[AUDIO LOGO]
SEANA SMITH: Well, shifting gears now to the world
of electric vehicles.
In late May, Ford jolted the EV charging
space after its game-changing agreement
with its rival, Tesla.
Ford's EV customers will be able to use
thousands of Tesla superchargers starting next spring.
Now, the recent deal putting two of the biggest US auto
companies on Tesla's charging network, and Pras, this really
raises the question just about the future of EV charging
and what could potentially maybe be the standard, if it's going
to be Tesla superchargers.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: mean, this deal was announced
ahead of the holiday weekend.
So really, it was surprising timing.
People were surprised by the actual move itself.
Ford joining forces with, essentially,
is its rival, Tesla there.
Starting next year, they'll be able to use Ford EVs using
the Tesla supercharger network, which is
12,000 superchargers in the US.
And then in 2025, even bigger news.
All new Ford EVs will have the Tesla NACS or North American
Charging Standard plug natively built into that car,
meaning that car will be able to go to any supercharger
without an adapter and start using
those natively right away.
So a big deal in the sense that these two rivals joined
forces together.
GM, sorry, Ford CEO Jim Farley said this is a good move,
because they think their customers are complaining
about reliability and ease of use,
and the Tesla network has those kind of situations solved.
They're very reliable.
They're always working, and they have
plenty of actually chargers.
So I see why they did it.
For Tesla itself, also a good move.
It unlocks some incremental revenue for them.
That's what Goldman analysts said.
Maybe $1 to $3 billion in revenue down
the line when this is kind of up and coming up and going
and other manufactures may hop in on there.
So it makes sense from both sides.
But the big question is, what happens to the universal CCS
standard that you see right there that GM and other people
use.
SEANA SMITH: Well, what do you think happens to that?
Because I think that's a big question
that everyone's asking right now.
Because there has been this massive push, obviously,
for a universal charging experience,
yet you still have two big players.
There's two very different ways to charge EVs,
which you would think could potentially
limit adoption at some point.
PRAS SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, I mean, this is sort of--
a Bloomberg writer said, this is like a Betamax
versus VHS situation, where there's
two competing standards.
Before this Ford deal, I would have
said the CCS universal standard will probably be the main one.
Tesla will live on its own like it's always been doing that
for over the past 10 years.
But now with Ford joining forces with them,
it makes you really kind of think
it's possible maybe a Hyundai or a Kia, someone like that,
says, you know what?
We want to actually hop on that service,
too, and not rely upon our own cobbled
together networks of like ChargePoint, EVgo, Electrify
America, all these different players that sort of
don't work together very well.
Why not use that NACS standard that seems to work well.
Tesla is offering that.
They're saying, we want to open it up.
So there is a possibility for that to be the next standard.
SEANA SMITH: We will see how this all plays out.
All right, well coming up next--