Quebec-headquartered FLO, a third-party electric vehicle charging network, has announced its plans to offer Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) across its network of chargers in Canada.
This move comes in response to the increasing acceptance of NACS among automakers and is poised to mitigate the confusion among EV drivers resulting from varying charging equipment, reports Tesla North.
This development follows the recent decision by GM to adopt NACS in the U.S. and Canada, mimicking Ford’s move. These moves suggest that Tesla’s charging connector standard might edge out competitors such as CCS, which is bigger and bulkier.
Last week, FLO’s Chief Product Officer, Nathan Yang, highlighted the company’s commitment to this standardization. He linked the broader acceptance of NACS to its growing popularity among EV drivers and the reliability of the charging stations currently employing NACS. Notably, FLO is renowned for its high station reliability, boasting an impressive uptime of over 98%.
“In our pursuit to offer the optimal EV charging experience for our customers, we stand with the technologies and standards that our drivers prefer,” Yang stated.
FLO’s business model allows significant flexibility in adopting the standards and technologies that meet its customer needs. This agility extends to hardware, software, and network design, enabling rapid adoption of new technology and standards.
Among FLO’s most recent stations, the NEVI-compliant FLO UltraTM fast charger has been designed to support NACS cables upon customers’ or site hosts’ request.
FLO ensures the uptime of its charging stations using its proprietary system, SmartVIEW. This advanced system remotely supervises each station’s performance in real-time, permitting swift identification of any downtime, its frequency, and duration.
The uptime, essentially representing the proportion of time that the charging stations were operational compared to the total possible operational time, is calculated using a meticulous method that involves the total potential operating time, the start and end time of any outage, and total downtime for all stations.
In a bid to consistently deliver the best charging experience for all drivers, FLO is formulating a plan to allow existing station customers to add NACS on compatible stations. Further details regarding this feature will be revealed in an upcoming announcement.
Chargepoint, another third-party EV charging network with stations in Canada, announced today it would also adopt the Tesla charging connector.
