You can drive your life away and never notice the little arrow on the dashboard — the one next to the fuel canister icon that points out which side of the car the gas cap is on. The arrow is a fun piece of everyday design that has inspired many a know-it-all friend or TikTok. But while the intel it relays can be helpful if you’re driving a rental car, or are just generally forgetful, it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme what side your fuel filler is on. Service stations are so big that there’s generally enough space to park at an open pump in whatever orientation a vehicle demands.
That’s not quite the case with electric cars.
When I test-drove the new Hyundai Ioniq 9 this summer, the industrial designers had included their own version of the little arrow to point out the location of the EV’s charging port. In the Ioniq 9’s case, it’s on the passenger’s side, the opposite of where you’d find the port on a Tesla. Turns out, that’s a problem. On our trip from L.A. to San Jose, Hyundai's navigation system directed me to a busy Tesla Supercharger just off the interstate in the parking lot of a Denny’s. But because of the big EV’s backward port placement, I needed two empty stalls next to each other — both of which I wound up blocking when I backed in to charge. The episode is an example of how we screwed over the present by not thinking hard enough when we built the infrastructure of the recent past.
Let’s back up. In the opening stage of the EV race, the charging question was split between Tesla and everybody else. The other electric carmakers adopted a few shared plug standards. But just like with gas cars, where the left-or-right placement of the gas cap seemed to vary arbitrarily vehicle to vehicle, there was no standardized placement of the charging port. Because all manner of different EVs pulled in, companies like Electrify America and Chargepoint built their chargers with cords long enough to reach either side of a car.
Tesla, meanwhile, built out its excellent but vertically integrated Supercharger network with only Tesla cars in mind. In most cases, a station amounted to eight or more parking spaces all in a row. The cable that came off each charging post was only long enough to reach the driver’s side rear, where all the standardized ports on Teslas can be found. The thinking made sense at the time. Other EVs weren’t allowed to use the Supercharger network. Why, then, would you pay for extra cabling to reach the other side of the vehicle?
It became a big issue late in 2022. At that point, Musk made Tesla’s proprietary plug an open-source standard and encouraged the other carmakers to adopt it. One by one they fell in line. The other car companies pledged to use the newly renamed North American Charging Standard, or NACS, in their future EVs. Then Tesla began to open many, but not all, of its stations to Rivians, Hyundais, and other electric cars.
Which leads us to today. The Ioniq 9, which began deliveries this summer, comes with a NACS port. This allows drivers to use Tesla stations without the need to keep an annoying dongle handy. But because Hyundai put the port on the opposite side, the car is oriented in the opposite direction from the way hundreds or thousands of Supercharger stations are set up. Suppose you find an empty spot between two Teslas and back in — the plug that could reach your passenger’s side port actually belongs to the stall next to you, and is in use by the EV parked there. The available cord, the one meant for the stall you actually parked in, can’t reach over to the passenger’s side.
The result is a mess. Find two open stalls next to each other and you can make it work, though it means you’re taking up both of them (stealing the cord meant for the neighboring stall and blocking the cord meant for the one you’re parked in). At giant stations with dozens of plugs, this is no big deal. At smaller ones with just 12 or 16 plugs, it’s a nuisance. I’ve walked out and moved the Rivian I was test-driving before I had all the electricity I wanted because I felt guilty about blocking two stalls. To avoid this breach of etiquette you might need to park illegally, leaving your EV in a non-spot or in a place where it’s blocking the sidewalk just so it can reach the plug. (Says Tesla FAQ: “In some cases you might have to park over the line in order to charge comfortably. Avoid parking diagonally to reach the cable and try to obstruct as few charge posts as possible.)
Some relief from this short-sightnedness is coming. Tesla’s new “V4” stations that are currently opening around the world are built with this complexity in mind and include longer cables and an orientation meant to reach either side of the vehicle. The buildout of EV chargers of all kinds is slated to continue even with the Trump administration’s opposition to funding them, and new stations should be flexible to any kind of electric car. And the idea of making sure EVs of any size and shape can charge is picking up steam. For example, many of the stations in Rivian’s Adventure Network include at least one stall where the charging post is off to the side of an extra-long parking space so that an EV towing a trailer can reach its charging port.
Yet for now, we’re stuck with what we’ve already built. There are more than 2,500 Tesla Supercharger stations in the U.S., representing more than 30,000 individual plugs, and most of those were built with the V2 and V3 versions of Tesla’s technology that have this orientation problem. For years to come, many of those stations will be the best or only option for non-Tesla EVs on a road trip, which means we’re all in for some extra inconvenience.
