Tesla's CCS Adapter Doesn't Work With The Cybertruck: Report

In general, I don’t trust NACS to CCS adapters, or vice versa. If the car wasn’t designed to accept the cable, it’s not a great idea to try to shove electrons through any variety of contraption. That’s a lot of energy, a lot of heat, and a lot of deadly flowing through that hunk of unregulated plastic. But, needs must and all that. People are going to continue using them, so it’s interesting that Tesla’s own factory-accessory CCS adapter doesn’t actually fit the Cybertruck.

Electric Car Charging Still Sucks, But That Might Change

The Tesla Cybertruck’s NACS charging port is integrated into the driver rear wheel arch, which has always seemed like a particularly vulnerable place to put an important piece of electric vehicle tech to me, but I digress. The issue here, however, is that the charge port is recessed into the wheel arch cladding fender flare, which makes the factory-offered CCS1 adapter impossible to use with the truck.

Many of you will probably recognize Kyle Conner from his Out of Spec exploits on YouTube and social media. He’s probably the guy I trust the most to deliver solid EV testing and results, and he goes to lengths many won’t—like pulling the body cladding off of a brand new Cybertruck to test its charging speed on an Ultium-branded EVGO CCS1 DC fast charger—to get them.

Even when the fitment issue was solved, by pulling off the surrounding cladding, and the powered NACS port cover, off of the truck to get the adapter to fit, the charger still couldn’t communicate with the truck. The charger refused to charge the Cybertruck at all through the Tesla adapter. The one thing a charger is supposed to do is charge.

It’s such an interesting facet of the Cybertruck that Tesla didn’t seem to engineer the truck with the full gamut of usability or use cases in mind, nor does it seem to integrate particularly well into the electric vehicle ecosystem reality we live in.

Many of the Tesla sycophants will write this off as a useless exercise, as they’ll stick to Tesla’s own network of NACS chargers. There are approximately 20,000 Tesla Superchargers in the U.S. right now, but that’s less than half of all DC fast charging stations, most of which have not yet upgraded to the North American Charging Standard. If you’re stuck somewhere that doesn’t have a Tesla station with a Cybertruck, for now, it seems you’re shit out of luck.

I’d ask Tesla to comment on this article, and Kyle’s independent charging test, but the company does not have a public relations arm to ask.