How To Charge Honda And Acura Electric Vehicles On Tesla Superchargers
It’s a good day to be a Honda or Acura electric vehicle owner. And that’s because today is the day that owners of those vehicles get access to the Tesla Supercharger network. But first, you need one of these. And you also need to know how to do it. So, that’s what we’re going to go over here today. In today’s video, I’m going to explain everything you need to know as a Honda or Acura electric vehicle owner to access the Tesla Supercharger network. Let’s get into it. Okay, so I just finished saying that today’s the day that Honda and Acura electric vehicle owners finally get access to the Tesla Supercharger network, but that’s not entirely true. It’s actually the day that they officially get access to the Tesla Supercharger network. And that’s for a while now. It’s been no small secret to many owners of the Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX that you could trick the Tesla app into letting you charge at a Tesla Supercharger by selecting one of General Motors electric vehicles. And that’s because General Motors makes the Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX for those companies. So the electronics, the communication process was the same. So, if you would have put in, say, a Cadillac L into your Tesla app and charged and had an adapter, you could charge your Acura ZDX saying that it was a Cadillac L. There was no way for you to enter the Acura ZDX or the Honda Prologue as your electric vehicle. So, you had to use another one. And if you used one of those GM electric vehicles, you’d be able to charge your EV. But now, you don’t have to trick anybody. Now, it’s official. The supercharger network is open to Acura ZDX and Honda prologue owners. You do need one of these. This is the official adapter that it’s the same adapter for Honda and for Acura except there’s a little uh logo on the top of it. One has the Acura logo, the other one has the Honda logo. It’s the same exact adapter. From what I understand, they get these from General Motors. So, it’s basically the General Motors adapter that they’re just branding for Honda and Acura. You get these at the a Honda or an Acura dealership. The manufacturer suggested retail is $225. I believe they’re going to sell for $225, but the uh dealerships are independent uh owned. They can charge what they want. So, some dealers might charge more, some might charge less. But I know the MSRP is $225, which is in line with what most of these uh Knack adapters are costing depending on which uh brand. And we’ll get into adapters at the end of this video. Talk a little bit about the different adapters, but this is the only one that Honda and Acura are saying that you should be using on their vehicles because the only adapter that they know they’ve tested and they know it’s safe and there won’t be any problems. and they are stating that using a non-approved adapter, you could void your warranty if you have some kind of a problem. So, this is the adapter that those brands want you to use. Okay. So, how do you use it? Well, at the launch today, the opening of the of the Supercharger network, Honda and Acura don’t have their native apps done yet. They haven’t been able to finalize that process with Tesla where you can initiate a charging session, stop a charging session, pay through the Honda and the Acura app. So, that’s coming hopefully very soon. But, as of today, you need to use the Tesla app in order to charge at the Tesla Superchargers. And uh let me qualify something. You can’t charge at every Tesla Supercharger. It’s a little complicated. But I’m going to show you in a minute how you know which ones you can go to. But basically, there’s different generations of Tesla superchargers. Uh there there’s uh V2 superchargers that are out there now. Those are the older versions that are limited to 150 kW. You can’t charge on those. Matter of fact, no electric vehicles other than Tesla vehicles can charge on those. It’s not just a Honda Acura thing. So those superchargers you cannot use. You can use the V3 superchargers, which is what most of them are, and also the new V4 superchargers. And then there’s also some limited amount of the Tesla urban superchargers. They’re lower powered, only 72 kW, but uh you can use those with the adapter. And then there’s the Magic Dock Tesla superchargers. Those have an integrated Knack adapter built into them. You could have been using those all along. They’ll charge any uh electric vehicle that has a CCS inlet, which is what Honda and Acura electric vehicles have. So, the few Magic Dock locations, there’s not a whole lot of them out there, but there are a growing number of them. Those you could have been using all along, okay? So, with this adapter now, you can use most V3 superchargers and all the new, not even all, most of the V4 superchargers. Uh, but first you need to download the Tesla app. So you download the Tesla app. You have to put in a payment method, your credit card in the Tesla app. And then you click on charging and then vehicle details. And then you’re going to click on the top right hand corner. There’s like a plus icon. You click on that. It’s going to ask you to put in the make, model, year, and