Soon there will be a NACS vehicle for the would-be purchaser who does not want to buy a Tesla

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Yes, soon there will be a NACS vehicle for the would-be purchaser who does not want to buy a Tesla.  But it will have the charging port in the wrong place on the vehicle.  On October 5, 2023 Kia/Hyundai announced that it had joined the Tesla plug club.  The company announced that Real Soon Now, its electric vehicles would have an NACS charging port instead of the one-foot-in-the-grave CCS charging port.  And now, after a delay of more than fifteen months, the first non-Tesla vehicle will soon be available for purchase that will have an NACS charging port.  It is the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5, shown above right.

But the charging port on the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be in the wrong place.  The correct place for an NACS charging port is in the left rear or the right front of the car.  As you can see in the photo, however, the charging port on the 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be in the right rear corner.

For those who do nearly all of their charging at home, this wrong location for the charging port might not have to be a daily problem.  Most home charging is done at a mere Level 2 or slower, meaning the current is a mere 48 amps or less.  This means the wire gauge for the charging cable only needs to be a mere 6-gauge.  This means that the charging cable can easily be 23 feet (as it is for most home chargers).  And the home owner often has some measure of flexibility when choosing where in the garage to place the charger.  Put simply, for home charging, the fact of the charging port being in the wrong place can usually be worked around.

The problem with Hyundai having put the NACS port in the wrong place presents itself every time the car owner goes to a Tesla supercharging station.   Supercharging takes place at much higher current levels than a mere 48 amps.  This means the conductors need to be much heavier gauge than a mere 6 gauge.  Not only that, the designers of the Tesla supercharging cables have found the need to run cooling liquid through the charging cables to try to keep the cables from getting too hot.  All of this means that it is unworkable to try to provide a charging cable that is (for example) 23 feet long.  More than a decade ago it was well settled that the Tesla charging port would be in the left rear corner, and that the Tesla charging kiosk would have its (understandably not very long) charging cable at the correct corner of the parking spot to permit it to reach the vehicle charging port after the vehicle had been backed in to the parking space.

Note that I said “more than a decade ago it was well settled”.  Nobody who plays any role at all in the North American car industry could claim to be surprised that now, in 2025, the correct place to put a charging port would be the left rear corner or the right front corner.  It had been this way for more than a decade.

And yet, when Hyundai took fifteen months to change over its manufacturing to provide an NACS port instead of the one-foot-in-the-grave CCS port, Hyundai unaccountably did not put the NACS port in the correct place.  I suppose the wiring harness brought the heavy-gauge charging conductors to the right rear when it was a CCS port, and Hyundai did not want to incur the one-time cost of re-routing the wiring harness to bring those conductors to a correct corner of the vehicle.

I would have thought that with fifteen months of lead time, Hyundai’s engineers could get this right.  (Recall that Hyundai announced its adoption of the NACS standard on October 5, 2023.)

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As you can see in the image at right, the driver of an EV with its charging port in the wrong place might be tempted to park a non-Tesla vehicle “sideways”, tying up three parking spots.  This is denoted with red lane markers.  Instead, the least-bad way to park would be for the non-Tesla vehicle to straddle a lane marker, tying up just two parking spots instead of three.  This is shown at left in the image, with white lane markers.

Hyundai says its 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5 will be physically available for purchase “near the end of January”.

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