Mazda to introduce NACS charging in Japan

The fact that countless car manufacturers in North America, including Mazda, rely on the NACS charging standard developed by Tesla is nothing new. However, the Japanese car manufacturer has now concluded an agreement with Tesla that new electric Mazdas in Japan will also use NACS from 2027.

The brief announcement from the Japanese company states that Mazda Motor Corporation has reached an agreement “with Tesla, Inc. (Tesla) to adopt the North American Charging Standard (NACS) for charging ports on the company’s battery electric vehicles (BEV) launched in Japan from 2027 onward.”

With the NACS, Mazda aims to provide more convenience to its electric car customers by offering a wider range of charging options. The NACS will give Mazda customers access to Tesla Superchargers in Japan, but adapters will also make them “compatible with other charging standards besides NACS with the use of adapters.” CHAdeMO fast chargers are particularly widespread in Japan, but the expansion is stalling somewhat. This could also have been a reason for Mazda to endeavour to gain access to Tesla’s Japanese Supercharger network. However, this is not confirmed in the short press release, nor does it contain a statement from a Mazda manager.

Mazda announced in January 2024 that it would adopt the NACS for its US models. Electric Mazdas launched on the US market from 2025 will use the NACS as the charging standard in accordance with the agreement concluded at the time. However, Mazda has not yet launched a new electric car in the USA; the only electric model to date, the MX-30, has not been available on the US market since July 2023.

In November 2022, Tesla released the previously proprietary design of its Supercharger plug and named it the ‘North American Charging Standard’ – even though it was not yet an SAE standard at the time, which has only been the case since December 2023. In the course of 2023, several car manufacturers then announced that they would use the NACS for their electric cars in North America in future, starting with Ford and GM, but later, premium German brands such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW, as well as Japanese car manufacturers, also entered into agreements with Tesla. The background to this is the widespread use and high reliability of Superchargers in North America, meaning that it was simply cheaper and quicker for many manufacturers to adopt the Tesla standard and gain access to Superchargers than to build their own reliable fast-charging networks.

It remains to be seen whether something similar will happen in Japan. Mazda is still alone in taking this step; Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Subaru have not yet made any statements about Japan. However, all four of the Japanese carmakers mentioned above rely on the NACS in the USA.

mazda.com