driving range of your EV. really doesn’t matter what you put in for the driving range. That’s uh immaterial, but you you should put in what the EPA rated range is. Uh you could but like I said, you could put in any any number there you want there. And then it’s going to ask, does your vehicle have a knack charge port or do you have a NX DC adapter? You want to click yes on that because hopefully you do have the Knack DC adapter. And then you want to click save. And once you’ve done that, you’re all set up to use the Tesla app at a Tesla Supercharger. But now you need to know which Tesla Superchargers you can access. So the Tesla app will do that. It’ll tell you which superchargers your vehicle can charge at. You can also do it in the Honda and Acura apps, but also which is my preferred method is in the vehicles navigation. Honda and uh Acura EVs have native Google Maps and in the vehicle if you set it up and tell it that you have a Knax adapter, it will route you to Tesla Superchargers that accept the Knack adapter for non-Tesla vehicles. So, let’s stop here, hop into Acura ZDX, and I’ll show you how you set your navigation up so that it will display the superchargers that you can go to. Okay. First up, from the map screen, select the charging station icon under the search bar. You can see the list of charging stations near me. And the Tesla Supercharger say plugs not compatible. Use the charging stations list filter icon to open its drop- down menu. Once that loads, you need to have the correct charger speed selected. Here I have it set to the middle icon, which is two lightning bolts. That setting will show you all of the charging stations that can deliver 150 kowatt or more. If you select the first icon with one lightning bolt, the vehicle will display all of the chargers that can deliver 50 kowatt or more. That setting will show you all of the Tesla superchargers you can access, including the 72 kW Tesla urban superchargers, while the middle setting will filter the urban superchargers out, but they will show you all of the V3 and V4 superchargers. If you select the last icon with the three lightning bolts, that won’t show you any Tesla superchargers because it will only display DC fast chargers that can deliver 350 kW or more. And most Tesla superchargers except for a few V4 stations are currently limited to 250 kW. Now, once you have that filter set correctly, you need to select the box under compatible plugs. You can see that the box currently lists the J1772 and CCS1 combo. Under adapters, toggle Knacks on. Now, when I go back, you can see that the Knack is included in the compatible plugs. Now, let’s see what the list of local charging station shows. It still has all of the stations it had before, including the local Tesla superchargers, even the ones that you cannot use, but they say plug not compatible, so you don’t make a mistake. This supercharger is one of the older V2 superchargers, so non-Tesla vehicles cannot use it, even with an adapter. But when I scroll down a little more, here’s a Tesla Supercharger site that I can use. But it reminds me that a Knack adapter is required. We have the Knack adapter. So, this is the site that I’ll be visiting next in this video to demonstrate how to use the adapters. So, I’m going to tag that option and the navigation system will route me there. Okay. Next up, I’m going to head out to a local Tesla Supercharger with an Acura ZDX and we’ll go through the process of initiating a charging session. But, uh, one of the questions that I know I’m going to get is, “Well, how fast will this charge my electric vehicle? Are Tesla superchargers faster than other DC fast chargers?” Well, yes and no. There are DC fast chargers out there with varying speeds and power levels. Really depends on which one you’re comparing it to. There are DC fast charging stations out there that are actually more powerful than Tesla Supercharger. So, I can’t say, “Oh, yeah, you’ll you’re always going to charge faster at a Tesla Supercharger.” You you may charge quicker than the one you’ve been charging at. It depends on what power level that one has. But the one thing I will say is that Tesla superchargers in general are powerful DC fast chargers. and they will supply as much current as your vehicle is calling for because the V3 superchargers which are the predominant superchargers out there have a maximum power output of around 250 260 kW. The Honda prologue has a maximum DC fast charge rate of 150 kW and the Acura ZDX is a little bit higher. It can charge at up to 190 kW. So the Tesla superchargers will charge your vehicle as fast as it can be charged at that time uh because it’ll be able to deliver at least as much power as the vehicle is going to call for. Now the lower power Tesla urban superchargers that I was talking about earlier, those are limited to 72 kW. So they would charge your vehicle a little bit slower. Uh but there’s not as many of them out there. I think you’re mostly going to be charging at the V3 superchargers and uh they can deliver as much power as your vehicle is going to call for. But the charging speed depends on a lot of factors. How hot or how cold your battery is, what your state of charge is when you pull up. The