Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmsmith | Hacker News Reader

>In response to the charger network concern, Kelly said GM is one of around a dozen automakers committed to the SAE combo connector. Tesla is the maverick with its own standard, and GM has not said it would collaborate on a shared standard, and neither has Tesla in reverse.

I get that Tesla thinks they can out-connector everyone else, but it seems like a shared connector standard would be a huge bonus for all EV companies.

View on HN

Multiple standards and per-brand charger networks would suck for consumers. Simple solution: make the federal tax credit only apply to cars that cooperate on connector standards (once a standard emerges).

It's not about connectors. Tesla ships adapters for the major connector standards (j1772 and chademo), and presumably will also do so for future standards. What it's about is supercharging, which is very customized to battery pack design and electric gear.

Supercharging is much like CHAdeMO. The car drives the whole process. It requests a certain voltage and amperage, and the charger provides that. This updates continuously as the charge goes on. They use different protocols for this communication (which is why Tesla's CHAdeMO adapter is $450 instead of a simple piece of plastic and dumb metal) but neither one is very specific to the battery pack or other electronics.

One wrinkle is that the charger has to be able to put out enough voltage to actually charge the battery. There are some rumbles about future cars with 800V packs to improve charging speeds, which would make them incompatible with these chargers. But all current and near-future cars could potentially use all current fast-charging standards with an adapter, or with a bit of engineering effort to build in a port.

The company to watch is NRG, which has good fast charging coverage in many metro areas.

http://insideevs.com/nrg-evgo-were-1-with-37-of-the-dc-fast-...

I think the problem is Tesla's connector is much faster. Last I checked Tesla offered others access to its connectors, too, for a license fee (obviously, it would be dumb to offer it for free).

What I've heard Elon say is that automakers who want to use the superchargers just have to share "costs". I assume that means electricity + property leases + maintenance + some sort of amortized construction costs. I've never heard anything about a license fee.

>obviously, it would be dumb to offer it for free

I'm not so sure. It would cement that connector as standard at any rate. Hopefully the revenue from licensing connectors isn't too critical to their business or they have bigger problems!

You know what they say - it's better to have a small share of a large market than vice versa.

I feel like the entire third party charger thing is an overstated red herring. Bolt just jumped us from 70 miles by default for non Tesla to 200 miles. Next jump in 3-5 years is 350 - 500? So once or twice a year you worry about needing to charge away from home? And that assumes you only have an electric car vs one of each. Seems so edge case (even at 200) but I understand why it can dominate the discussion.

So once or twice a year you worry about needing to charge away from home?

What if you rent? I was going to have my landlord install a $750 outdoor level 2 charger so I could charge my car in under 8 hours. It's a problem for renters.

Would you really go all electric if you didn't have access resolved at your residence? Seems like a headache you'd always be managing.

I would quite happily own an EV if it had a few hundred km range and access to slow chargers at work or while shopping.

Park car, plug in to GPO. Go shopping, come back an hour or two later. Sure, it won't completely cover the day's driving but it will stretch the time between visits to a fast/super charging station.

The car's range is a buffer between fast charger visits.

They don't think that, they have already done that. They have supercharger coverage in all of North America and western Europe. The "dozen committed automakers" have nothing.

Adapters are simple though, no? At least wherever I see EV charging stations in malls and such, a variety of cars is connected - Leafs, Tesla S, Chevy Volt, and others. Perhaps this is not the most effective/fast way to charge a Tesla, but it does work.

> The "dozen committed automakers" have nothing.

They have installed way more charging stations than Tesla, by several orders of magnitude. Almost every Nissan, GM, BMW, etc dealership has at least one or two charging stations and they're open to the public. I can see 15 stations within 10 miles of my home, most at dealerships, then a few at malls and stores. Tesla has 3 Superchargers in the entire state, only near highways. The highway already has chargers installed at its rest stops, too (including DC quick chargers), and they're not Tesla chargers, they're the standard connector every other EV uses. PlugShare shows over 50,000 public chargers in the US. Tesla's only built 590 stations.

