There is no EU law prohibiting other charging standards for electric cars. The car industry locked one standard in because they deemed it to be technically a good and future-proof solution. When Tesla introduced the Model 3 on the market, it came with CCS2 from the beginning. They had a chance to stick to their proprietary plug, but decided against it.
It’s not quite right to say Tesla “decided against” its own plug. The EU’s 2014 Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Directive locked CCS2 in as the
mandatory standard for public charging.
Sure, other plugs weren’t banned, but if you wanted your cars to work with Europe’s charging network, you had no real choice but to adopt CCS2. Tesla lobbied for its connector, but regulators said “no, a standard is already chosen.”
By mandating CCS2 early, the EU locked into an inferior connector and left no room for the better solution to win on its merits.
That’s why the U.S. wound up in a better place: by letting the market play out, NACS rose to the top naturally, and now it’s becoming the new standard. Just like what the EU is doing with phone charging cables: in the short term you get uniformity, but you slow down adoption of the thing that was actually better
So much hyperbole 🙄. First, it did not happen, for good reasons. I would also not be happy with Micro-USB as a universal charging standard, to be clear. If you look at EU legislation from a high level, they try to avoid baking technical standards into law whenever possible. This kind of details work is usually delegated to standard bodies that are organised and paid for by the industry. The USB-C mandate is the exception, not the rule.
It didn’t happen, but not because the EU didn’t try. They pushed Micro-USB hard as the “common charger” solution, even after Lightning was already on the market. That’s exactly my point. By the time the EU process finished, the tech was already behind.
And they may delegate to industry bodies, but the outcome is still the same. Once Brussels blesses a “standard,” it’s effectively frozen for years. USB-C only won out because the market ignored the EU’s Micro-USB push and moved ahead anyway. But that option has been taken away when it comes to USB-C.
I’ll repeat what I said a few posts upthread.
Hard-coding USB-C into law creates a chilling effect on innovation; the EU’s own data shows how their micro-USB push slowed USB-C adoption; Oppo’s already hit the physical limit of USB-C; and even if a better port came along tomorrow, the EU’s process would delay it 5–8 years. You see those as acceptable trade-offs to mandate something that was
already happening without regulation. I don’t.
