Tesla is going to open its fast-charging stations to Ford drivers

Ford has struck a deal to give its drivers access to 12,000 fast-charging stations in Tesla’s network, which could discourage car shoppers from buying one of its electric vehicles.

The deal more than doubles the number of fast-charging stations in Ford’s North American charging network. Ford owners will gain access next spring via an adapter that converts electric connectors to Tesla’s Superchargers for use in Ford’s Mustang Mach-E or F-150 Lightning pick-up trucks.

Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley announced the deal alongside Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX billionaire boss Elon Musk at a surprise event on the social media site’s audio livestream function Twitter Spaces.

“We’re really excited,” Farley said. “We are ramping up production, and we think this is a huge step forward for our industry and for all electric customers.”

Tesla was already planning to partially open its 45,000-charger network to all electric car models by the end of 2024 at the urging of the White House and gain access to $7.5 billion in subsidies. The EV maker will open at least 7,500 chargers to drivers of any EV model, including 3,500 along US highways.

The Biden administration wants to build 500,000 chargers nationwide by 2030, up from about 130,000 available now, as it races to expand EV adoption.

“We don’t want the Tesla Supercharger network to be like a walled garden,” Musk said.

When the second generation of Ford’s EVs will be available in 2025, they will be built with the same connector that Tesla already uses, eliminating the need for an adapter, Farley said. The adapter will cost in the “hundreds of dollars range”, Musk said – not “super expensive”.

Long distance travel in the US has created “range anxiety” among drivers, who worry about being stranded far from a charging station. The fear has prompted US car makers to pursue source batteries capable of traveling farther on a single charge, although this increases the cost of the vehicle. EVs are already more expensive than conventional engines.

Ford sees fast-chargers as a way to circumvent the problem.

“Our industry is obsessed with these huge batteries, and I think that’s probably not the right approach,” Farley said. “We must make the battery as small as possible . . . but combined with that is a really great fast-charging experience so we don’t have to carry around $20,000 in extra batteries.”

Musk and Farley joked, praised and raved about the difficulties of building the cars on the 30-minute livestream, which attracted more than 100,000 listeners. The head of the Michigan carmaker told a story about driving with his kids in California, charging his car and passing one Tesla station after another.

“My kids kept looking at me, ‘There’s another Supercharger, can you stop there? How about the I-5, Dad?'”, he recalled. “I was like, ‘No, you have to go behind this other building.’