Automakers vary in changeover to faster USB

Jul 21, 2023

The USB port seen in a VW Atlas.

For months, a battle over EV charging has taken place across the auto industry, playing out in headline after headline and pitting one type of connector against another to gain dominance and win consolidation into a single standard.

But set aside electric vehicles for a moment: There's another charging connector transition underway that affects far more vehicles and exponentially more consumers. And it's coming to an instrument panel and rear seat near you — if it hasn't already arrived.

The Universal Serial Bus-A connector — the thin, rectangular hole with the plastic tongue that's been a part of automotive equipment since 2006 — is being replaced by the smaller, more efficient USB-C. The USB upgrade has been ongoing in the larger world since 2014, with computer, cellphone and electronics manufacturers migrating steadily to the new standard.

In the auto industry, the transition remains a work in progress.

Just how widespread is the switch to USB-C in the tech world? Even traditional electronics hardware holdout Apple is transitioning to the USB-C standard, in part to comply with European law. But the underlying advantages are simple: The USB-C is smaller, reversible and able to deliver much more power and data.

"Today, you can get 240 watts of power over [USB-C], and you can now get up to 80 gigabit-per-second data rates, which is huge," said Jeff Ravencraft, COO of the USB Implementers Forum, the nonprofit established in 1995 to promote and maintain USB technology. By comparison, those first USB-A connectors from 1995 could carry 7.5 watts of power, or 1.5 megabits of data per second, Ravencraft said.

"We say it all the time: This train has left the station. It left a long time ago," Ravencraft said of USB-A, noting the robustness of the USB-C connector and its growing ubiquity across technologies. Electronics manufacturers and the USB Implementers Forum stopped developing the USB-A around 2010.

Automakers are taking divergent paths, at least for now, on converting to USB-C.

Some, including Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen, are all-in, switching exclusively to the new standard as each of their model lines comes up for an interior freshening or redesign. Others, including Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, have hedged their technological bets, offering both USB-A and USB-C ports in their vehicles.

At BMW, all new launches from the 2021 iX forward offer USB-C exclusively, a spokesperson told Automotive News, while Mini vehicles offer both USB-A and USB-C, depending on the level of equipment and trim, and will transition to all USB-C. The German automaker cited compatibility with "an increasing number of devices," ease of connectivity, and higher rates of data transfer and charging as the reasons behind the switch.

At Toyota, the decision to transition to exclusively USB-C occurred in 2019 after deep analysis of where the consumer electronics market was heading, said Hal Eubanks, manager of cross carline advanced technology for Toyota Motor North America. Eubanks' portfolio includes automated driving and multimedia, including how Toyota customers plug into their cars.

He said internal and external analysis determined that by "the end of 2021, USB-C, in terms of the Apple iPhone, would represent 90.4 percent of users, and by the end of 2022, it would be over 99 percent," with even deeper penetration among Android users. Still, Eubanks said, "it was not necessarily an easy decision to transition 100 percent to USB-C from USB-A because even that small percentage of people, they matter to us. But at the end of the day, it's just that the percentage of smartphones that were going to be on USB-C by this time was just overwhelming."

Moving to USB-C had some distinct advantages for Toyota, Eubanks said, including faster charging times using a vehicle's nondata, charge-only ports. Most USB-A ports are limited to 7.5 watts, while today's USB-C ports offer 15-watt charging and higher. For new Toyota and Lexus vehicles — starting with the 2024 Toyota Tacoma this year — the automaker will transition to 45-watt charging. That's more power than current iPhones or Android phones are capable of receiving, but it "future-proofs" Toyota's customers, Eubanks said.

The transition also saved the Japanese automaker money, Eubanks said. "I can't go into details on this, but we have reduced the price of each of our USB ports as they have gone from USB-A to USB-C. It's not that they were particularly expensive per port to start with, but they have gone down dramatically percentagewise in price from what they were."

Automakers likely kept the USB-A ports in their vehicles for "backward compatibility," said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst for Guidehouse Insights. "People have a lot of cables around that they've gathered over the years. If you've got some USB-A cables, you may want to keep using them for a while."

But he said even the USB-A holdouts will eventually convert to USB-C exclusively. "With the next generation of models, they'll likely move to just the USB-Cs."

Ford is using both kinds of ports "to facilitate the transition that many of our customers are going through as they update their electronic devices to the latest technology," said spokesperson Alan Hall.

Marvin Lewis, an engineer at GM, said the company began the transition to exclusively USB-C with the Cadillac Lyriq, because the USB-A "will not be able to keep up with the future devices." He said other vehicles would follow as they were freshened or redesigned.

Though it was introduced almost a decade ago, the USB-C has been under constant development and continues to evolve and improve, said Rahman Ismail, chief technology officer of the USB Implementers Forum. Ismail said USB-C's growth is especially important in the automobile as the updated connector's use spreads across the tech world.

"It's not just people using phones anymore; they're using a lot more things in the back [seat] — computers, kids on their iPads, you name it — and they're drawing a lot more power," said Ismail, who is also a senior engineer with several patents at chipmaker Intel Corp.

The way USB-C is configured allows automotive engineers to parse out different power levels to different ports in the vehicle while being able to carry sufficient data bandwidth to run multiple systems simultaneously, Ismail said. That's especially important as the auto industry transitions to battery-electric propulsion, where wasted watts can mean less driving range.

"USB-C gives the car manufacturer the opportunity to be more green, as it were, by the very fact that he can now control the amount of battery power you can [deliver to each charging port in a vehicle] and have a very efficient transmission of power that you can minutely and properly control," Ismail said. "You can give 100 watts to one port, 15 watts to another and so on. That's a huge efficiency benefit right there."

So is the USB-C the end of the line for charging cables — the last solution other than inductive charging and Bluetooth connectivity?

Maybe, said Ravencraft.

USB-C "is very robust, and it was designed to have some longevity to it. Having said that, though, if a disruptive technology comes along, it comes along and the world deals with it," he said. "But we believe that USB-C and power delivery [through it] will be around for a few years to come."

Urvaksh Karkaria contributed to this report.

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