vehicles will charge faster when they’re at a lower state of charge. As the state of charge increases and you get to higher states of charge, all electric vehicles slow down the charging rate, not just Honda and Acura vehicles. So, uh, you charge the fastest, you know, between, you know, 10% and maybe 50 or 60%. Once you get up over 60, 70, close to 80%, the vehicle slows down its charging rate dramatically. And it’s one of the reasons why most people don’t stay at DC fast chargers or Tesla superchargers beyond 80% state of charge because the vehicle starts to charge very slowly after that. Okay. Uh, let’s hop in a ZDX, head to my local Tesla Supercharger, and we’ll go over how you charge your Honda or Acura at a Tesla Supercharger. Okay, so you’re at the Tesla Supercharger, but we need to back it up for a second because it’s important you understand how to park at a Tesla Supercharger. And that’s because the Tesla Superchargers were designed originally to service Tesla vehicles. And Tesla vehicles have their charge port on the rear left side of the vehicle. And that allows Tesla vehicles to back in and plug in perfectly. If you notice, the cable isn’t long on these Tesla Superchargers. Not nearly as long as it is on the DC fast chargers from other networks. And that’s because these were designed for Tesla vehicles. Now, the new Tesla chargers, they’re called V4 chargers. They have longer cables to accommodate non-Tesla vehicles. They can reach almost anywhere on the vehicle, wherever the charge port is. But for today, most of the chargers you’re going to encounter are chargers like this, the V3 superchargers. They have these short cables. So, in order to be able to reach your charge port, which for the Honda vehicles and AC Acura vehicles are on the front left side of the vehicle, you have to park in a very specific way. and that is you’ve got to pull into the spot about a foot and a half over the line. You’re going to occupy two Tesla Supercharger stalls. Unfortunately, it’s the only way to do it. You can’t just occupy one stall. You see how the vehicle’s parked here a little bit over the line? That’s because where the cable comes out of the charger, you need to be in line with that almost directly where the cable comes out of the charger in order for it to reach because as you could see here, that’s it. It barely reaches as it is. And not only do you have to be right over that line, you’ve got to pull as far up as you can and nearly touch the ballards that are there to protect the superchargers. I know this isn’t ideal, but this is how it’s set up. And this specific way to park the vehicle is the only way you’re going to be able to charge your Honda Prologue or your Acura ZDX. Now, there are some supercharger sites that can accommodate pullth through vehicles or sometimes they’re on the side of the parking stall. Those will be easier for you to uh plug in, but they’re rare. So, if you find one of those, then good for you. But this is what you’re going to normally encounter. And this stall here is for this supercharger to service. But if you notice, I’m really not parked in this stall. The majority of the vehicle is parked in the stall next to me. So, that supercharger can’t be used while you’re charging. Okay. So, you’ve parked the vehicle correctly and you’re at the supercharger. How do you plug in? Okay. Well, first you need to remove the little plug cover that covers the two DC pins on the bottom of your charge port. Then you remove the connector from the Tesla Supercharger. And when you’re going to put it in the adapter, you can’t just push it in. It won’t go in. You have to press the button on the bottom of the adapter. Now it can lock in. Now once it’s locked onto the connector, insert it into the vehicle. Make sure you hear that click. And now you need to activate the charging session from your Tesla app. And you do that by opening up your Tesla app, tagging the three little bars on the top right corner, and then you’ll see charge your other EV. You press charger other EV, it’s going to locate you and it knows which supercharger you’re at based on your location of your phone. It shows right here that I’m at the Alamucci, New Jersey supercharger. And I press charge here. After you press charge here, it’s going to ask you what stall are you at because all of these supercharger stalls are numbered. It starts with 1 A, 1 B. This is 1 C. So, now I’m going to tag 1C and then hit start charging. I hear the vehicle’s charge port lock, which means the supercharger got my command and it’s going to begin charging. Now, the vehicle just beeped, which means it’s beginning to charge. The app still says initialize charging. Now, it shows the state of charge and it’s going to start displaying the charging rate that the supercharger is charging your vehicle at. You’ll see it’ll it’ll it’ll increase as the charging session goes on. Uh depending on the temperature of your battery and your car, you may see your peak charging rate or you may not. It’s really dependent on a lot of factors. Uh but you can monitor the charging session from your app. Okay. So, you’re charging. Now, how do you end the charging session? Well, there’s a couple ways. If you set a certain percentage in