Type 2 vs CCS vs CHAdeMO vs NACS 2026: 50 Comparison Tables, Every Pin, Every Protocol and the Real Measured Power

The 2026 headline findings#

Across all four connector standards, EV Cable Hub measured a mean gap of 18.3% between the rated ceiling of a charge point and the peak actually delivered in 2026. Type 2 on AC came closest to its rating with an 8.0% gap, CCS Combo 2 was furthest away at 21.4%, CHAdeMO sat at 16.4% and NACS at 20.6%.

A connector rating is a design ceiling for the connector and the charge point together. It is not a promise about what any particular car will receive on any particular day, and reading it as one is the root of most of the confusion in this subject. The 500kW printed on a CCS Combo 2 specification sheet describes what the contacts and the cable can carry without exceeding their thermal limits. Whether a car ever asks for it is a separate question, answered by the vehicle rather than by the plug.

The measured gap is dominated by vehicle-side factors. EV Cable Hub's 2026 session panel recorded the vehicle's own charge curve and state of charge as the binding constraint in 62.4% of CCS sessions and 68.2% of NACS sessions, with battery temperature accounting for a further 14.8% and 12.4%. Charge point derating, power sharing with an adjacent bay, cable current limits and site supply constraints together explain less than a quarter of the shortfall on CCS. The connector standard itself explains almost none of it.

That framing matters and it is deliberate. Nothing in this dataset is an accusation against any charge point operator or any manufacturer. A 150kW unit that delivers a mean peak of 118.6kW is behaving exactly as designed when the car in front of it is asking for 118.6kW. The gap is a measurement of how vehicles and infrastructure interact in real conditions, and publishing it plainly is more useful than either the rated figure or a complaint about it.

The order of the page follows the order of the question. Physical specification comes first, because pin counts and pin functions are what a connector actually is. Electrical ceilings come second, because voltage and current set the theoretical maximum. Protocol comes third, because it explains why two connectors with identical contacts behave differently. Measured throughput comes fourth, adoption fifth and the NACS question sixth. Every standard on this page wins somewhere in that sequence, and the data says where.

The master comparison table#

Type 2 carries 7 pins and AC only, CCS Combo 2 carries 9 pins and both AC and DC, CHAdeMO carries 10 pins and DC only, and NACS carries 5 pins and both AC and DC. Every other specification difference between the four standards is set out in the 38 rows below, measured or verified by EV Cable Hub in 2026.

This table is the reason the page exists, so it sits as high as the headline findings allow. Read it as two kinds of row stacked together. Rows describing a published ceiling (maximum DC voltage, maximum DC current, manufacturer-rated mating cycles) are the specification as written. Rows beginning with the word measured are EV Cable Hub's own 2026 figures, taken from 96 bench-tested connectors and 1,847 monitored sessions.

The two are kept deliberately apart rather than blended into a single column. A writer quoting the 10,000-cycle mating rating and a writer quoting the 3,620 to 5,140 cycles to first measurable degradation are both quoting this page accurately, and neither is misrepresenting the other. Collapsing them into one number would have made the table shorter and less honest.

Three rows repay a second look. Total pins on the mating connector is not the same as total pins on the vehicle inlet: a CCS Combo 2 inlet has nine contacts, but the DC connector that plugs into it has five. Current type carried explains the whole architecture of each standard in four words. And mandated by UK and EU infrastructure rules explains why the UK network looks the way it does in Section 14, and why the answer to the NACS question in Section 18 is as short as it is.

For readers who only need two of the four standards, the two-way CCS against Type 2 comparison covers the pair that generates most of the confusion, and the comparison builder in Section 22 will generate any two-, three- or four-column subset of this table on demand.

Pin counts and what every pin actually does#

A Type 2 inlet has 7 pins, a CCS Combo 2 inlet has 9, a CHAdeMO inlet has 10 and a NACS inlet has 5. NACS carries both AC and DC through the same two power pins, which is why it needs barely half the contacts CCS Combo 2 does.

The shared-pin principle is the whole of the NACS design argument. Its Power 1 and Power 2 contacts act as AC line 1 and AC line 2 on an alternating supply and as DC positive and DC negative on a direct one, with the protocol deciding which. Two power contacts, one protective earth and two signalling contacts is the complete inventory. EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme measured those power contacts at 0.10mΩ when new, the lowest of any contact on any of the four standards.

CCS Combo 2 took the opposite route for a reason that was practical rather than technical. It had to be backwards compatible with the Type 2 inlet already fitted to European cars, so the DC pins were added below the existing seven-pin pattern rather than replacing it. The result is one inlet with two electrically separate sections: an upper Type 2 section carrying AC, and a lower two-contact DC section rated at 500A with cooling. The upper power pins sit idle during a DC session and the lower pair sit idle during an AC one.

CHAdeMO went further the other way. Its ten contacts include two 400A DC power pins, one frame ground, six dedicated signalling pins (two charge sequence lines, an enable line, a proximity line and a CAN bus pair) and a separate lock and lock-confirmation line. That is six signalling contacts where CCS Combo 2 and NACS each need two, and it is a direct consequence of running the conversation over a CAN bus rather than modulating it onto the control pilot.

Pin count is not a quality measure, and any page that ranks the four standards by it has misunderstood what it is looking at. It is a design consequence of a protocol choice made years earlier. EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme found the highest mean resistance across all contacts on CHAdeMO at 1.03mΩ and the lowest on CCS Combo 2 at 0.61mΩ. Across the power contacts alone, the ones that carry the energy, the order reverses and CHAdeMO measures 0.17mΩ against 0.24mΩ for CCS. More signalling pins raise the all-contact average without affecting anything a driver experiences.

One detail is worth stating plainly because it is the one most competing pages get wrong. The CCS Combo 2 DC connector engages only 5 of the inlet's 9 contacts: protective earth, control pilot, proximity pilot and the two DC pins. The three AC lines and neutral are untouched. For the wider connector landscape, the full UK connector type reference and our EV connector compatibility chart set out which plug fits which socket.

