I always felt like other makes could negotiate a better deal than that if they found it valuable to do so. It turns out that apparently they can.

It probably helps that Tesla is a mature company now, and such an agreement would likely involve patent sharing on both sides.

My understanding is the NACS spec Tesla released last year replaces the old patent sharing agreement for using Tesla’s connector.

So they didn’t get any bites until they actually bothered to make it an interoperable standard that didn’t require patent sharing.

That could be true, tbh. The fact that this agreement only mentioned Ford made me wonder if there's a period of exclusivity for the supercharger aspect of it.

Its also possible that Tesla is just opening NACS->CCS via adapter to everyone. Given the mentioned stall counts, it'd at least be limited to V3 stations, though.

It sounds like part of the deal with Ford is also plug-and-charge compatibility where the charging is billed to your Ford account automatically.

The current superchargers with the "magic dock" captive CCS adapter require using the Tesla app to initiate charging and handle billing.

I didn't hear that, but that would be useful. Plug and charge makes a big difference.