Write Your Congressman: The Plug That Doesn't Lock You In

To the Honorable Member of Congress:

We write on behalf of a right the buyer of a car is owed and is seldom told he holds: the right to plug the machine he paid for into any network that machine can reach.

Consider what a maker did this week. By Hyundai's own account, the company took its charge port out, fitted a different inlet in its place so the car can draw power from a network it could not reach before, and shipped the adapters for the old plugs, both ways, in the box. We name no standard the winner and none the loser here, and we make no claim about how fast either fills a battery or how well either holds up, because the release makes none and neither will we. We note only the shape of the gesture. A maker that hands the owner the adapters to plug in anywhere has said, in hardware, that open was the point.

Here is the plain trouble, and it outlasts one badge. A charge port can be built as an open door or as a fence, and the fence pays whoever owns it. Fitted the wrong way, the port becomes a leash: a machine a person bought outright, penned to a single company's network, permitted to draw power only where that company allows. The car is his. The plug decides whose it really is.

We propose no statute, and we will not pretend a bill could dictate the shape of a plug. No law belongs on the end of a charging cable. We ask only for the plain thing the driver is owed: that a car's charge port be an open door by design, free to draw power on any network the car can physically reach, with the adapters in the box and no walled garden standing between an owner and the outlet. One machine, bought once, free to plug in wherever it can.

Let the port be a public door, not a private gate. Write back to us when you have.

Respectfully, The Editors