On June 17, 2026, Electrify America opened a 20-stall fast-charging hub in downtown Santa Barbara on the site of a former Greyhound depot. Every stall delivers up to 350 kW, and a 1.9 megawatt battery system, the company's largest public battery deployment yet, buffers the site against demand spikes. Every one of those 20 stalls launched with a CCS connector. Two weeks later, Electrify America said it would convert some of them to NACS/J3400, the Tesla-style connector, as part of a wider pilot across a set of its busiest hubs.
That is a smaller move than it sounds. Electrify America's June 2023 announcement said the company "will work to offer a NACS connector option at existing and future charging stations by 2025," while continuing to support CCS: a commitment to an effort, not a station-by-station completion guarantee. It is now late 2026, and the program remains a limited test-and-learn pilot, 15 sites on the company's own pilot page as of October 17, 2026, out of a network of more than 1,000 stations. For a commercial property owner deciding what connectors to put on a new site this year, the news is worth reading closely, not because it settles the CCS-versus-NACS question, but because it shows how a major network operator is actually managing that transition in practice: slowly, selectively, and without giving up CCS at most locations.
What Electrify America actually announced
The rollout, reported by Electrek on June 30 and confirmed by electrive the next day, breaks into three groups.
Five large-format California hubs were reported in the June trade coverage as converting some existing CCS connectors to NACS while keeping both connector types available (the company's pilot page lists these five as live but does not give a connector mix): the Harrison Street flagship in San Francisco, Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, Fashion Valley Mall South in San Diego, the Santa Monica station, and the new Santa Barbara flagship. These are Electrify America's highest-traffic sites, the kind built for pull-through truck and RV access as well as passenger cars.
Four more California stations, in La Mirada, Arcadia, Santa Ana, and Diamond Bar, were announced as converting entirely to NACS, dropping CCS at those specific locations. The pilot page now lists all four as live and fully NACS.
Four East Coast sites, three Wakefern ShopRite locations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and a Wawa in Bristol, Pennsylvania, were announced for conversion as well; the company's pilot page lists them as targeted for fall 2026 and does not say which connector mix each will get. (The late-June coverage also named a fifth East Coast site, an Urban Edge property in North Bergen, New Jersey, which no longer appears on the pilot page.)
That was the 14-station wave as reported at the end of June. As of October 17, 2026, Electrify America's own pilot page lists 15 sites in total: 11 live (including the two earlier pilot sites in Connecticut and Florida, the five California large-format hubs, and the four fully NACS California stations) and four East Coast sites targeted for fall 2026. Electrify America, which is Volkswagen-backed with Siemens a minority shareholder since a 2022 capital raise, already ran a smaller NACS pilot in Connecticut and Florida before this wave, and the company has not published a network-wide count of how many of its more than 1,000 US stations now offer a NACS connector. What it has not announced is a timeline for converting the rest of the network, or a public rationale beyond reducing wait times at its most congested sites while it gathers data on the right connector mix.
What Electrify America actually said in 2023
The context that makes this news smaller than the headline suggests: Electrify America's June 2023 release said the company "will work to offer a NACS connector option at existing and future charging stations by 2025," while continuing to support CCS. That wording committed the company to an effort, not to a station-by-station completion guarantee, and it never promised a finished network-wide switch. Three years later, the company describes the 2026 program as a test-and-learn pilot covering a low double-digit number of sites, chosen for traffic volume rather than announced as a network standard. Whatever has shaped that pace, hardware sourcing, station-by-station retrofit logistics, or a decision to watch how Tesla's own Magic Dock adapters performed first, the practical result is that most Electrify America stalls in the country are still CCS-only as of this writing.
Who this actually matters to, and who can wait
If you operate or are planning a retail, hospitality, or workplace charging site and you are not building at Electrify America's scale, this specific announcement changes nothing about your near-term connector decision. It is a data point about how a large operator is sequencing a multi-year transition, not a signal that CCS is being phased out. Electrify America is explicit that CCS support continues across the network, with the exception of the four stations converted to NACS-only, and the company has made no public statement about retiring CCS network-wide.
Where it matters is for anyone specifying hardware for a new DC fast charging install in the second half of 2026. Two facts should shape that decision. First, most EVs on the road today, and most of the ones a fleet or retail site will see pull in over the next two to three years, still charge on CCS or J1772; NACS-native vehicles are a growing share of new sales but not yet the installed base. Second, the operator best positioned to know how fast that installed base is shifting, Electrify America, is still hedging rather than committing to one connector, running a limited test-and-learn pilot rather than a network-wide conversion.
