BMW i5 spotted with native NACS port – could be one of the 1st brands to switch?

A BMW i5 with a native NACS port was spotted charging this weekend in Green River, Utah, leading to thoughts that BMW’s NACS transition may leapfrog a few other companies.

We’ve seen a lot of action in the NACS transition in the last few weeks, with several brands added to Tesla’s Supercharger “coming soon” page, separate announcements from VW and Honda, and with Hyundai shipping the first third-party vehicles with a native NACS port (which works great on Superchargers) and Kia’s native NACS EV6 just around the corner as well.

One of the brands added to the “coming soon” list is BMW, a brand whose NACS transition we haven’t heard a whole lot about lately. It announced in 2023 that NACS would come in 2025, and we know that an adapter will be available when BMW gains access to the network (though the transition has gotten a little bit chaotic in the interim, after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s unwise abrupt firing of the whole Supercharger team).

But BMW also has a new class of vehicles coming out – dubbed, in the most German way possible, “Neue Klasse” – with a new EV platform that better integrates batteries into the vehicle structure. Those vehicles may come with NACS support natively, and the first of them should ship by the end of this year.

And we may have seen the first physical indication of those future native NACS vehicles this weekend in Utah, with a BMW i5 spotted being driven and charged by BMW engineers.

The pictures were taken by reddit user Redditq_, who we also followed up with. They mentioned that the vehicles all had various engineering equipment stuck to the dashboards, that there were three development vehicles in total at the station (other than his, in the middle of the shot above), and that the cars were using an adapter to charge. The engineers said they were testing the NACS port.

Interestingly enough, this charging station doesn’t have any NACS charging heads, only CCS and CHAdeMO. So the engineers used a CCS to NACS adapter to charge at this station.

The BMW has the charging port on the passenger side, which is notable as Teslas all have charging ports on the driver side. This has caused some difficulty as brands gain Supercharger access, because older Supercharger stations have short cables that can’t reach both sides of the vehicle (the new V4 system will fix this, but not many of those stations have rolled out yet). This has led to some vehicles having to double-park in order to charge, which is actually the Tesla-recommended method.

But passenger-side ports are more beneficial for street-side charging, which is becoming more common in European cities and would be a method to make it easier for apartment-dwellers or other street parkers to charge their cars. The Rivian R2 was originally unveiled with a relocated charge port to the passenger side for this reason, before moving it back to the driver’s side for Supercharger compatibility instead.

This is actually one of the first vehicles that we’ve seen with a native NACS port, even in testing. While most brands have announced a transition and several are already sending out adapters and are Supercharger-compatible, the only other cars we’ve seen with native ports have been Hyundai/Kia cars and unreleased/concept vehicles (e.g. the R2 and the Aptera).

So, despite BMW not being on the absolute forefront of the transition in terms of adapter availability (like Ford or Rivian, for example), it may leapfrog some brands at bringing a NACS-native car to market. BMW is also a part of the IONNA charging network, which will install NACS plugs.

We saw similar early native NACS ports with Hyundai, when a camouflaged vehicle with a native port was spotted in July 2024, about six months before Hyundai started shipping the Ioniq 5 with its own native port. We wonder if something similar might happen with BMW.

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