Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone says otherwise, there are already more CCS quick charge locations than there are Tesla Supercharger locations, before the Bolt has even gone on sale. The number grows every day. There were zero Superchargers when Tesla started selling its cars.

734 Supercharger stations: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger

843 CCS stations: http://www.afdc.energy.gov/locator/stations/widget/results?u...

The article is misleading by counting "hookups" (plugs) instead of locations.

View on HN

Not even close - there are roughly 2x as many SuperChargers as CSS stations. Also, CCS stations are clustered around population centers and not optimized for long road trips. Lastly, CCS charging can't be built in to the purchase price of the Bolt.

All of these facts are directly from TFA...

As a car driver, I've never taken or wanted to take a long road trip in any car. If it's more than 2 hours away, we fly or take a train. As an EV driver, the DCFC stations in population centers are what's needed. They're what let me drive to the next city over in my Leaf to shop, eat or visit people. The companies building these things are putting them where the demand is.

>>People don't take thousand mile road trips every day

Yes they do. Everyday thousands of tourist drive from BFE to Orlando, it's one of the reasons stretch of I-4 along the attractions is the deadliest in the US (too many tourist that all drive differently).

It may not be common in your region of the world, but it is extremely common in other regions.

And certainly many people routinely drive 200-300 miles or so for a weekend trip--to rural locations that aren't going to have much in the way of charging infrastructure.

If you're going from pretty much any major city to ski areas, mountain hiking, kayaking/canoeing, etc. you can easily be looking at a couple hundred miles or more. You may not do that but it's a very common weekend activity for many people in urban areas.

The challenge with the CCS stations is they are generally only one or two plugs. As CCS cars become more prevalent, they're going to need much larger setups, with 8, 10 or 12 plugs at each station. The wait to quick-charge is bad enough. It would be a lot worse if you had to wait 20 minutes just to get on the charger.

There are only one or two plugs because there are no cars to use them. BMW's sold just 22K i3's to date worldwide. Chevy's sold a few thousand Spark EV's. Tesla and Leaf don't use CCS. Most of the time the chargers sit completely idle. There's no need, nor financial projections to justify, building more CCS plugs per location. The ratio of CCS plugs to CCS-capable cars is probably better than the ratio of Supercharger plugs to Tesla cars. Tesla's locations are the ones known for the lines of waiting cars.

Keep in mind the Bolt hasn't gone on sale yet. Nobody's bought one, there are zero Bolt drivers available to pay money to Blink/CP/NRG that are laying out $50K+ to build each CCS charger. If they've built nearly 900 of them around the nation anyway, on the premise that the cars are coming, think about how fast the network can expand when there are actual cars on the road to justify doing so. Volkswagen is going to dump almost $2 billion into building CCS chargers as part of its settlement for the emissions scandal.

Like all technology, early adopters will suffer "just one or two plugs" for a while... or not, if you're in Pennsylvania like me, and the chargers are unused and available 100% of the time I check Plugshare... so that in a few years, when there are half a million or more EVs on the road... that is, potential customers... we will have created demand that led to those additional plugs being built.

Complaining that there are only 1579 fast charge plugs for the Bolt before it goes on sale is like complaining there weren't enough iPhone docks available before the iPhone came out. The accessories showed up after the customers that can buy them did.

Fair enough. I've seen full J1772 charger stations, but you're right that I haven't seen full CCS stations. As the number of CCS-capable cars increase, we should see improvements in station capacity and reliability.

From the article:

> As of September 1, 2016, there were 1061 CCS fast-charging connectors in the United States, versus 2010 Tesla Supercharger hookups.

I can't fathom where they got those numbers. They aren't close to anything from Tesla, Plugshare, or the US DoE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com