What a connector strategy actually costs
The real planning question for a commercial site is not which connector wins, it is how much it costs you if you guess wrong. Our future-proofing guide covers this in depth; the table below summarizes the trade-offs specific to the CCS/NACS decision.
| Strategy | What it covers | Upfront cost | Risk if the market shifts |
|---|
| CCS-only | Today's larger installed base of DC-capable EVs | Lowest | Highest: a full connector swap or new hardware if NACS becomes dominant |
| NACS-only | Tesla and the growing share of NACS-native EVs from other automakers | Lowest | High: shuts out the CCS installed base that still dominates on the road today |
| Native dual-connector hardware (two cables per dispenser) | Both standards, no adapter in the path | Moderate premium over single-connector hardware | Low: covers both today's and tomorrow's vehicles, at the cost of extra cabinet space and cable management |
| CCS station with a NACS adapter kit | NACS vehicles via an add-on adapter at the connector | Low incremental cost over CCS-only | Moderate: adapters add a failure point and slow the plug-in process versus a native cable |
Costs and risk levels are illustrative and relative, not dollar figures; get current quotes from your hardware vendor, and confirm whether "NACS-ready" claims mean a native cable or an adapter kit before you sign a contract.
One more precision point for anyone writing an RFP: the standard behind the connector is still moving. For deployed hardware the accurate label is the NACS/J3400 connector. SAE released J3400 as a Technical Information Report in December 2023, a Recommended Practice followed in 2024, and SAE published the J3400/2 connectors-and-inlets standard in May 2025, while the umbrella J3400 record remains a work in progress. A procurement document should cite the exact revision it is buying against, not just "NACS."
At most sites in this pilot, the ones keeping both connectors, Electrify America is leaning toward the dual-connector pattern rather than swapping one standard for another outright. That is the more expensive path per stall, but it is also the one that does not bet the site on which standard wins. The four full conversions, now live, show the opposite bet is also on the table: Electrify America is willing to drop CCS entirely where it decides the traffic supports it.
The honest caveats
A few things this story does not tell us. Electrify America has not said publicly whether the retrofit uses a native NACS cable swap or an adapter-based approach at each site; past company statements describe a native-cable retrofit, but that has not been independently confirmed for this specific 2026 wave. The company has not published how many of its stations nationwide already support NACS, so there is no way to size this 15-site pilot against the whole network with real precision. And this is described as a pilot gathering usage data, which means Electrify America itself may not yet know what the right long-term connector ratio is, a reasonable position for an operator to hold, but not one that gives a commercial property owner a clean answer to copy.
What to do now
- Do not treat this as a signal to build NACS-only. CCS remains the larger installed base today, and even the operator making this move is keeping CCS everywhere except four stations.
- Ask vendors directly whether "NACS support" means a native cable or an adapter, and get that in writing in the RFP, not just in marketing copy.
- Prioritize hardware with swappable or dual-connector cable heads if your budget allows it. The cost premium over single-connector hardware is real but modest next to the cost of retrofitting a CCS-only site later, the same logic that applies to oversizing conduit and panel capacity.
- Watch Electrify America's next update rather than react to this one. A 15-site pilot with no stated completion date is useful context, not a deadline. If the company reports results or expands the program later in 2026, that is the point to revisit your own site's connector plan.
For the deeper mechanics of sizing conduit, panels, and load management so a connector decision does not force a bigger retrofit later, see Future-Proofing Your Commercial EV Charging Installation. For how connector and power-level choices flow into the underlying project math, see DC Fast Charging ROI: Why the Math Is Different.
Last factually verified: 2026-10-17 against Electrify America's pilot stations page (electrifyamerica.com/pilot-stations), which supplies the site list and live or targeted status but no connector mix; the "both connector types" detail for the five California large-format hubs comes from the June trade coverage, not that page. The "more than 1,000 stations" network size is a rounded figure, not a dated company statistic. Sources: Electrek's June 30, 2026 report and electrive's July 1, 2026 follow-up on the retrofit wave; electrive, Charged EVs, and other trade coverage of the June 2026 Santa Barbara hub opening; and Electrify America's June 2023 press release (as carried by trade outlets) on working to offer a NACS connector option by 2025. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from Electrify America or any company named here.
Corrections (August 11, 2026): An earlier version of this article said Electrify America had promised network-wide NACS "by 2025" and framed the 2026 retrofit as arriving three years late; the company's June 2023 announcement said it "will work to offer a NACS connector option at existing and future charging stations by 2025" while continuing CCS support, which was not a station-by-station completion guarantee, and the 2026 program is a limited test-and-learn pilot.