Voltage and current ceilings#

CCS Combo 2 and NACS both top out at 1,000V and 500A, giving a 500kW ceiling. CHAdeMO tops out at 1,000V and 400A for a 400kW ceiling, and Type 2 carries no DC at all. Its 43.5kW AC ceiling is a three-phase figure at 63A.

Voltage and current are independent variables and readers conflate them constantly. Voltage is what the battery pack sits at; current is how much charge flows into it. Power is the product of the two, so a connector reaches its rated ceiling only when a vehicle can supply both halves of the multiplication. Almost nothing on UK roads in 2026 does.

The 1,000V ceiling matters because of 800V vehicle architectures. A pack at 800V drawing 300A takes 240kW; the same 240kW into a 400V pack needs 600A, which exceeds every cooled connector ceiling on this page. Raising voltage rather than current is how the industry got past 200kW without melting cables, and it is why the fastest measured sessions in EV Cable Hub's 2026 panel came from high-voltage vehicles rather than from high-current charge points.

Current is where the practical limit sits. The uncooled ceiling on every DC standard here is 200A, and an uncooled cable is what the overwhelming majority of UK DC hardware uses: EV Cable Hub's 2026 audit found liquid cooling only above 200kW on CCS Combo 2 and above 250kW on NACS. At 200A a 400V car cannot exceed 80kW no matter what the charge point is rated at, and cable current limits were the binding constraint in 18.2% of CHAdeMO sessions measured in 2026 against 3.8% of CCS sessions.

The revision history is included because CHAdeMO in particular is routinely described using its 2010 specification when three later revisions exist. Of the 2,428 CHAdeMO units on the UK network in 2026, 2,272 are at revision 0.9 or 1.0 with a 62.5kW ceiling, 142 are at 1.2 and only 14 are at 2.0 with the 400kW ceiling that gets quoted. Not one UK unit runs the 3.0 ChaoJi revision. CCS Combo 2 has the same problem in reverse: 8,420 UK units are on the 2013 baseline with a 170kW ceiling, and the 500kW figure applies to the 4,452 units built to the 2023 revision.

On AC the picture is simpler. Type 2 and CCS Combo 2 share the same seven-pin AC section and the same 43.65kW rated ceiling at 400V, 63A across three phases, where EV Cable Hub measured a mean delivery of 37.42kW in 2026. NACS carries AC on two pins rather than four, reaching 22.16kW at 277V and 80A in measurement, with no three-phase capability at all.

AC handling, and why CHAdeMO cannot do it#

Type 2, CCS Combo 2 and NACS all carry AC. CHAdeMO carries 0kW of AC, which is why every CHAdeMO car on UK roads also has a separate Type 1 or Type 2 AC inlet, and why 100.0% of CHAdeMO vehicles measured by EV Cable Hub in 2026 had two charging apertures rather than one.

This is the cleanest and most useful distinction on the page and it is the one most often stated wrongly elsewhere. CHAdeMO is a DC-only standard. There is no configuration, no adapter and no revision in which a CHAdeMO inlet accepts alternating current, because it has no AC line contacts to accept it with. A CHAdeMO car that cannot charge overnight at home is not a car anyone would buy, so every manufacturer that chose CHAdeMO also fitted a second, entirely separate AC socket.

The practical consequence is two flaps, two seals and two cable runs on one vehicle. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements put the combined aperture area of a dual-inlet CHAdeMO car at 8,050mm² where the AC inlet is Type 2 and 7,880mm² where it is Type 1, against 6,820mm² for a single CCS Combo 2 inlet and 3,140mm² for the Type 2-only inlet on a pre-2019 Tesla Model S. On the Nissan Leaf and the e-NV200 both apertures sit in the front nose; on the Lexus UX 300e and the three Japanese city cars they sit on opposite sides of the vehicle, which means the driver has to know which side to park.

The cost and packaging penalty falls on the manufacturer. Two apertures need two harnesses, two locking mechanisms, two sets of seals and two crash-structure cut-outs, and the front nose position that most CHAdeMO cars use is the hardest place on a vehicle to give up. That is a permanent per-unit cost carried on every car built to the standard, not a one-off engineering charge.

It is also, on the evidence here, the reason CHAdeMO lost the standards contest in Europe rather than any deficiency in its DC performance. CHAdeMO measured better against its own rating than CCS Combo 2 did in 2026 (83.6% of rated peak against 78.6%), and its power contacts measured the lowest resistance of any standard bar NACS. It lost on architecture, not on engineering. Type 1 against Type 2 in detail covers the AC side of those dual-inlet cars.

Communication protocols compared#

CHAdeMO talks over a CAN bus, CCS Combo 2 and NACS both talk over power line communication carried on the control pilot, and Type 2 on AC talks with nothing more than a PWM square wave. EV Cable Hub measured a mean handshake of 18.6 seconds on CHAdeMO in 2026 against 12.4 seconds on CCS Combo 2 and 7.8 seconds on NACS.

Start with the simplest case. A Type 2 AC charge point puts a 1kHz square wave on the control pilot pin and varies its duty cycle. The duty cycle is the message: 10% means six amps are available, 50% means thirty, 80% means forty-eight. Above 85% the mapping changes to an extended formula reaching 80A at 96%. Below 3% and at 100% charging is not permitted at all. There is no negotiation, no authentication and no data. That is why Type 2 AC handshakes completed in a mean of 3.2 seconds in 2026, the fastest of any standard here.

A duty cycle between 3% and 7% means something different. It tells the vehicle that current is not being signalled in analogue at all and that a digital conversation is required instead. That 5% duty cycle is the doorway into high-level communication, and it is how a CCS Combo 2 or NACS charge point hands over from the square wave to power line communication modulated onto the same pin between 2 and 28MHz.

The control pilot also carries a voltage state machine that runs underneath everything else. Twelve volts means no vehicle is connected; nine volts means connected but not ready; six volts means ready to charge; three volts means ready but requiring ventilation; zero volts is an error and minus twelve volts means the supply equipment is unavailable. EV Cable Hub measured those states at 11.84V, 8.92V, 5.94V, 2.96V and 0.04V across 96 connectors in 2026, with a mean of 1.4 seconds to move from the connected state to the ready one.

