Aptera wants to adopt Tesla’s charge connector for its solar electric car

Aptera wants to adopt Tesla’s charge connector for its upcoming solar electric car and believes that the entire US EV market should do the same.

When Tesla started making electric cars, there was no dominant charging standard and therefore, Tesla developed its own. Things have changed a lot since then, and now, CCS has become the global standard.

While CCS has now been globally adopted, it doesn’t necessarily make it the best charging standard out there, and that’s what Aptera believes.

Aptera is building a battery and solar-powered super-efficient three-wheeler electric car. It claims a range of up to 1,000 miles and achieves that by making the vehicle extremely lightweight, with three wheels and a drag coefficient (Cd) of only 0.13.

When it first unveiled the new vehicle in 2020, a prototype featured a Tesla connector, it caught our attention since this is a proprietary connector.

Two years later, Aptera still has hope to use Tesla’s connector said Chris Anthony, Aptera Co-CEO, during a new Q&A:

Years ago, we saw the evolution of the J1772 connector and I think we all marveled at the inadequacy of the connector. It was big, clunky, and it looks like a hairdryer. It wasn’t elegant at all. Then one Tesla brought up their plug and it was beautiful, elegant with a little handle that you can easily plug into your electric vehicle.

Here’s the difference between the CCS connector (J1772 with DC fast-charging CCS pins) and the Tesla connector:

Anthony argues that the Tesla connector is much easier to manipulate and also there’s the fact that the same connector supports all levels of charging. The co-CEO argued that the entire US market should adopt Tesla’s connector and hinted that the company plans to leverage its investor and reservation holder bases to try to make it happen.

Aptera has now over 25,000 reservation holders, and it is aiming to deliver its first vehicles by the end of the year.

Electrek’s Take

I tend to agree with them, but it’s not happening. If even Tesla is not taking this battle, I doubt that Aptera can make a big difference.

Tesla has already folded in Europe, where it is using CCS, and it plans to launch CCS compatibility at Superchargers in the US.

Yes, the Tesla connector is better, but it looks like CCS has already won.