Ford Is Sticking With an EV Future—With a Boost From Tesla
The road to progress has never been smooth. Witness, as a metaphor, the trials and tribulations of the Ford Motor Company as it has tried to sell electric vehicle drivers the premier charging experience: an easy, friction-free, and maybe even delightful pit stop that might convince even more buyers to dump their gas-guzzlers for the plug.
However, Ford announced today that, a year after saying it would give away electric vehicle charging adapters to qualifying customers, it has finally made good on this promise.
Ford says it has sent out 140,000 fast-charging adapters, allowing thousands of model year 2021 to 2024 Mach-E and Lighting drivers to access the Tesla Supercharger network. Now customers have access to 44,000 fast chargers across North America—up 53 percent from a year ago—which can charge up a car in as little as 20 minutes. In total, North American Ford drivers can now access 180,000 chargers, which the company says makes it the continent’s largest integrated public charging network.
Before the 2-pound adapter could show up in drivers’ mailboxes, Ford went through a nearly two-year odyssey of changes, delays, a few manufacturing missteps, and a low-grade kerfuffle with Tesla, still the country’s most dominant EV manufacturer. The whole thing is a microcosm of the wider challenges that face car manufacturers as they attempt to ride the whims of global markets and policy to transition to electric vehicles. It echoes, too, Ford’s stop-starts in its own EV rollout, which have included production delays and pauses, difficulty in bringing down the costs of production, and last summer’s announcement that the company would rejigger its electrification strategy to emphasize hybrids over battery-electrics, canceling one electric SUV and delaying another EV in the process.
Ford says getting this adapter and public charging right is vital because most of the company’s EV customers are now people switching from gas-powered cars. "We know that making the charging experience work better is just going to make them feel better about their purchase,” says CEO Jim Farley. Hooking up with Tesla’s Supercharger network, long regarded as the most reliable and built-out in the US, is part of the automaker’s strategy to get more people into EVs.
Nationally, though, public charging still has issues. Last month, the federal government paused a national program to build out a robust charging station network across the US. A recent survey from JD Power found that one in five of the EV drivers who visited public charging stations in the last three months of 2024 were unable to charge, due to station outages, long wait times, payment failures, and broken equipment. Vandalism has also been an issue; Tesla has confirmed it is testing a product called "DyeDefender" that sprays blue-staining dye on anyone who attempts to cut its charging cables.
Vehicle shoppers’ top three barriers to an EV purchase, the survey said, are charging-related: a lack of charging availability; the longer times required to charge up; and limited battery range. “If someone feels like the public charging infrastructure isn’t supportive enough, they might opt for an ICE vehicle,” says Brent Gruber, the head of the EV practice at JD Power, referring to internal combustion engines.
Ford’s attempt to solve these issues started in 2023. The Supercharger network has long been seen as one of Tesla’s great advantages, and drivers say the Tesla charger, now called the North American Charging Standard (NACS), is preferable because its connectors are lighter and easier to handle, and because the technology tends to work the first time it plugs in.
So Farley asked chief EV, digital, and design officer Doug Field—a former engineering head at Tesla—to ask the electric automaker about access to the Supercharger network. Tesla said no. Then Farley started a “complimentary” exchange with Tesla CEO Elon Musk on X, which turned into texting.
“We eventually settled on something,” Farley says. Ford became the first non-Tesla automaker to announce that it would use NACS. The first Fords with built-in NACS connectors will come in 2026; for now, drivers will depend on their free adapters. (Replacements are $200 a pop.)
Ford's Supercharger adapter.
When Ford said last year that its adapters would be free, the company was initially surprised by the customer enthusiasm for the product. Tesla was set to manufacture the Ford NACS adapters. But by mid-summer, Ford customers were flooding online forums with complaints of adapter delays, and Ford decided Tesla wasn’t quite moving fast enough, especially given the number needed.
“We have a certain amount of patience, but given that this is something we promised our customers, we don't have unlimited patience,” Farley says. So Ford switched to Lectron, which manufactures EV chargers and adapters.
NACS is open source, but officials with Lectron and Ford said the companies still had plenty of quick work to do to make sure that the Ford-branded adapter could survive in the real world. The companies tested the adapter in extreme cold and heat. Ford assumed its customers would beat up the thing—dropping it, slamming it, accidentally rolling over it with their EVs, which can weigh nearly 7,000 pounds—and it tested the adapter to make sure it could survive. The team decided at one point that the adapter’s latch wasn’t up to snuff, so transitioned it from zinc alloy to stainless steel.
One special manufacturing challenge was proofing the adapter against water, says Christopher Maiwald, the founder and CEO of Lectron. The firm wanted the adapter to survive for up to 30 minutes in more than 3 feet of water, but also to survive more than 10,000 insertions. “We learned a lot about sealing implementation,” says Maiwald. The whole thing was hard work. “It seems really quite mundane, but once you go into the details and understand how much learning and a little bit of suffering went into this, it’s really quite beautiful,” he says.
In October, Ford advised a number of customers to stop using their adapters; the affected products were manufactured by Tesla, Maiwald says. Ford confirmed Lectron wasn't responsible for the issue, but declined to specify Tesla's role. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Indeed, the T-word looms large over not just this adapter project but the entire electric vehicle industry. In the US, protesters dismayed by CEO Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration have gathered outside Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations. (Now that at least eight automakers’ vehicles have access to the Tesla charging network, the protests could make more than Tesla drivers uncomfortable.) Tesla sales have fallen off a cliff in Europe, thanks in part to Musk’s reputation and the new dominance of Chinese EV automakers. Sales have also fallen in the US, though not as dramatically.
Farley calls Ford a “hungry” number two in US EV sales, but he mostly demurs when asked whether Tesla’s new role in politics might lead to changes on the EV leaderboard. “I've seen many, many companies have crises of reputation, but their consumer products are separated from their reputation, and they and customers are willing to separate the two,” he says.
“What I've learned over time is that the company should be really focused on what it can control,” says Farley. He’s talking, in part, about his company's incoming lineup of affordable EVs, due out in 2027, to compete with already announced offerings from the likes of VW, Kia and Hyundai. Whether the charging network, accessed via a Tesla adaptor or not, is there to tempt consumers to convert in sufficient quantities remains to be seen.
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