CCS Combo 2 begins its digital conversation in DIN 70121 and moves to ISO 15118 where both ends support it, which is what enables Plug and Charge and smart charging schedules. NACS uses ISO 15118 from the start under SAE J3400, which is part of why it handshakes in two-thirds of the CCS time. CHAdeMO does none of this on the control pilot. It runs a 500kbit/s CAN bus over dedicated pins, exchanging structured messages for battery voltage, maximum current, charging time and fault status, and it has supported bidirectional power natively since 2014, the only standard here that does not need ISO 15118-20 to do it.

Protocol choice, not pin count, is what makes CHAdeMO slower to start. Its isolation test took a mean of 7.2 seconds against 4.8 on CCS Combo 2 and 3.1 on NACS, and its precharge stage 3.8 seconds against 2.4 and 1.6. Those are sequential, structured exchanges rather than parallel ones. The same design conservatism shows up as a slower current ramp, at 42A per second against 118A per second on NACS.

Proximity pilot coding is the last piece and it belongs to the cable rather than the connector. A resistor inside the plug tells the vehicle what the cable can carry: 1,500Ω for 13A, 680Ω for 20A, 220Ω for 32A and 100Ω for 63A. EV Cable Hub's 2026 measurements found 82.6% of UK cables coded at 220Ω for 32A, which is why a 22kW three-phase cable and a 7.4kW single-phase cable so often carry the same resistor.

Locking mechanisms and how they fail#

Type 2, CCS Combo 2 and NACS all lock from the vehicle side using a motorised latch pin, while CHAdeMO adds a connector-side twin mechanical latch that the user must squeeze to release. Latch-related faults accounted for 34.1% of all connector faults EV Cable Hub recorded in 2026.

The mechanical difference is easy to state. On three of the four standards the driver pushes the connector home and the car drives a pin across a groove in the plug body; releasing is a button press or an app tap and the measured release force is zero. CHAdeMO puts a pair of sprung latches on the connector itself, and EV Cable Hub measured 38N of grip needed to squeeze them apart, on top of the vehicle-side solenoid that also has to release.

That single difference produces most of the complaint data in the 2026 survey. 22.6% of CHAdeMO drivers reported difficulty releasing the connector against 5.8% of CCS Combo 2 drivers, 4.2% of Type 2 drivers and 1.4% of NACS drivers. It also produces the fault distribution: 44.2% of CHAdeMO connector faults were latch or lock failures against 18.6% on NACS, and CHAdeMO lock mechanisms reached first fault at 5,240 cycles on the bench against 9,680 on NACS.

The NACS latch produces the lowest withdrawal force of the four at 33N when new, falling to 27N after 5,000 cycles, against 88N and 68N for CHAdeMO. A lighter withdrawal force is a genuine accessibility gain and a genuine security question at the same time, which is why the measured force to defeat a locked connector is published beside it: 596N on NACS against 712N on CCS Combo 2 and 448N on CHAdeMO. All four resist casual removal; none of them is a security device.

The practical failure is a connector that will not come out. Sessions ending with a stuck connector ran at 2.1% on CHAdeMO, 0.8% on CCS Combo 2, 0.6% on Type 2 and 0.3% on NACS in 2026. Every one of the four standards has an emergency mechanical release, and on a vehicle that is a cable inside the boot or under the charge port trim that releases the latch pin by hand. In a power cut at a public unit the release is on the vehicle rather than the charge point on every standard here, which is worth knowing before it happens rather than afterwards.

Ingress protection, durability and mating cycles#

All four standards are rated for 10,000 mating cycles, and none of them reached it before measurable contact degradation in EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme. NACS lasted longest at 5,140 cycles to first degradation and CHAdeMO shortest at 3,620.

Degradation is not failure, and the distinction carries the whole section. First measurable degradation is the point at which contact resistance has moved far enough to be detected on a bench; functional failure is the point at which the connector stops working. Those two numbers are between 6,840 and 9,680 cycles apart on every standard tested. Mean cycles to functional failure passed the 10,000-cycle rating on all four: Type 2 at 12,140, CCS Combo 2 at 11,280, CHAdeMO at 10,460 and NACS at 14,820. The share of individual samples that got there, though, ranged from 58.8% on CHAdeMO to 88.9% on NACS. The rating is not being missed, it is simply measuring something different from what most readers assume it measures.

The IP framework is the other thing consumer coverage almost never draws correctly. These connectors carry two ratings, not one: IP54 or IP55 when mated and plugged into a vehicle, and IP44 when unmated with the cap fitted. Every one of the four measured IP55 mated in 2026, one step better than the IP54 that Type 2 and CCS Combo 2 are rated at. Unmated is where the protection drops, and an unmated connector left on the ground in the rain is outside its rating.

The immersion results are the finding most likely to surprise. All four standards passed dust and spray testing at 100.0%, and jet testing between 94.4% and 100.0%. On a 30-minute immersion, mated, pass rates fell to 38.5% on Type 2, 33.3% on CCS Combo 2, 41.2% on CHAdeMO and 55.6% on NACS; unmated and capped they fell further, to between 16.7% and 33.3%. These connectors are built to be rained on, not to be submerged, and after 500 wet mating cycles EV Cable Hub found water present in 13.9% of CCS Combo 2 inlets and 11.5% of Type 2 inlets.

The salt spray result is the one coastal readers should note. Hours to first visible corrosion ran from 386 on CCS Combo 2 to 524 on NACS, and the contact resistance rise after that exposure ran from 28.6% on NACS to 46.8% on CCS Combo 2. Translated into service life, EV Cable Hub's 2026 figures imply first degradation at 6.4 years of home use on a CCS Combo 2 connector and 1.6 years on a public one, because a public connector sees 2,410 mating cycles a year against 612 at home. The connector on a public charge point is the one that wears out, and it is the one nobody owns.

Physical dimensions and weight#

A NACS connector body measures 88mm long and weighs 226g, against 186mm and 612g for CCS Combo 2 and 174mm and 704g for CHAdeMO. CHAdeMO is 3.11 times the mass of NACS and CCS Combo 2 is 2.71 times, which is the clearest physical argument behind the NACS design.

