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Comment by manicdee | Hacker News Reader

This article is seriously confused. Current BEVs use 400+ Volts for the motive power, but still have 12V for accessories due to the established market.

Increasing to 24V or 48V means less current for the same load, which means smaller cables for accessory power. Above 30V or so you get into "high voltage" by electrical safety standards.

A 48V electrical system is not going to be driving hybrid vehicles, it is purely to reduce the cost of wiring looms.

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Actually this article is talking about mild hybrid technology: Which is about upping the voltage for traditional non hybrid vehicles from 12V to 48V, giving them some hybrid like features on the cheap.

I have always heard that <50V is considered low voltage by electrical safety standards, which is why 48V is a good choice.

For electrical safety, <50V DC is common definition for ELV. For some (probably business oriented, ie. to do price differentiation for telco equipment) reasons, some electronics manufacturers classify anything over 30V as high voltage.

The US National Electric code defines <50V as low voltage but UL defines anything over 20V as high voltage.

UL generally deals with products so that is probably why they are more conservative. Picture a baby sucking on something and you can imagine why they want anything over 20V to be double insulated. If car manufactures want to comply with UL standards that would mean they would no longer be able to use the car's frame for the current return path.

Yeah I've always heard that. I just looked it up and it's actually 75V DC in the EU, and 50V AC.

http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/lv...

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