Why doesn’t the 2023 bZ4X have true Plug & Charge? This feels like a software update Toyota is holding back.
Hey everyone,
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately while out at public fast chargers. Toyota announced that true Plug & Charge (the ISO 15118 protocol where you just plug in and the car handles authentication/payment automatically) is officially a feature for the 2026 model year.
But it makes me wonder... why are the 2023–2025 models completely left out of this?
I know some people use EVgo’s AutoCharge+, which works okay, but that’s an EVgo-specific workaround that just reads the car's MAC address. It isn't true Plug & Charge.
As far as I understand, standard ISO 15118 compliance is almost entirely a software and firmware protocol. The car already communicates with the charger to handshake, handle digital security tokens, and manage current. It's not like our 2023 models lack the physical hardware to talk to a station.
With Toyota pushing out OTA updates and even rolling out NACS adapters and Apple Maps EV routing for the older model years, it feels like adding true Plug & Charge capability via an over-the-air update should be entirely possible.
Does anyone with more of a tech or engineering background know if there's an actual hardware limitation preventing the 2023s from getting this? Or is Toyota just holding it back as an incentive to get people to trade up to newer model years?
Curious to hear your thoughts, or if anyone has managed to get true Plug & Charge (not AutoCharge) working through some other workaround.