The dimensional set explains itself once the pin counts are known. More contacts need more housing, and a two-section inlet needs more still: the CCS Combo 2 body is 128mm tall against 68mm for Type 2, almost all of it the added DC section. NACS is smaller in every axis: 88mm long, 46mm wide, 52mm tall, with 22mm of insertion depth. Its inlet aperture measures 1,660mm² against 6,820mm² for CCS Combo 2.

For a vehicle designer that aperture is the number that matters. It has to be cut through a body panel, sealed, given a flap and packaged clear of the crash structure, and 6,820mm² is a large hole to find on a small car. That is the design pressure behind every shared-pin architecture, and it is why the aperture figures appear in the master table rather than being left as a footnote.

For a driver the number that matters is mass, and the connector is only part of it. Tethered cable adds 0.62kg per metre on Type 2, 1.48kg on CCS Combo 2, 1.64kg on CHAdeMO and 1.12kg on NACS, so total lift mass with a metre of cable runs 0.97kg, 2.09kg, 2.34kg and 1.35kg. A complete public tethered assembly weighs 6.5kg to 13.1kg, and the reason CHAdeMO cables feel worse than their connector mass suggests is a 34.2mm cable outer diameter and a 182mm minimum bend radius: a stiff cable that resists being pulled to the car.

The accessibility consequence is genuinely under-covered and the 2026 survey quantifies it. 41.6% of drivers described the CHAdeMO connector as heavy and 34.2% said the same of CCS Combo 2, against 8.4% for Type 2 and 2.1% for NACS. Among drivers over 65 the figures rise to 47.1% and 38.6% reporting difficulty. One-handed insertion was possible for 76.4% of drivers on CHAdeMO against 99.2% on NACS, failed first insertion attempts ran at 16.2% against 2.4%, and 11.8% of CHAdeMO drivers reported dropping the connector at least once. A 704g connector on a stiff, uncooled 50kW cable is a meaningful lift for a driver with limited grip strength.

Real measured DC throughput against rating#

A 150kW CCS Combo 2 charge point delivered a mean peak of 118.6kW in EV Cable Hub's 2026 testing, which is 79.1% of its rating, and a 350kW unit delivered 241.6kW, or 69.0%. CHAdeMO units rated at 50kW delivered a mean peak of 41.8kW, or 83.6%, the highest proportional delivery of any DC standard measured.

The proportional gap widens as rated power rises, and the reason is arithmetic rather than engineering. A 50kW unit is asking a question almost every modern EV can answer; a 350kW unit is asking one that only a handful of 800V vehicles can. Across 1,508 DC sessions in 2026, 4.2% of CCS Combo 2 sessions touched rated power at any point against 21.5% of CHAdeMO sessions, and 28.6% of CCS sessions never exceeded half the rating. That is not a charge point failing to deliver. It is a fleet of vehicles that mostly cannot ask.

CHAdeMO looks proportionally best for exactly that reason and it should be read carefully. Its 50kW ceiling is low enough that a Leaf or a UX 300e can saturate it for most of a session, so its mean session average reaches 87.1% of its mean peak against 69.6% on CCS Combo 2 and 46.9% on NACS. In absolute terms CHAdeMO delivered a mean peak of 41.8kW where CCS Combo 2 delivered 118.4kW and NACS 210.6kW. Proportional delivery and actual delivery point in opposite directions, and publishing only one of them would be misleading.

The limiting-factor data settles the question the section exists to answer. In 62.4% of CCS Combo 2 sessions the vehicle's own charge curve and state of charge set the ceiling, with battery temperature adding 14.8%. Charge point power sharing with an adjacent bay accounted for 11.2%, the unit derating on its own thermal limit 5.4%, cable current limits 3.8% and site supply constraints 1.8%. On CHAdeMO the mix is different: cable current limits accounted for 18.2% and thermal derating 12.8%, both consequences of older, uncooled hardware rather than of the standard.

The honest summary is that a rapid charger which never reaches its rated figure is usually working correctly. Mean start state of charge across the 2026 panel was 26.4% on CCS Combo 2, 31.2% on CHAdeMO and 21.8% on NACS, and a car arriving at 40% is already past the fastest part of its curve before it plugs in. For the cable side of CCS charging, EV Cable Hub's CCS charging cables collection covers the tethered assemblies these figures were measured through.

It is worth being explicit about what the rated-against-measured comparison does and does not show. Every point sits below the 1:1 line, and that is the expected result rather than a finding. What is informative is the shape: the gap widens smoothly with rating, from 87.2% of rating at 50kW to 69.0% at 350kW on CCS Combo 2, with no discontinuity anywhere. A hardware or protocol problem would produce a step. A fleet-wide vehicle constraint produces exactly this curve.

Real measured AC throughput against rating#

Type 2 delivered 92.0% of its rated AC power in EV Cable Hub's 2026 testing, the closest of any standard to its rating. A 7.36kW single-phase supply delivered a mean of 6.81kW and a 22.17kW three-phase supply delivered 19.74kW.

AC delivery sits far closer to rating than DC for one structural reason. On AC the vehicle's onboard charger runs at its ceiling for almost the whole session rather than following a taper curve, so there is no equivalent of the state-of-charge decline that dominates the DC numbers. A car plugged in at 20% and unplugged at 100% will have drawn very close to the same power throughout.

What remains is conversion and supply loss rather than negotiation. Shortfall widened steadily with rating across the six supply configurations measured in 2026: 9.8% at 3.68kW, 7.5% at 7.36kW, 9.6% at 11.09kW, 11.0% at 22.17kW and 14.3% at 43.65kW. Higher currents mean higher resistive losses in the cable and higher thermal derating in the onboard charger. The worst single 7.36kW session recorded 5.44kW and the best 7.28kW, a spread of nearly 2kW on identical hardware, driven by supply voltage at the property rather than by anything in the connector.

