away, is the bar every operator now has to clear. The ISO 15118 standard that makes this possible has been in the spec for years and was rolled out by approximately nobody. With NACS, it is table stakes. Operators who do not ship it in 2026 lose every customer who has tried a Supercharger.

Second, the maintenance layer. Tesla dispatches a technician to a broken stall on a service-level agreement measured in hours. The legacy networks dispatch on an SLA measured in weeks, and the technician who shows up often has to call a different vendor’s service desk to even get the firmware diagnostic. The economics of NACS, fewer connector variants in the field, fewer protocol stacks to debug, make a real SLA possible for the first time. Whether it becomes mandatory is a regulatory question.

Third, the build-out math. With one connector, the federal NEVI program’s target of 500,000 chargers by 2030 stops being three parallel build-outs and becomes one. That is the kind of efficiency gain that, applied to a $7.5 billion program, materially changes the number of stalls that get built.

Where this leaves Tesla

Tesla’s Supercharger network is now an infrastructure business that sells to its competitors. It is also, on the current financials, more profitable per dollar deployed than its car business. The decision Tesla has not yet publicly made is whether to spin Supercharging out, into an entity that can raise infrastructure-cost-of-capital money without being valued at software multiples, or to keep it inside the auto business as a moat.

The case for spinning out is obvious. The case for not spinning out is that Supercharger reliability is one of the three things that genuinely differentiates owning a Tesla in 2026, and the other two are FSD and the service price-list.

For now, the company that solved charging once is being asked to solve it again, this time for everybody. The connector is the easy part.