your vehicle, uh let’s say 80%, I mean it could be set to 100%, but many people when they use these fast chargers, they unplug it like 80% because the vehicle starts charging very slowly after that. So whatever your limit is, if the vehicle hits that, it’ll stop charging. It won’t go past the limit that you set in the car. But let’s say you haven’t reached that limit, but you’re done charging. How do you end the session? There’s a couple ways of doing it. Number one, you can open up your Tesla app and hit the stop charging button. That’s number one. Number two, you can press this button here on top of the Tesla connector. That’s going to end the charging session. You’ll hear it click and then you’ll be able to remove the connector. The way you remove the connector is you don’t remove the Tesla connector from the adapter. Remove the adapter first. You press the button on top of the adapter and pull it out of the car. Now you press the button on the bottom of the adapter, the one that we had to press to put the connector in. Remove the adapter and holster the Tesla connector. Now, you could also end the charging session from within the Honda and Acura apps once they are fully done and you can use them to charge at the Tesla Superchargers. But as of today, the launch of this the the opening of the supercharger network for Honda and Acura vehicles, the only way to do the charging session is by using the Tesla app. From what I understand, pretty soon Honda and Acura will have their native apps ready and you’ll be able to use those to charge. So that’s it. Put the cap back on. Close the charge port door. Don’t forget your adapter. Bring it back in the car with you. and you’ve used the Tesla Supercharger to charge your Honda or Acura electric vehicle. All right, so I said earlier that I was going to talk a little bit more about adapters at the end of the video. And here we are at the end of the video and we’re going to talk about adapters. This is the official Acura and Honda adapter. If you take a look at this adapter here, looks very similar, doesn’t it? And that’s because this is the Electron Vortex adapter. Electron makes this adapter for Honda and Acura or really for General Motors cuz as I said earlier, this is really a GM uh co-engineered adapter. They co-engineered it with Electron. They took Electron’s Vortex adapter and they added a couple of things to it. They said, “We like your adapter. It’s a good solid adapter, but we want our adapter to be a little bit better.” So, we’re going to add a couple of things. They made the uh outer plastic a little bit more brake resistant. They also added an extra interlocking pin in here, so when the vehicle is attached, when the adapter is attached to a vehicle, it can’t be pulled out hot. It’s a good safety feature. But, um, basically it is the same as this Electron Vortex adapter. This is the A Toz Typhoon Pro adapter. If you follow me here on State of Charge, you know this is one of the adapters that I use frequently. This adapter here is the official Tesla adapter. And all of these are DC adapters, DC only Knack to uh CCS1 adapters. This is the official Tesla adapter. Tesla makes this adapter and they sell it to companies like Ford and uh General Motors and Riven and a bunch of companies get this adapter from Tesla. And then this is the Anthol Knax adapter. This is actually the only adapter currently that is safety certified that has gone through UL certification, safety certification, and is safety certified. The only one on the market. Unfortunately, you can’t buy it yet. You should be able to buy it in about a month from the date that this video is going live. But uh you know that it’s a high quality well-made adapter if it passed safety certification before any of these other adapters have. Okay. So why am I mentioning all this? Well, in a perfect world you everybody would use the adapter that Honda and Acura tells them to use. It’s their cars. They say this is the adapter we want you to use. But it’s not a perfect world. And we know people go out online and buy other products. They say, “I’m not paying $225 from Acura, Honda, or whatever. I’m going to I’m going to get my own Knack to CCS1 adapter.” These are the only adapters that I have used, checked out, talked to engineers that designed them, and will endorse and say, “These adapters are safe to use. I’m comfortable endorsing them and saying, you know, I use them on my EVs all the time.” There are dozens of other Knacks to CCS1 adapters that you can buy out there online. Go to Amazon, click next to CCS1 adapter. You’re going to see dozens of them. Most of them are lowquality junk, unsafe. And that’s the reason why Honda and Acura and the other OEMs have said we you can only use the adapter that we make or the one that we endorse and sell you because they can’t test dozens and dozens of other adapters. So, they’re saying we’re not even going to look at any of them. This is the adapter we sell. This is the one we want you to use. But, as I said, I know not everybody’s going to do that. If you’re going to go out and get a third party adapter, get one of these. These are the adapters that are safe, high quality, well-made adapters. First option is get the one your