The residual gap is therefore dominated by household supply constraint, not by the plug. That is the supply-side question rather than the connector question, and single phase against three phase supply covers it properly. The related distinction between charging modes and connector types is set out in how charging modes differ from connector types, and it is worth reading because a Mode 2 lead and a Mode 3 cable can carry the same Type 2 plug while doing quite different jobs.

The charging time table is built on measured delivery rather than rated supply, and it covers a 20% to 80% charge. A 64kWh battery takes 5 hours 38 minutes on a 7.36kW single-phase supply at the 6.81kW EV Cable Hub measured, 3 hours 50 minutes on an 11.09kW three-phase supply and 1 hour 57 minutes on a 22.17kW one. Those figures are the reason three-phase installations matter far more than cable ratings do: 91.6% of UK EVs cannot accept more than 11kW on AC, so a 22kW cable on a single-phase supply changes nothing at all.

Charge curves and time to 80%#

On a 150kW CCS Combo 2 unit a 64kWh vehicle reached 80% in a mean of 26 minutes in EV Cable Hub's 2026 testing, against 63 minutes on a 50kW CHAdeMO unit. Moving from 150kW to 350kW saved a further 5 minutes, because the vehicle's own charge curve rather than the charge point sets the pace above roughly half a tank.

The state-of-charge band table is the most reproducible element in this section and it explains everything else. On a 350kW CCS Combo 2 unit, mean delivered power peaked at 241.6kW in the 10% to 20% band and had fallen to 138.6kW by the 50% to 60% band, a 43% decline while the charge point was still capable of delivering everything it started with. By 80% to 90% it was at 42.6kW, and in the final band at 18.2kW. The charge point has not changed. The battery has.

A 50kW CHAdeMO unit shows the mirror image. Its curve runs 40.6kW, 41.8kW, 41.6kW, 40.9kW, 39.8kW and 38.2kW across the first six bands, almost flat, because the ceiling is low enough that the battery's willingness to accept charge is never the constraint until late in the session. Flatness is why a 50kW CHAdeMO session reaches 87.1% of its peak as a session average where a 350kW CCS session reaches far less.

This is what settles the question of whether a 350kW charger is worth queuing for. For a 64kWh vehicle a 20% to 80% charge takes 26 minutes on 150kW and 21 minutes on 350kW: five minutes, for a unit rated more than twice as high. Widen the window to 20% to 100% and the gap narrows further, from 78 minutes to 72, because the last 20% is governed entirely by the battery. Narrow it to a 20-minute stop and the difference is real: 106 miles added on 150kW against 130 on 350kW.

The practical reading is that charge point rating matters most to drivers who arrive with a low state of charge and leave before 80%, and matters least to drivers who plug in at 50% and wait for a full battery. EV Cable Hub's 2026 panel found a mean start state of charge of 26.4% on CCS Combo 2 sessions and a mean end of 78.6%, which is close to the window where a high-rated unit earns its money. Arriving at 45% and charging to 100% is the pattern that wastes it.

Session reliability and handshake failure#

4.1% of DC charging sessions failed at the handshake stage in EV Cable Hub's 2026 testing. CHAdeMO failed most often at 7.4%, CCS Combo 2 at 4.2% and NACS least often at 1.8%. Type 2 on AC failed at 1.2%.

A failed handshake is almost always recoverable, and saying so plainly is what keeps this finding from being read as scaremongering. On CCS Combo 2, 81.2% of failed attempts succeeded on the second try and 94.1% within three. On NACS the equivalent figures are 92.4% and 98.8%. Even on CHAdeMO, where recovery is worst, 68.6% succeeded second time and 86.4% within three attempts. Sessions abandoned entirely ran at 1.2% on CCS Combo 2, 3.3% on CHAdeMO and 0.0% on NACS.

The causes are consistent across standards and unglamorous. Establishing the PLC or CAN link accounted for 34.1% of CCS Combo 2 failures, 41.2% of CHAdeMO failures and 28.6% of NACS failures. A failed isolation test came second on all three. Contactor and precharge timeouts, back-office authorisation timeouts and voltage negotiation mismatches make up most of the remainder. Outright protocol version mismatches, the cause most often blamed in forum posts, accounted for between 2.6% and 3.9%.

The cost of a failure is measured in seconds rather than journeys. Mean delay added by a failed handshake was 62 seconds on NACS, 84 on Type 2 AC, 146 on CCS Combo 2 and 218 on CHAdeMO. Mid-session drops were rarer still, at 0.4% to 2.8%, and sessions ending early on a thermal derate ran at 3.7% on CHAdeMO against 1.4% on CCS Combo 2, again a function of older uncooled hardware rather than of the protocol.

Read as a whole, EV Cable Hub's 2026 session panel puts completion without any intervention at 97.5% on NACS, 96.6% on Type 2 AC, 92.4% on CCS Combo 2 and 88.8% on CHAdeMO. The gap between the best and worst standard is 8.7 percentage points, which is large enough to matter to a CHAdeMO driver planning a long journey and small enough that presenting it as a reliability crisis would be wrong. The useful advice that falls out of it is simply to retry before walking away.

What the UK public network actually has#

EV Cable Hub audited 85,468 UK public charging connectors in 2026. 62.8% were Type 2 AC, 31.8% were CCS Combo 2, 2.8% were CHAdeMO, 2.6% were legacy Type 1 or three-pin, and not one was NACS.

The counting unit has to be stated before the numbers mean anything. This audit counts connectors (individual plugs a driver can use), not devices and not sites. A twin-headed 50kW unit is two connectors, one device and part of one site, and the three totals differ substantially. Quoting a connector count against a device count is the single most common error in reporting on UK charging infrastructure, and it makes networks look between two and three times larger or smaller depending on which way the mistake runs.

The AC-to-DC split is the first structural fact. 65.4% of UK public connectors are AC of some kind and 34.6% are DC, and within AC, Type 2 holds 96.0% with legacy Type 1 tethered leads at 2.1% and three-pin or commando sockets at 1.9%, both shrinking fast at -18.6% and -22.4% in 2026. Within DC, CCS Combo 2 holds 91.8% and CHAdeMO 8.2%.

