CCS, CHAdeMO and Type 2: UK EV Connectors Explained

The first time you pull up at a bank of public chargers, the cables look interchangeable. They are not. Plug the wrong one in and nothing happens — at best you have wasted five minutes, at worst you have queued behind someone for a charger your car physically cannot use.

The good news is that the UK has quietly standardised. In practice you need to recognise three connectors, and once you know which two your own car takes, the rest of the estate sorts itself into "mine" and "not mine" the moment you look at it.

The one distinction that explains everything

Every connector on this site falls into one of two families, and the difference is where the conversion from mains AC to the DC your battery stores happens.

AC charging sends alternating current to the car and lets the car's own onboard charger convert it. That onboard charger is a physical box with a physical limit — commonly 7.4kW, sometimes 11kW or 22kW. This is the ceiling that matters: if your car has a 7.4kW onboard charger, a 22kW AC post will still only give you 7.4kW. The post is not broken. Your car is the bottleneck.

DC charging skips the car's onboard charger entirely. The conversion happens inside the charging unit itself, which is why DC chargers are the size of a fridge and AC posts are the size of a bollard. With the onboard charger out of the loop, the only limits are the charger's rating and what your battery will accept. This is how you get 50kW, 150kW or 350kW.

That single fact explains most of what confuses people. AC is slow because of a box in your car. DC is fast because it bypasses it.

Type 2 — the AC connector you will use most

Type 2 (its proper name is Mennekes, after the German firm that designed it) is a seven-pin round plug with one flattened edge. It is the European and UK standard for AC charging and it is on essentially every EV sold here.

You will meet Type 2 at home wallboxes, workplace car parks, supermarket bays, hotel chargers, on-street lamppost and bollard units, and the 7kW and 22kW posts in town centre car parks — which is to say, most of the charge points on this site. Speeds run from 3.7kW up to 22kW.

The practical quirk: many Type 2 posts are untethered, meaning there is a socket on the unit and no cable attached. You supply the cable. A Type 2 to Type 2 lead lives in the boot of most UK EVs for exactly this reason, and if yours did not come with one, buy one before you need it. Arriving at an untethered post without a cable is the single most common way to be defeated by a charger that is working perfectly.

CCS — the rapid connector that won

CCS stands for Combined Charging System, and the name is literal: it is a Type 2 plug with two fat DC pins bolted underneath, giving a distinctive keyhole shape. The "combined" part means one socket on the car handles both AC and DC. You plug a Type 2 cable into the top portion for slow charging, or a CCS cable into the whole thing for rapid charging.

CCS is the UK's rapid standard and the argument is over. Every mainstream EV launched here in recent years uses it, and it is what the 150kW and 350kW ultra-rapid hubs on motorway services are built around. Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y use CCS in the UK too, and Tesla has opened a growing share of its Supercharger network to other brands as a result.

If your car is newer than about 2019, this is almost certainly your rapid connector, and you can ignore most of the next section.

CHAdeMO — the one that is fading

CHAdeMO is a large round DC connector developed in Japan, and it was genuinely first to market. In the UK it is now a legacy standard on a slow decline. The cars that use it are mostly the Nissan Leaf and e-NV200, plus some early Mitsubishi and Kia models.

Here is what matters if you drive one. Most existing rapid units are dual-headed — a CCS cable on one side, CHAdeMO on the other — so you are fine at the majority of the current estate. But new-build ultra-rapid hubs increasingly fit CCS only, and CHAdeMO tops out around 50kW in practice on UK hardware regardless. If you drive a Leaf, plan slightly more conservatively on unfamiliar routes, and check the connector list on a charge point's entry here before you commit to a detour.

The two you will see occasionally

Type 1 (J1772) is a five-pin AC connector from an earlier generation, found on cars like the first-generation Leaf, early Outlander PHEVs and the pre-facelift BMW i3. It is AC only and no UK public post is tethered with it any more — Type 1 drivers carry a Type 2 to Type 1 cable and use ordinary untethered posts.

The three-pin domestic plug, universally called a granny cable, is the emergency option. It draws around 2.3kW, which is roughly 8 miles of range per hour — fine overnight at a relative's house, useless as a strategy. Never run one through a household extension lead, and never coil it on the reel while it is in use.

Working out which ones are yours

Open your charge flap and look at the socket. If you see a Type 2 outline with two round pins in a bay underneath, you have CCS — your two connectors are Type 2 for AC and CCS for DC. If you see a Type 2 outline and, separately, a second large round socket beside it, you have CHAdeMO. If you see a five-pin socket with no DC provision at all, you have Type 1 and you are AC only.

That is the whole decision. Two connectors, one for slow and one for fast, and every charge point listed on PlugMap tells you which ones it offers before you drive there.

Reading the connector list on a PlugMap page

On every town page we list each charge point's connectors with the power rating beside them, like CCS (Type 2) · 150kW or Type 2 · 7kW ×2. The multiplier at the end is the number of that connector available at the site — useful for judging your odds of finding one free when you arrive.

One honest caveat. This data comes from OpenChargeMap, an open database maintained by operators and contributors, and connector records can lag reality when a site is upgraded or a unit is replaced. It is accurate for the overwhelming majority of sites, but on a marginal-range journey, treat the operator's own app as the final word and use our listings to plan.

Now that you can tell the plugs apart, the next question is how fast each one actually charges — and why a 150kW charger rarely gives you 150kW for long.