Today was supposed to be the day that Kia owners gain access to Tesla’s Supercharger network, but on Monday the brand announced that access would be delayed until spring. However, some owners have figured out a way to charge on Superchargers already.
It’s been a busy time for the North American EV industry’s transition to NACS, the charging standard originally advanced by Tesla and now standardized by SAE.
We’ve seen several brands added to the “coming soon” list, and even beyond that, VW and Honda have both made their own announcements that access is coming soon.
But the wait might not be that long for all owners, if you’re willing to do something unsanctioned to get a charge.
Kia and Hyundai electric cars are built on the same E-GMP platform, which is famous for its DC charging capability. And those brands were the first brands other than Tesla to ship cars with a local NACS port, without having to use an adapter.
Currently, we’ve heard reports that Hyundai electric cars qualify without factor on Tesla’s network, even though that logo was just added to Tesla’s “coming soon” page this week. And this reportedly applies in some cases to Kia as well, with a slight twist.
A Kia EV6 owner, who is taking Technically Jeff’s call on Youtube, posted a video of himself charging his EV6 in a Tesla Supercharger today, the day Kia originally intended to have access to it.
He doesn’t have a 2025 EV6 with native NACS port, and instead used a third party adapter from A2Z. This is not the official Kia-sanctioned adapter, as the official Kia adapter is not out yet. Manufacturers typically recommend that you use an official adapter, instead of a third party one.
In order to get the Supercharger to recognize his vehicle, he opened the Tesla app and listed his vehicle as an Ioniq 5, rather than an EV6. We’ve heard of other owners trying the same with Honda Prologues, listing them as Chevy Blazers (again, due to the car’s shared underpinnings) and being able to charge.
You pre-conditioned the battery by tricking your car into thinking you were going to use some other CCS DC tester nearby, so the battery was only partially conditioned and the initial fast speed was not optimal.
Further, because he charged at a Tesla V3 cabinet, which isn’t capable of 800V, the EV6’s 800V charging system was limited. So he ended up peaking at around 100kW, which is roughly half of the best performance these cars can handle. Until Tesla rolls out more V4 cabinets, 800V vehicles can expect slower charging performance on Superchargers than they would get on an 800V charger.
The update that allows this also appears to have been recent. Other owners have recently attempted to charge Kias using the same method, without success. But now we see this report that is imaginable today, if you have a third-party adapter and don’t mind lying a little about Tesla.
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Jameson has been driving electric cars since 2009, and covering EVs, sustainability and policy for Electrek since 2016.
You can contact him at jamie@electrek. co.