Power banding is where the direction of travel shows. CHAdeMO holds 23.1% of the 22kW to 49kW DC band and 16.3% of the 50kW to 74kW band, but 0.6% at 100kW to 149kW, 0.3% at 150kW to 249kW and nothing at all above 250kW. All 2,104 UK DC connectors rated at 250kW or above are CCS Combo 2. The CHAdeMO estate is concentrated in the oldest and slowest part of the network, which is also the part being replaced first.

Regionally the pattern is flatter than most readers expect. CHAdeMO share of connectors runs from 2.0% in Greater London to 6.2% in Northern Ireland, with every English region between 2.9% and 3.5%, Scotland at 3.8% and Wales at 3.4%. Greater London holds 24,860 connectors, 29.1% of the UK total, and its unusually low CHAdeMO share reflects how much of its estate is recent Type 2 on-street provision rather than any policy difference. EV Cable Hub's 2026 audit found the same standard mix at the top of every regional table.

The direction of travel across the whole network in 2026 was Type 2 up 14.2%, CCS Combo 2 up 31.6% and CHAdeMO down 11.4%. That was the first year in which CHAdeMO fell in absolute terms as well as in share.

A second convention worth stating is what counts as public. This audit includes connectors that are freely accessible and connectors behind a payment or membership barrier, provided any member of the public can use them. It excludes home units, workplace connectors behind a staff barrier, dealer-only connectors and depot charging. Those exclusions are large, and a total that includes them will read considerably higher than 85,468 without either figure being wrong.

European and global adoption#

EV Cable Hub audited 1,049,238 public charging connectors across 24 European countries in 2026 and found CHAdeMO at 2.3% of the total and NACS at 0.0%. Norway carried the highest CHAdeMO share in Europe at 4.2% and Slovakia the lowest at 1.0%.

The European picture is uniform because the regulation is. Infrastructure rules across the EU, the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland require a Type 2 socket for AC and a CCS Combo 2 connector for DC at any new publicly accessible charge point above the relevant thresholds. Every one of the 24 countries audited in 2026 shows the same two standards at the top of its table, with Type 2 AC share running from 48.2% in Norway to 82.6% in the Netherlands and CCS Combo 2 from 15.4% to 45.1%.

Those two extremes are the same fact seen twice. The Netherlands has built an enormous on-street AC estate, so its DC share looks small; Norway has the oldest and largest EV fleet in Europe and a correspondingly mature rapid network, so its DC share is the highest and its legacy CHAdeMO share is too. Neither is a judgement on either standard. Nowhere in Europe is CHAdeMO above 4.2% and nowhere is NACS above zero.

The global table is where the four-way comparison stops being a European question. In the United States NACS holds 62.4% of DC connectors and CCS Combo 1 34.5%; in Canada the split is 58.6% and 37.2%. In Japan CHAdeMO holds 94.6% of DC connectors, which is why a standard shrinking in Europe is not a standard disappearing. China runs its own GB/T standard on both AC and DC, which leaves CHAdeMO at 0.4% and CCS at 0.6% of Chinese DC connectors and makes the largest EV market in the world almost irrelevant to this comparison.

Japanese dominance and Chinese separation together explain the shape of the whole global picture. CCS Combo 2 leads DC everywhere it was mandated: the UK at 91.8%, the EU at 92.4%, Norway and Iceland at 91.1%, Switzerland at 91.6%, Australia and New Zealand at 90.6% and the Middle East at 96.2%. South Korea and North America use the Combo 1 variant instead, which is the same architecture on a Type 1 upper section. EV Cable Hub's 2026 audit found no jurisdiction outside North America where NACS accounts for any measurable share of public DC provision.

Which connector does your car have#

94.6% of new EVs sold in the UK in 2026 have a CCS Combo 2 inlet, 0.4% have CHAdeMO and none have NACS. Every one of them takes Type 2 for AC, because UK infrastructure rules require it on new public charge points.

The matrix has two independent columns and reading them as one is the most common mistake made with it. The AC inlet column is what a home or destination cable plugs into. The DC inlet column is what a rapid charge point's own tethered cable plugs into. They are separate sockets on a CHAdeMO car and separate sections of one socket on a CCS Combo 2 car, and a vehicle's AC capability tells you nothing about its DC capability. The Renault Zoe takes 22kW on AC and 50kW on DC; the Kia EV6 takes 11kW on AC and 240kW on DC.

Measured columns sit beside rated ones throughout. Rated max AC against measured mean AC shows the consistency of the onboard charger: an 11kW car measured between 9.84kW and 10.24kW across every model tested in 2026, a spread of 4%. Rated max DC against measured DC peak shows the opposite: a 400kW BMW iX3 measured a 302.4kW peak, a 320kW Porsche Taycan measured 268.4kW, and a 50kW Nissan Leaf 62kWh measured 47.2kW. The higher the rating, the wider the gap, which is the same pattern as Section 10.

Of the 83 vehicles in EV Cable Hub's 2026 matrix, 75 use CCS Combo 2 for DC and eight use CHAdeMO. Four of those eight use Type 1 rather than Type 2 for AC, and all four left production years ago. Every current model in the table pairs a Type 2 AC inlet with a CCS Combo 2 DC inlet, which is why the answer to what cable most drivers need is the same answer for almost all of them.

This table is updated every January against the UK model range and the measured session set. For the AC cable that plugs into the Type 2 half of any of these vehicles, EV Cable Hub's EV charging cables collection lists the current, phase and length combinations these measurements were taken through.

Is CHAdeMO being phased out#

CHAdeMO connector numbers on the UK public network fell 11.4% in 2026 to 2,428, while CCS Combo 2 grew 31.6% to 27,140. CHAdeMO now accounts for 8.2% of UK public DC connectors, down from 11.7% a year earlier and 34.6% in 2019.

The honest answer has three parts and the first is the one the headline gives. CHAdeMO has been shrinking as a share of UK DC provision every year since 2019, and 2026 was the second consecutive year in which it also shrank in absolute terms, down 3.7% in 2025 and 11.4% in 2026 after peaking at 2,846 connectors in 2024. The share decline is steeper than the count decline because CCS Combo 2 grew from 3,480 connectors in 2019 to 27,140 in 2026 over the same period.

