Tesla Magic Dock
The network of Tesla Supercharger columns is slowly opening up to the rest of electric cars, with all the consequent difficulties; if in Europe the transition was relatively simple and painless, so much so that even in Italy the Supercharger columns are already compatible with electric cars from other manufacturers, the same thing cannot be said for the United States where Tesla uses a proprietary connector and therefore found it somewhat in difficulty when it decided to open the charging network to the rest of the market. The solution is called the Tesla Magic Dock, nothing more than an adapter that allows you to connect a car equipped with a CCS Combo 1 port – the standard adopted throughout Europe – to the Tesla NACS socket.
In the video that we report at the bottom you can briefly see the functioning of the new adapter which is integrated into the column and can be unlocked via the official Tesla application; the operation seems simple enough, but small compatibility problems cannot be excluded a priori, at least initially. For this reason, Tesla has decided to start gradually with charging stations in California and New York – in any case the compatible stations are already indicated on the Tesla app.
There are 2 available rates, as already seen in Europe: you can decide to pay for each single use with the price of electricity which can vary from day to day, or you can decide to subscribe for $12.99 a month to have a lower price per kWh, with reductions that can go up to 12 cents per kWh.
Finally there is the problem of physical compatibility, considering that the Supercharger columns are equipped with relatively short charging cables and designed specifically for Tesla; despite being aware of the problem, at the moment Tesla has not proposed a solution but urges all users to be respectful of the charging stalls, without going to occupy the space next to it if the cable is not long enough to charge.