Almost exactly a year ago, I was visiting my local Lowes home improvement store and glanced over at the bank of Tesla Superchargers in the parking lot. There was a Tesla Service vehicle there and some of the chargers had be opened.
You know me, my curiosity got the best of me and I moseyed on over.
I asked the technician what he was doing and he explained that he was installing Tesla Magic Docks on all the stations. He would not allow photographs to be taken of the charger cabinet while it was opened.
The Magic Dock is an NACS (Tesla) adapter to enable recharging a vehicle equipped with a CCS1 (non-Tesla) charging port. It is “magically” attached to the normal NACS plug while within the charger cabinet. It cannot be easily removed or stolen and has to be returned to the charger cabinet’s plug holder to end the charging session. An EV driver accesses it by using the Tesla smartphone app to initiate charging.
I went into Lowes to shop but I’ve thought about those Magic Docks ever since. How do they work? How do you select the port you want? Does the speed of charging remain the same, or at least as fast as the non-Tesla EV can charge?
So, my friend and videographer Charles Mills and I shot a video to share the answers we found.