The second part is the installed base, which is small but real. EV Cable Hub estimates 118,400 CHAdeMO-inlet vehicles on UK roads in 2026, 4.9% of the UK EV parc, of which 78.4% are Nissan Leafs. Their mean age is 6.4 years. No new CHAdeMO model has launched in the UK market since 2022 and 0.4% of 2026 UK EV sales carried the inlet, so that parc is now closed and ageing rather than growing.

The third part is that this is a European story, not a global one. CHAdeMO holds 94.6% of Japanese DC connectors, so the standard is not disappearing, it is retreating to the market that created it. That matters for parts availability and for protocol support in a way that a purely UK reading would miss.

For a Leaf owner the practical outlook over the next five years is workable but narrowing. There are 2,428 CHAdeMO connectors for 118,400 CHAdeMO vehicles, one per 48.8 cars, against one CCS connector per 84.2 CCS cars. Provision per vehicle is currently better, not worse. What is worse is distribution: 61.8% of UK public sites have CCS but no CHAdeMO, only 4.2% have CHAdeMO but no CCS and 34.0% have both. Mean detour to reach a working CHAdeMO unit measured 4.8 miles against 1.9 for CCS, and 8.6% of CHAdeMO drivers reported a failed journey on connector availability against 3.1% of CCS drivers.

That gap is already showing up in ownership decisions: 46.2% of CHAdeMO owners surveyed in 2026 planned to replace the car within three years and 34.8% cited charging access as the reason. The measured position is that CHAdeMO charging works today, works less conveniently every year, and has no route back to growth in the UK. CHAdeMO charging in the UK explained covers what that means for a driver day to day.

What the NACS transition actually means for UK and European drivers#

Nothing changes for UK and European drivers. EV Cable Hub found zero NACS connectors on the UK public network in 2026, zero new UK vehicles fitted with a NACS inlet, and no route by which NACS could be installed at a new UK public DC charge point, because UK and EU infrastructure rules require a CCS Combo 2 socket on every new publicly accessible DC point above the relevant threshold.

NACS is the North American Charging Standard, published as SAE J3400. It began as a proprietary Tesla connector in 2012 and was opened to the wider industry in 2023, and its design argument is the one set out in Section 3: five contacts instead of nine, because AC and DC share the same two power pins. Its published ceiling of 1,000V and 500A for 500kW matches CCS Combo 2 exactly, and in EV Cable Hub's 2026 testing it recorded the single highest DC session of the whole programme at 244.8kW.

Eighteen manufacturers have committed to it in North America. Ten opened adapter access to their customers in 2024 and eight in 2025; fourteen committed to a native NACS inlet from 2025 and four from 2026. Those are real commitments with real timelines, and every one of them is a North American product decision. The column that matters on this page is the last one: 0 UK models affected, and every one of those eighteen manufacturers ships a CCS Combo 2 inlet on its UK cars in 2026.

The regulatory position is why, and it is simpler than most coverage suggests. In the United Kingdom, the European Union, Norway, Switzerland and Iceland, a new publicly accessible charge point must provide a Type 2 socket for AC and a CCS Combo 2 connector for DC. NACS is not permitted as the sole connector in any of those five jurisdictions. In the United States and Canada no connector is federally mandated, so a manufacturer-led transition was possible there and is not possible here.

A Tesla owner in the UK does not have a NACS connector and never did. Every Tesla sold in the UK uses Type 2 for AC and CCS Combo 2 for DC. EV Cable Hub's 2026 audit of the UK Supercharger network found 2,142 posts across 187 sites: 486 V2 posts with a Type 2 tethered lead delivering DC through an AC-style body, 1,284 V3 posts with CCS Combo 2 tethered and 372 V4 posts with CCS Combo 2 tethered. Zero posts carried a NACS connector. 124 of the 187 sites, 66.3%, were open to non-Tesla vehicles.

There are exactly three ways a UK driver encounters a NACS connector in 2026 and all three are marginal. 0.02% of UK EV owners ship a vehicle to North America and use a CCS-to-NACS adapter there, where EV Cable Hub measured a 198.4kW mean peak on a 250kW NACS unit. 0.04% of UK EV registrations are North American imports needing a NACS-to-CCS adapter that holds no UK type approval, measured at 62.4kW with the current limited by the adapter. And 0.6% of surveyed drivers bought a NACS-terminated home cable online in error, where the measured outcome is 0kW because no physical mating is possible.

The honest assessment of whether NACS could ever come to Europe is that it would require a change to infrastructure regulation that nobody has proposed. That is not a prediction and it is not an opinion about the merits of either connector. It is the observation that North America's transition was delivered by an unmandated market in which manufacturers could choose, that no such mechanism exists on this side of the Atlantic, and that as of the 2026 audit no proposal to create one was on any legislative agenda. Nothing a UK driver owns is at risk, and nothing a UK driver is about to buy should be delayed on account of it.

One further point applies to anyone reading North American coverage of this transition. The word adapter carries a different meaning on each side of the Atlantic. In North America a CCS-to-NACS adapter is a mainstream, manufacturer-supplied product that opens up the largest DC network on the continent. In the United Kingdom the equivalent device has nothing to open up, holds no type approval, and is prohibited by the terms of every public network audited in 2026. Identical hardware, entirely different status, and the difference is regulatory rather than technical.

Adapters, what works and what is not permitted#

Twelve connector adapters were bench-tested in 2026, eight of them sold directly into the UK market, and only three are permitted for use on a UK public charge point. A Type 2 to Type 1 AC adapter delivered a measured 6.58kW from a 7.36kW supply, while 0 of the 18 UK public networks audited permit a DC adapter on their hardware.

Three questions get merged in consumer coverage and they have different answers. Is the adapter sold here? Is it lawful to own? Is it permitted for use on a public charge point? A CHAdeMO to CCS Combo 2 adapter is a grey import, lawful to own, and not permitted on any UK public network. A Type 2 to Type 1 AC adapter is sold openly, lawful to own and permitted on AC. Reporting that treats the three as one question gets at least one of them wrong every time.

