Every six months, the automotive analysis firm JD Power surveys some 5,000 US electric vehicle house owners about their experiences driving their battery-powered cars. The newest version of this survey, out this week, discovered that EV’s perennial bugbear remains to be bugbear-ing. In truth, it’s acquired worse: Drivers say they’re even extra dissatisfied with the availability of public charging stations than they have been a yr in the past.

In North America, extra charging stations are on their manner, thanks partly to a US federally funded program that seeks to get not less than half 1,000,000 extra within the floor by 2030. But on this messy center interval, automakers have provide you with one other answer: Let Tesla deal with it.

Tesla has the most widespread and dependable charging network within the United States. (In truth, the brand new survey discovered that upscale EV drivers usually tend to be proud of public charging—and the vast majority of them drive Teslas.) It additionally has a singular charging plug, referred to as the North American Charging Standard. Nearly each world automaker has now pledged to add that plug to its electric vehicles, permitting its drivers to faucet into the Tesla charging community.

Ford piloted the “let Tesla take care of it” mannequin final May when it introduced it might undertake that plug. Its EVs will include the connector normal by 2025. And beginning in the present day, current drivers of the Mach-E Mustang and Lightning pick-up truck house owners will get entry to a hearty chunk of Tesla’s supercharger community, courtesy of free adapters that they’ll now order off a website Ford simply launched. The adapters will probably be free of charge between now and July; after that, they’ll retail for $230, Ford says. The firm expects the adapters to start delivery in late March.

Tesla Saves Best New Chargers For Its Own

Ford recurrently surveys its personal drivers and “their main pain points have to do with public charging,” Ken Williams, the automaker’s director of charging and vitality providers, stated on a name with reporters this week. The adapter will give Ford drivers entry to fifteen,000 new chargers, bringing the entire as much as 126,000 chargers and greater than 28,000 quick chargers throughout the US and Canada. (That doesn’t embody each charger within the Tesla community; Ford drivers gained’t get entry to older Tesla charging stations, and Tesla has reserved a choose few newer ones for its drivers solely.) Drivers will be capable of entry and pay to cost on the stations via Ford’s app.