automaker’s telling you to get. But if you don’t want to get that one or they’re out of stock or for whatever reason, the Electron Vortex, the A Toz Typhoon Pro, there’s really no name for this one. It’s just the Tesla made kna CCS1 adapter and the Amphenol adapter are all high quality well-made adapters that you know I’ve used dozens of times on my electric vehicles and I endorse them. Matter of fact, I have coupon codes with the A Toz adapter and the Electron Vortex adapter to save some money. I’ll have links in those in the description of this video. But you buy the adapter that you’re comfortable with. But I needed to at least talk about this because there’s so many adapters out there and I see some of my followers buying some of the real cheap adapters. They go to Amazon and they click on filter by price. They buy adapter for like a hundred bucks and the thing dies in a month. You’re you’re lucky if that’s all that happens and it doesn’t create a problem with your vehicle or somebody gets hurt or something cuz there’s some super lowquality adapters out there. It’s a total race to the bottom. Everyone’s getting in this game to try to sell these adapters cuz tens of thousands of them are being sold every month and everybody wants to undercut the next guy. So, they make them really cheaply made on the inside with, you know, a thin plastic casing. You drop it once, it breaks. If you if you use uh 500 amps for 10 minutes running through it, some of the this the connections break. So, you know, you you think you’re saving money, you’re really not. get a good high quality adapter and uh that’s the way to go. And I I know that you’re going to be able to charge for many years with the adapter and it’s going to be safe and you’re not going to have any issues. The uh Honda Prologue and the Acura ZDX actually do pull 500 amps for a while. So, it’s uh a lot of power going through the adapter. So, uh you you want a adapter that can handle that. This This is rated for 500 amps. It has that stamped on the side. 1,000 volt 500 amps. Um I’m sure that 500 amps has a time period though. It wouldn’t be able to deliver 500 amps for like an hour straight. But um uh your vehicle is only going to pull that for 10 minutes or something like that uh before it starts ramping down its power. So um that’s the adapters. I just wanted to go over this cuz I know people are going to rush out and try to save a few dollars. Please don’t buy one of those super lowquality adapters that you find on uh Amazon. These are the only ones that I’ve tested. I’ve used other ones. I’m not going to even mention names. Most of the other ones you see on Amazon are junk. They really are. And uh you might get away with it for a while. It might work just fine for a certain period of time, but when it breaks, uh you’re you’re lucky if it just stops working and it doesn’t cause you a problem with your vehicle. Oh, now you’re involved with a warranty issue with uh your your car if the adapter caused some kind of problem with the car. All right. Well, that’s pretty much all we have here today for our how to charge a Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX on the Tesla Supercharger Network. Congratulations for finally getting official access to the Tesla Supercharger network. I’ve had a lot of uh Honda and Acura EV owners reach out to me and say, “Tom, any insight on this? When are we going to get We feel like we’re last to the party. Well, you’re not last to the party. There’s still a couple automakers out there. Some of the German brands, uh, particularly Volkswagen Group, uh, BMW, they don’t have Supercharger access yet, but, uh, it’s supposed to come this summer. We’ll see, but you guys have it now. And, uh, happy charging at Tesla Superchargers. They may not always be your first option, but there’s like, I think over 23,000 Supercharger stalls now that you have access to. So, when you’re on a road trip, you can go to Electrify America, you can go to Iana, EVgo. There’s a whole bunch of networks out there, but now you also have those Tesla superchargers. Just make sure you use your navigation system or your app and you don’t end up at one that you can’t plug in and charge because they are out there. Check ahead of time if you’re on a long road trip and make sure that the places you plan to stop at are actual supercharger sites that you can access. All right, that’s all we have here today. Hey, if this is your first time here at State of Charge, please hit that subscribe button and ring the notification bell so you don’t miss any upcoming electric vehicle news and reviews. And as always, thanks for watching.
This video will explain everything you need to know to charge a Honda or Acura electric vehicle on Tesla Superchargers.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:38 What you need to know to charge at Tesla Superchargers
05:23 How to set up the Tesla app
07:40 How to set Google Navigation in your car to list Tesla Superchargers
10:30 How fast will Superchargers chage Honda and Acure vehicles
13:08 How to park at a Tesla Supercharger
16:00 How to use the NACS to CCS1 adapter
20:02 The different NACS to CCS1 adapters available today
27:32 Outro
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