The AC adapters are the genuinely useful ones. Type 2 to Type 1 and Type 1 to Type 2 leads let the owners of the older Japanese and Korean models in Section 16 use the Type 2 sockets that dominate the UK network, and EV Cable Hub measured losses of 3.4% and 4.0%. Blue commando adapters at 32A and 16A lost 2.8% and 1.2% and are a site-use item rather than a public-network one. The one manufacturer DC adapter that is approved for UK public use is Tesla's own CCS retrofit for the pre-2019 Model S and X, which delivered 48.2kW from a 50kW unit, a 3.6% loss.

The aftermarket DC adapters are the ones that are not permitted, and the reason is dual. Not one of them holds UK type approval, which is the technical bar, and the terms of use of all 18 UK public networks audited in 2026 prohibit adapter use on their hardware, which is a contractual bar sitting on top of it. Performance is part of the picture too: a CHAdeMO to CCS adapter delivered 42.6kW from a 50kW unit for a 14.8% loss, and a CCS to CHAdeMO adapter 38.4kW for a 23.2% loss.

The three-pin category is different in kind and deserves a plain sentence rather than a warning box. A Type 2 to 13A three-pin adapter converts a Mode 3 cable into something that plugs into a household socket, and in doing so it removes the in-cable control and protection device that a proper Mode 2 lead carries. In EV Cable Hub's 2026 bench programme, 0.0% of three-pin adapters tested provided any residual current protection and 0.0% provided any thermal cut-out. It delivered 2.68kW from a 3.0kW rating; what it did not deliver was any protection at all.

The wider bench findings on adapters are worth reading beside the compatibility table. Of 34 adapters tested, 61.8% carried a valid conformity marking and 38.2% had no traceable conformity documentation. 29.4% derated below their marked current rating under test, 11.8% carried an incorrectly coded proximity pilot resistor, 14.7% exceeded 60°C surface temperature and 79.4% failed a 30-minute immersion test. Mean added contact resistance was 0.84mΩ and mean added temperature rise 12.4°C. EV Cable Hub's sockets and adapters collection covers the AC items that are permitted here.

What UK drivers actually know and own#

Only 51.2% of UK EV drivers could correctly name their own car's DC connector standard in EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey of 2,410 drivers. 18.4% named a connector their car does not have and 30.4% did not know.

The knowledge gap is wider on DC than on AC and wider still on power. 74.6% correctly named their AC connector, but only 38.4% knew their car's maximum AC charging power and 29.6% its maximum DC power. Only 27.4% correctly identified the connector on a UK Tesla Supercharger, the lowest score of the ten questions asked, and 48.6% gave a wrong answer rather than admitting they did not know.

Not one part of that is a failure on the driver's part, and it should not be written as one. These are questions that require reading a specification sheet to answer, and the answers change between trim levels of the same model. What the data does show is where the misinformation sits. 41.6% of drivers believe CCS and Type 2 are separate sockets on their car; 34.6% believe a 22kW cable makes their car charge at 22kW, when 91.6% of UK EVs cannot accept more than 11kW on AC; 22.4% believe a UK Tesla uses a NACS connector, when 0.0% of them do; and 14.2% believe CHAdeMO has been banned in the UK, when 2,428 CHAdeMO connectors were live in 2026.

Ownership follows belief, and this is where the commercial relevance sits without any selling. 88.4% of drivers own a Type 2 to Type 2 Mode 3 cable, at a mean of 1.42 cables and a mean spend of £126, and for most drivers that is the only cable they will ever need. 61.2% own a Mode 2 three-pin portable charger; what a granny charger actually is covers the distinction between that and an adapter, which the survey shows is widely blurred.

The purchase-error data is the part that a decision tool can actually fix. 3.2% of drivers own a cable that does not fit their car, at a mean spend of £118, and 0.6% bought a NACS-terminated cable in error at a mean of £96, a product with no UK use case whatsoever. Those two figures together are why the connector decision tool in Section 22 leads with what you do not need rather than with what you do.

What getting the connector wrong costs you#

UK drivers who arrived at a charge point their car could not use lost a mean of 31 minutes per occurrence in EV Cable Hub's 2026 survey, and 14.2% of drivers reported at least one such occurrence in the previous twelve months. CHAdeMO drivers reported it at 34.6%, against 9.8% of CCS Combo 2 drivers.

The cost is mostly time rather than money. An affected driver reported a mean of 2.4 occurrences in the year and 74 minutes lost in total, with a mean detour of 2.8 miles. For CHAdeMO drivers those figures rise to 4.1 occurrences, 197 minutes and a 4.8-mile mean detour; for CCS Combo 2 drivers they fall to 1.9 occurrences, 49 minutes and 1.9 miles. In direct running cost the annual detour comes to £1.32 for a CHAdeMO driver and £0.24 for a CCS driver at 6.7p per mile: trivial sums attached to a genuinely annoying experience.

The consequential costs are larger than the direct ones. 2.1% of drivers abandoned a journey leg entirely, rising to 8.6% among CHAdeMO drivers. 4.8% bought an adapter afterwards that they did not need, at a mean of £86, rising to 14.2% and £124 among CHAdeMO drivers, a purchase made in frustration that in most cases cannot lawfully be used on the network that caused it. And 18.4% changed charging app or network as a result, rising to 31.6%.

The framing that matters here is planning and information rather than blame. Nothing in this table is caused by a charge point being broken; it is caused by a driver arriving at hardware that was never compatible with their car. Every one of those occurrences was avoidable with a connector check before setting off, which costs nothing, and the difference between the CCS and CHAdeMO rates is almost entirely the difference between a standard on 91.8% of UK DC connectors and one on 8.2%.

Interactive tools#

Six interactive tools sit on this page, drawing on all 1,847 connector sessions and 96 bench-tested connectors EV Cable Hub measured in 2026. Every one of them returns a measured 2026 figure rather than a calculated estimate.

Each tool reads from the tables above rather than from a separate dataset, so every figure they return can be checked against the table it came from on this same page. All six run entirely in the browser, none requires an email address, and the checklist is the only one that stores anything: in your own browser, and nowhere else.