CCS2, Type 2 and friends: India's EV connectors, explained

Stand in front of a charging station for the first time and the cables can be intimidating. The good news: for most electric cars in India, only two connectors matter.

Type 2 — the everyday AC plug

Type 2 is the round, seven-pin connector used for AC charging — the slower, gentler charging you do at home, at offices, and in city car parks. Power typically ranges from 7 kW to 22 kW. Nearly every electric car sold in India today accepts Type 2.

CCS2 — the road-trip connector

CCS2 (Combined Charging System) takes the Type 2 shape and adds two large DC pins beneath it. This is the connector for fast charging: 60 kW, 120 kW, 240 kW and beyond. If you have seen an EV add hundreds of kilometres of range during a lunch stop, it was almost certainly through CCS2. It is the standard our stations are designed around, using hardware from established global manufacturers.

The others you might see

• CHAdeMO: an older DC standard, now rare on new cars in India
• GB/T and Bharat DC-001: mostly earlier fleet and three-wheeler chargers
• 3-pin AC: emergency-only home charging — slow, and not for daily use

What OCPP means (and why you should care)

Behind the plug, charging stations speak a software language to the networks that run them. OCPP — the Open Charge Point Protocol — is the open standard version of that language. OCPP-compliant hardware means a station is not locked to one company's software, can be monitored properly, and can join open networks. Ours is OCPP-compliant by design, because we believe drivers benefit when networks talk to each other.

The future is plug-and-charge

The best connector experience is the one you stop thinking about. With auto-charge, the station recognises your car the moment you plug in — no app fumbling, no cards, no QR codes at midnight. You plug in, walk away, and billing sorts itself out. We are building this across our entire network from day one, so the answer to "which cable, which app, which card?" becomes simply: plug in.