I drive a Nissan Leaf. They're ridiculously cheap (we're talking $10-12K fully loaded for a recent, low mileage certified preowned). I've charged it at public stations. I also look forward to upgrading to a longer range EV as soon as there's one that doesn't cost as much as a house. There are way more than enough non-Tesla charging stations out there to make me comfortable only owning an EV, by any make.

These are not useful chargers for long-distance travel. They are barely above a 230V/15A outlet, and pretty much only useful for top-up charging at destinations. And guess what, Tesla has adapters for all of these. As I said, they have won this already.

No, looking around me, the Nissan dealers and the highway rest stops have DC quick chargers (480V L3), which are the equivalent of Tesla's superchargers.

You're comparing 80% of 80 miles and 80% of 260 miles, and saying that they're equivalent? One is more than 3X faster than the other. One makes it somewhat reasonable to drive long distances, the other does not.

BTW, Tesla sells an adapter for Chademo.

The Chademo standard supports up to 100 kW of output, while Tesla Superchargers are up to 120 kW. Most of the L3 chargers out there are hooked up to 125A and put out 62.5 kW, but they can be upgraded with no change to cars, and provide comparable recharge times to Tesla's chargers. There are relatively few EVs on the road, and none that have the range of a Tesla, so no customer base to necessitate those upgrades just yet. It's awesome what Tesla has done, but there's really nothing wrong with how the infrastructure is growing for all the other EVs and the standards they've all chosen to support. If the Chevy Bolt flops, it won't be because it takes early adopters 45 minutes at the rest stop instead of 30 to make an occasional long-distance road trip.

Yeah, it'll be because the Bolt's fast chargers are in inconvenient locations and are hard to count on since they're installed in single units.

The way the infrastructure is growing for other EVs sucks. If you had a Tesla equivalent car today that couldn't use Tesla superchargers, it would be terrible for long distance travel. It would be slow, painful, and run a substantial risk of stranding when it turns out the one charger you were really counting on has been broken for weeks and the dealer is too busy selling house-sized SUVs to care about repairing it.

This could change quickly if the big car makers cared to. So far there's no indication that they do, though.

Typical CHAdeMO chargers are half the speed of a Supercharger or less. They're also often installed in single units, making them highly vulnerable to breakdowns, queueing, or blocking by non-EVs.

You're comparing apples and oranges. The vast majority of those 50,000 public chargers are slow L2 AC chargers, not L3 fast DC chargers. Many of those 50,000 public chargers are Tesla L2 chargers, too.

If you want a proper comparison, filter PlugShare to only show CHAdeMO and CCS, and compare that to Tesla superchargers. And consider that "only near highways" is exactly where they're useful. And that Teslas can use CHAdeMO chargers too.

Edit: and go through the non-Tesla fast chargers and see how many are broken down, how many are actually available to the public (some Nissan dealers limit theirs to only LEAFs bought from them), how many are frequently blocked by non-EVs, how many have pathetic power levels like 25kW or less, and in general just how many of those are actually useful for long distance travel. No need to do this for the Tesla chargers, as they're all good. (Except Bethesda. You can count that one out.)

Come March it will be 3 years that Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) also has a network of chargers in the UK I presume elsewhere too. [1]

The are part of the POLAR network [2] which has over 4,000 charge points across the UK for Nissan Leaf, Renault Fluance, Mini ED, Vauxhall Ampera, Chevrolet Volt and Tesla Roadster, BMW i8 and i3, Tesla Model S, Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, Renault ZOE, Renault Twizy, VW e-Golf ...

[1] http://your.asda.com/news-and-blogs/electric-car-drivers-can...

[2] https://www.chargemasterplc.com/index.php/blog/launch-of-pol...

These are slow AC chargers which are not very useful for long distance travel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com