Enlarge / When the Acura ZDX goes into production next year, the cars will feature CCS ports. But Honda and Acura EVs launched from 2025 onward will feature NACS ports instead. (credit: Honda)

On Thursday morning, Honda became the latest automaker to announce that it is switching away from the Combined Charging Standard port for fast-charging its electric vehicles. Since May of this year, beginning with Ford, multiple OEMs have signed on to the North American Charging Standard, which uses a plug of Tesla's design.

Perhaps more important than the plug itself is the fact that Honda has negotiated access for its customers to use Tesla's Supercharger network. These are far more numerous than CCS fast chargers in North America, and they're far more reliable—although much of that reliability is down to the tightly integrated Tesla ecosystem , and there are no guarantees that third-party vehicles will find the process as friction-free.

That's particularly true since some of those vehicles—including Honda EVs—will have to use a CCS-to-NACS adapter. Each automaker announcement has followed the same pattern, with NACS ports only appearing on cars from 2025 onward. EVs built before then will need adapters, which are supposed to be available sometime in 2024.

Enlarge / Your car's maker can collect data on you from many different sources. (credit: Getty Images)

Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings , stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?

While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not.

Enlarge / A Tesla charging station on February 18, 2023, in Union City, New Jersey. (credit: Getty Images | VIEW press )

Tesla has consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, reportedly leading car owners to think something was broken when actual driving range was much lower than advertised. When these owners scheduled service appointments to fix the problem, Tesla canceled the appointments because there was no way to improve the actual distance Tesla cars could drive between charges, according to an investigation by Reuters .

In mid-2022, Tesla started routing range complaints to a "Diversion Team" that fielded up to 2,000 cases a week and "was expected to close about 750 cases a week," Reuters reported.

"Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles' potential driving distance—by rigging their range-estimating software," the article published today said. "The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers 'rosy' projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts."

Enlarge / Elon Musk at the Viva Tech fair in Paris, France, on Friday, June 16, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk plans an appeal to the US Supreme Court after losing an attempt to terminate a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Musk claims violates his First Amendment rights. The 2018 settlement over Musk's false "funding secured" tweets required Tesla to impose controls on his social media posts.

"Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, confirmed on Tuesday that Musk plans an appeal to the Supreme Court," according to Reuters .

In April 2022, Musk's attempt to get out of the settlement was rejected by a judge in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Musk appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, but the ruling against Musk was affirmed unanimously by a three-judge panel.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Tesla | Airplane!)

On July 3, 2023, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration made public a letter it sent Tesla in August 2022, demanding that the company provide updated responses to some questions. NHTSA is investigating the performance of Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system after identifying more than a dozen crashes in which Tesla vehicles struck stopped emergency vehicles . The agency is also investigating whether Tesla vehicles adequately ensure drivers are paying attention when using the Autopilot system.

Following a string of notable crashes, NHTSA officially initiated an investigation into Tesla's Autopilot system. And on July 3 , NHTSA wrote to Tesla again, asking the automaker for updated information by July 19. As far as anyone can tell, that didn't happen.

Recalls galore

If NHTSA decides to issue a recall, it wouldn’t be the first time. Tesla has faced a significant number of recalls over the past decade, covering various issues ranging from seatbelts to battery-related concerns.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The mass sponge EV charger plug migration continues to gather steam. Since we last wrote about the topic, first Polestar and then Mercedes-Benz also announced that they're dropping the Combined Charging Standard 1 (CCS1) connector in favor of Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) . Sometime next year, non-Tesla electric vehicles from those makes, as well as Ford , General Motors , Volvo , and Rivian , will be able to start making use of Tesla's Supercharger network. In 2025, those automakers—and probably a few more—will start building cars with NACS ports built in.

It's not just the car makers. Charger manufacturers and charging networks have also been announcing new NACS products, and it feels like enough critical mass is building that CCS1 might be headed for extinction. Or at least it may be relegated to curio status alongside CHAdeMO. Things are looking even better now that SAE International is taking over the management of NACS, so it will no longer be under the control of a rival OEM run by a billionaire known for impulsive and often arbitrary decisions. At this point, many are merely waiting to see if Hyundai Motor Group or Volkswagen Group will be the next big convert.

The justification for dropping an entrenched standard and switching to NACS, from Ford and others, was as much about obtaining access for their EV owners to Tesla's Supercharger network, and why not? Even the most hardened partisan from the EV brand flame wars has to concede that not only are there far more Superchargers out there, but they offer a vastly superior charging experience to any of the public charging networks.

Enlarge (credit: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images)

In November 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk stepped onto a stage in California to launch a new kind of EV: the Cybertruck, an angular cyberpunk-styled pickup with bodywork made of brushed stainless steel and “unbreakable” glass. What happened next has entered into public relations folklore. Under the glare of the cameras, the demo truck’s windows smashed not once, but twice during a demonstration of their strength. Musk first swore, then joked: “There’s room for improvement.” That off-the-cuff remark could have been a fitting mantra for the entire project.

Not that this faltering start has deterred Tesla’s devoted fans, of course. Since then, an estimated 1.8 million customers have put down their $100 deposits to reserve a Cybertruck. The vehicle was supposed to start rolling off production lines in 2021. But two years on, the trucks still haven’t been delivered, and for most customers, they won’t be until 2024 at the earliest.

Enlarge / GM is the second American automaker to decide to ditch the CCS port (pictured) for Tesla's design. (credit: Cadillac)

Tesla's Supercharger network is about to get more crowded. On Thursday afternoon, General Motors CEO Mary Barra joined Tesla CEO (and Twitter's owner) Elon Musk to announce that GM is signing on to what Tesla calls the North American Charging Standard (NACS) and will integrate those ports into its electric vehicles from 2025. The move follows a similar agreement between Tesla and Ford, announced two weeks ago .

"This collaboration is a key part of our strategy and an important next step in quickly expanding access to fast chargers for our customers. Not only will it help make the transition to electric vehicles more seamless for our customers, but it could help move the industry toward a single North American charging standard," Barra said in a statement.

GM EVs will gain access to the Supercharger network of over 12,000 chargers starting in 2024. As with the Ford news, GM EVs will initially require an adapter to connect the NACS cable to their CCS1 charging ports.