Hot on the heels of Kia being added to Tesla's “coming soon” page for the Supercharger, we're now learning that Supercharger support won't arrive as quickly as Kia expects – with a delay of weeks or months before Kia owners. can connect to North America's largest fast charging network.
Earlier today, Kia and several other brands were added to Tesla's upcoming page, suggesting that access may be imminent.
This squared off with the previous announcement in September that access would arrive in January – with the planned date of January 15, just two days away from now.
But today, PC Magazine reported that Kia's arrival will be delayed to sometime in the Spring.
Specifically, Kia has updated a press release on its website that previously stated a launch date of January 15. The press release now says “Access to DC fast chargers is planned for the first quarter of 2025.”
That means it could be anytime in the next three months, assuming there are no further delays.
PC Magazine quoted James Bell, Kia's head of PR, as saying “a delay has occurred and we are working with the appropriate teams to confirm availability/a new date.” We also reached out to Bell to see if we could get more information, but had not heard back by press time.
It is not clear whether this delay will affect other brands, such as Hyundai and Genesis.
Kia and Hyundai (and Hyundai's sub-brand Genesis) share a platform for their electric cars, and were the first to offer cars with native NACS ports on 2025 models, instead of using adapters like every other model until now. Older Kia/Hyundai vehicles without native NACS ports will still be able to use the adapter once the vehicles have access to the network.
We've reached out to Hyundai to see if they've been hit by the same delay, but haven't heard back. We will update when we do.
In 2022, Tesla announced that it will open its charging network, attracted by the large amount of money promised in President Biden's support for EV charging.
For a while it seemed like a hail mary, as many thought that most of the industry had already committed to the SAE CCS standard for fast charging.
But then in 2023, Ford announced that they would use Tesla's “NACS” connector, and all the dominoes began to fall. Before long, the entire industry had announced the switch to Tesla's charging standard.
But these things take time, and the industry had to work on redesigning the vehicles, building adapters, organizing the software handshake, and creating a formal standard. Now, a few brands may already be using Superchargers, with more to come.
The release appeared to be delayed, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk suddenly fired the entire Supercharging team that was responsible for the successful implementation of this coup that could see Tesla take the lead forever in EV charging, a firing that caused chaos and jeopardized the revolution.
Earlier today, when so many brands were added to the “coming soon” page, it seemed that maybe the dust settling in the chaotic charging state caused my Musk to become unstable. But perhaps the Kia news is an indication that there are still issues that need to be addressed.
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