I Guess Volvo's Doing The Tesla Charging Thing Too

Photo: Volvo

Well, it happened again. Yet another automaker has worked out a deal to allow its electric vehicle owners to use Tesla’s Superchargers. This time around, it’s Volvo. So if you happen to own a Volvo XC40 Recharge, congratulations. It is about to get easier to take your car on a road trip. There will be no more worrying about whether or not 223 miles of range is enough to get you from one city to the next if you can’t find a charger that works.

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“As part of our journey to becoming fully electric by 2030, we want to make life with an electric car as easy as possible,” Volvo CEO Jim Rowan said in a statement. “One major inhibitor to more people making the shift to electric driving – a key step in making transportation more sustainable – is access to easy and convenient charging infrastructure. Today, with this agreement, we’re taking a major step to remove this threshold for Volvo drivers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.”

In addition to Volvo EV owners having access to Tesla Superchargers starting in the first half of 2024, Volvo will also be equipping its EVs with a North American Charging Standard port starting in 2025. This announcement comes a week after Rivian announced the same plan with a similar timeline and about three weeks after General Motors did the same. But it was Ford that kicked off this trend back in late May.

At this point, it feels like we’re going to see automakers all make the same deal with Tesla one by one until every EV sold in the U.S. from 2025 on includes a Tesla charging port. If you regularly keep up with car news, it’s probably going to get annoying reading announcement after announcement, but something tells us there isn’t much of a chance that these automakers will coordinate a joint announcement so we can get this out of the way all at once.

And as Tesla allows more automakers to have access to its chargers, it also raises the question of how it’s going to deal with crowding, the erosion of one of its key advantages over rival EVs and owners who get upset that they have to wait for non-Teslas to get out of the way so that they can charge their cars. Further, how will Tesla’s Superchargers get integrated into other companies’ trip-planning software programs?

We certainly have our questions, but considering the Supercharger network is the only reliable charging network in the U.S., this deal is definitely a win, on paper, for Volvo’s customers.