Japanese carmaker Subaru, which currently makes just one battery electric vehicle (BEV), the Solterra, will adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) connector from 2025, the company said in a statement today.
Cars that came from the factory with the CCS inlet – that’s the Solterra – will get access to the 15,000+ Tesla Superchargers in North America by way of an adapter, while “certain” Subaru BEVs that will be launched here in 2025 will be fitted from the get-go with the NACS connector.
The announcement comes after Toyota – which manufactures Subaru’s sole EV at its factory in Motomachi, Japan next to its bZ4X cousin – made a similar move last month along with Lexus. Of course, the Japanese automakers are just the latest to join the list of companies that will switch to Tesla’s charging connector in the following years in North America, including BMW, Ford, General Motors, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Kia, and Nissan.
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Regarding the 2025 target for putting the plug on new EVs straight from the factory, Subaru wants to launch eight new battery-powered cars by 2026, with the first new electric vehicle planned to be a three-row SUV made in collaboration with Toyota, which will build both cars at its Kentucky plant starting in … you guessed it, 2025. That’s the same year when in-house production in Japan is slated to begin.
By 2030, Subaru wants half its global sales volume to be made up of battery electric vehicles, or about 600,000 units out of an expected volume of 1.2 million. In the United States, its target is to sell 400,000 EVs per year by 2028, so even though at the moment it only has one battery-powered car on dealer lots, the switch to Tesla’s NACS connector makes a lot of sense, considering the brand’s future ambitions.
The Supercharger network is arguably the most reliable DC fast charging network in North America, with the reported uptime being over 99 percent year after year. By comparison, other public charging stations don’t fare as well, with almost two in five visits to chargers being unsuccessful last year, according to a J.D. Power survey.
