Dear Kia electric vehicle owners: Your days of envying Tesla owners while you waste time with unresponsive credit card readers, broken screens and mysteriously slow charging speeds are about to be over.
Kia will soon ship out adapters that allow access to the Tesla Supercharger stations, InsideEVs has learned. A Kia U.S. spokesperson confirmed that dealers have been made aware of the incoming adapters and that the parts are shipping to them right now.
Kia EV owners will be notified that the adapter is available soon on their Kia Access smartphone app, the spokesperson said. The adapters will be free of charge for any recent EV6 and EV9 owners, and available to purchase for owners who took delivery prior to September 2024, the automaker announced last year.
Photo by: Hyundai
Earlier this month, PC Mag reported that the Kia adapter rollout had run into a “slight delay,” as Supercharger access was originally slated to begin Jan. 15. It turns out the delay wasn’t a very long one, however. Kia has not stated the purchase price of the adapters yet; its corporate cousin Hyundai is slated to issue them for free. The Kia spokesperson said only that they would be “affordably priced” for non-recent owners. Most Tesla North American Charging Standard (NACS) adapters are around $200.
The NACS revolution kicked off with Ford’s EVs in 2023 and quickly spread to the rest of the American auto industry. Nearly every automaker that makes EVs announced a plan to allow access to the Tesla Superchargers either last year or in 2025, via adapters, all while they eventually move to making Tesla’s NACS charging port the standard one on their vehicles. The charging system has since become an SAE standard rather than a proprietary Tesla plug.
Allowing access to the Superchargers was seen as an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” way of replicating the generally excellent, seamless and high-quality charging experience Tesla offers. The smaller and sleeker NACS plug is also much easier to handle than the Combined Charging System (CCS) plug that’s been standard on non-Tesla U.S.-market EVs for many years.
Photo by: Kia
Kia EV9 GT with a NACS plug
Starting with their 2025 models, Kia too will switch to the native NACS plug from the factory. The updated EV6 and EV9 will go NACS first, but in the meantime, owners of CCS-equipped cars will be able to charge using the forthcoming adapters. Hyundai’s EVs, which use nearly identical hardware, have not seen any charging performance issues using these adapters so far.
Contact the author: [email protected]
