I was puzzled recently when I tried to connect my Tesla model 3 to a third-party level 3 CHAdeMO charger. The adapter I had received with the car fit on the charger perfectly and I was able to plug it into my car. The charger and car did the “handshake“ with the flashing blue light but the charger gave an error message “waiting for EV”. After extensive online searches on this issue I found out that 1) the model 3 cannot except level 3 charging from third-party chargers, and 2) that while the J1772 adapter I was using fit perfectly on the CHAdeMO charger, it requires a special $400 adapter to be able to use any third-party level 3 chargers. Level 2 works fine, but not level 3.
I think you're laboring under some mistaken impressions about different types of charging. In the hopes of clarifying....
Every new Tesla ships with a J1772 adapter, as pictured here:
This J1772 adapter is a Level 2 (note: 2, not 3) adapter. It's used to connect J1772 Level 2 plugs to your Tesla. These are
not DC fast chargers. Most public Level 2 equipment charges at about 6 kW, although some can go a bit slower or faster than that.
I've never tried it, but it's possible that you could connect the J1772 adapter to a CCS1 plug, which looks like this:
I suspect you connected a CCS1 (not a CHAdeMO) plug to the J1772 adapter that came with your car. If so, it wouldn't work, because DC current flows through those two big pins on the bottom of the CCS1 plug, and those remain disconnected. I imagine you'd get some sort of charging error message on the car and/or the charging station, but I don't know precisely what that error message would read.
CHAdeMO is an entirely different beast. It's used mostly by Nissan Leafs, although a few other Japanese and Korean compliance cars have used it, too. A CHAdeMO plug looks something like this:
There's no way that a CHAdeMO plug will fit into the J1772 adapter that Tesla includes with the car. Thus, I don't think you were using CHAdeMO; however, it's possible you got your hands on Tesla's CHAdeMO-to-Tesla adapter:
Tesla is no longer selling this adapter in North America, although the last I heard it was still available in South Korea and Japan, and you might be able to get one as a "grey market" import or on the used market (eBay, etc.). If you have one of these, then it
should work with most CHAdeMO DC fast chargers; however, some people do have problems with some specific stations, or of course a specific adapter might be broken. This adapter will charge at a maximum of 50 kW. This is far slower than most Superchargers, but it's fast enough to be useful in some circumstances. When Tesla was still selling them in the US, the price was $400; but now that they're no longer available directly from Tesla, there's been price gouging on eBay, so prices are significantly higher.
In addition to the CHAdeMO adapter, there are numerous CCS1 adapters. There are multiple threads here on this forum discussing these adapters.
This thread, in particular, exists to describe what's currently available. Most of these adapters are simple pass-through devices, similar to Tesla's J1772 adapter, but they're designed to pass through the CCS1 high-voltage DC pins. As such, they require that the car understand the CCS protocol, which not all Teslas do. Most Teslas sold in the past two years or so do understand CCS, but older ones don't, and the necessary chip is missing from a few cars made relatively recently, too, because of supply-chain problems. There are several manufacturers, so appearances differ, but one common design (which is Tesla's, but has been copied by at least one Chinese manufacturer) looks like this:
These CCS1 adapters sell for $250 to $500. Tesla does
not currently include them with the car in any market, AFAIK. Most people who've tried them report that they're pretty reliable, with the caveat that the car itself must support CCS charging; however, some CCS DC fast chargers are unreliable. Anecdotal reports suggest increasing problems in the past few months, particularly at Electrify America, because of supply-chain problems slowing repairs of broken equipment. When they do work, they can charge at up to 200 kW (theoretical maximum; in practice a few kW less than that) on "350 kW" CCS1 stations, and at lower rates on less-speedy hardware.
As I've said, my suspicion is that you tried to use your J1772 adapter to connect to a CCS1 plug, which simply will not work. Use one of those CCS1-to-Tesla adapters instead and it will work
if your car has CCS support. (There's also one CCS1-to-Tesla adapter, made by Setec, that works even without this in-car support, but only at a maximum of 50 kW and with various other caveats. I don't recommend buying one of these at this time.)
