The road to progress has never been smooth. Witness, as a metaphor, the trials and tribulations of the Ford Motor Company as it has tried to sell electric vehicle drivers the premier charging experience: an easy, friction-free, and maybe even delightful pit stop that might convince even more buyers to dump their gas-guzzlers for the plug.
However, Ford announced today that, a year after saying it would give away electric vehicle charging adapters to qualifying customers, it has finally made good on this promise.
Ford says it has sent out 140,000 fast-charging adapters, allowing thousands of model year 2021 to 2024 Mach-E and Lighting drivers to access the Tesla Supercharger network. Now customers have access to 44,000 fast chargers across North America—up 53 percent from a year ago—which can charge up a car in as little as 20 minutes. In total, North American Ford drivers can now access 180,000 chargers, which the company says makes it the continent’s largest integrated public charging network.
Before the 2-pound adapter could show up in drivers’ mailboxes, Ford went through a nearly two-year odyssey of changes, delays, a few manufacturing missteps, and a low-grade kerfuffle with Tesla, still the country’s most dominant EV manufacturer. The whole thing is a microcosm of the wider challenges that face car manufacturers as they attempt to ride the whims of global markets and policy to transition to electric vehicles. It echoes, too, Ford’s stop-starts in its own EV rollout, which have included production delays and pauses, difficulty in bringing down the costs of production, and last summer’s announcement that the company would rejigger its electrification strategy to emphasize hybrids over battery-electrics, canceling one electric SUV and delaying another EV in the process.
Ford says getting this adapter and public charging right is vital because most of the company’s EV customers are now people switching from gas-powered cars. “We know that making the charging experience work better is just going to make them feel better about their purchase,” says CEO Jim Farley. Hooking up with Tesla’s Supercharger network, long regarded as the most reliable and built-out in the US, is part of the automaker’s strategy to get more people into EVs.
Nationally, though, public charging still has issues. Last month, the federal government paused a national program to build out a robust charging station network across the US. A recent survey from JD Power found that one in five of the EV drivers who visited public charging stations in the last three months of 2024 were unable to charge, due to station outages, long wait times, payment failures, and broken equipment. Vandalism has also been an issue; Tesla has confirmed it is testing a product called “DyeDefender” that sprays blue-staining dye on anyone who attempts to cut its charging cables.
Vehicle shoppers’ top three barriers to an EV purchase, the survey said, are charging-related: a lack of charging availability; the longer times required to charge up; and limited battery range. “If someone feels like the public charging infrastructure isn’t supportive enough, they might opt for an ICE vehicle,” says Brent Gruber, the head of the EV practice at JD Power, referring to internal combustion engines.
