A BMW i5 with a native NACS port was spotted charging this weekend in Green River, Utah, leading to thoughts that BMW’s NACS transition may leapfrog a few other companies.
We’ve seen a lot of action in the NACS transition in the last few weeks, with several brands added to Tesla’s Supercharger “coming soon” page, separate announcements from VW and Honda, and with Hyundai shipping the first third-party vehicles with a native NACS port (which works great on Superchargers) and Kia’s native NACS EV6 just around the corner as well.
One of the brands added to the “coming soon” list is BMW, a brand whose NACS transition we haven’t heard a whole lot about lately. It announced in 2023 that NACS would come in 2025, and we know that an adapter will be available when BMW gains access to the network (though the transition has gotten a little bit chaotic in the interim, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s unwise abrupt firing of the whole Supercharger team).
But BMW also has a new class of vehicles coming out – dubbed, in the most German way possible, “Neue Klasse” – with a new EV platform that better integrates batteries into the vehicle structure. Those vehicles may come with NACS support natively, and the first of them should ship by the end of this year.
And we may have seen the first physical indication of those future native NACS vehicles this weekend in Utah, with a BMW i5 spotted being driven and charged by BMW engineers.
The pictures were taken by reddit user Redditq_, who we also followed up with. They mentioned that the vehicles all had various engineering equipment stuck to the dashboards, that there were three development vehicles in total at the station (other than his, in the middle of the shot above), and that the cars were using an adapter to charge. The engineers said they were testing the NACS port.
Interestingly enough, this charging station doesn’t have any NACS charging heads, only CCS and CHAdeMO. So the engineers used a CCS to NACS adapter to charge at this station.
This is actually one of the first vehicles that we’ve seen with a native NACS port, even in testing. While most brands have announced a transition and several are already sending out adapters and are Supercharger-compatible, the only other cars we’ve seen with native ports have been Hyundai/Kia cars.
So, despite BMW not being on the absolute forefront of the transition in terms of adapter availability (like Ford or Rivian, for example), it may leapfrog some brands at bringing a NACS-native car to market.
We saw a similar thing with Hyundai and Kia, when a camouflaged vehicle with a native port was spotted in July 2024, about six months before Hyundai started shipping the Ioniq 5 with its own native port. We wonder if something similar might happen with BMW.
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