Plug wars: the battle for electric car supremacy
reuters.com
reuters.com
So, while there probably was a tactical component in the German manufacturers pushing for CCS, one can also make quite good technical arguments for CCS. In true German fashion, it is bulky and somewhat overengineered for current cars, but for a reason.
Current petrol stations (in NZ) have 4 different 'one-size-fits-all' nozzles.
91/95/98RON + diesel, some places also have adBlue for diesel trucks.
It's wasteful to have multiple plugs but not the end of the world.
The benefits to this are that the cost of the battery is spread out over time for the customer. And since the customer is always effectively paying the difference in cost of the deposit on the battery, the battery in their car will never exceed the value of what they have paid already. This also makes it way easier to recycle batteries once they have reached end of life as well.
Put an outlet at every parking spot for topping up while you work or shop in a more remote location, and you'll solve the problem for 95% of all urban cars.
(If your commute is > 80 miles, you have a bigger problem!)
Can you substantiate this claim? It seems a little Alex Jones-y without any evidence to support it. My understanding from reading the Wiki page is that this phrase popped up 20 years ago in a newspaper actually talking about a GM-made EV.
Frankly the chicken-and-egg scenario between charging infrastructure buildout and EV takeup is a very well-known dynamic of the market for this technology.
There was a time about ten years ago when many market participants were diving headfirst into EVs, but rapid-charging infrastructure was totally nonexistent and EVs didn't come anywhere close to the range of gas-powered cars, no matter how much you paid.
The median car journey in the US is just over 12 miles each way. 93% of households drive less than 100 miles on any given day. Current electric cars have more than enough range for the vast majority of users the vast majority of the time, but people have been trained by marketing to place excessive weight on abnormal journeys like road trips.
The majority of households have more than one car, so it would make perfect sense for them to have one electric car for routine journeys and keep an ICE car for those rare longer journeys. People who do actually take the plunge and go electric consistently report that they charge much less often than they thought they would need to, especially away from home. If we had a realistic sense of how we actually use our cars, EVs could achieve >50% market penetration without any infrastructure at all.
But it’s not the same 93% of households driving short trips every single day, while 7% of households drive long-haul day in and day out.
I might commute to work and back for less than 100 miles every single work day. But every weekend or so I might take a longer trip - short getaway to the beach, mountains, skiing resort, wine country, theme park, national park, relative out of town - you name it.
What am I supposed to do for that weekend or two? Take an Uber to Yosemite? Show up at Avis/Hertz and request to be raped on prices for a hot holiday weekend?
For single-car households people would still seek comfort in the fact that even if they have one long trip a year, they’re covered. And the costs of ownership of a compact gas/hybrid vs compact electric still lean in favor of the former.
Owning an electric car oftentimes means rather extensive coordination with my wife on the one day a year where both of us need to travel a long trip. That's the one day a year that we absolutely have to have charging infrastructure.
On extremely cold days in the winter my wife occasionally had to stop at a Chili's to top up on her way home. Without public charging she would have been stranded.
Don't even get me started about the time that we had to move and live in a vacation rental for a week. The grounds in the outdoor outlets were faulty. Electric vehicle Chargers verify the presence of a working ground, so I had to hunt through the rental property to find the best outlet and use a long extension cord.
So if you think electric vehicles will work without public charging infrastructure, you're delusional.
1. Battery packs are structural - if you make them removable the car will be less rigid.
2. You have $X to spend. You can spend it on improving rechargeability or making batteries swappable. 10% of your customers will swap battery packs ever, and 1% regularly. 10% of your customers will benefit from faster quick-charging times
The big thing with electrical cars is, that they can be plugged in while parking. So every morning, you start off with the full range of the car, and often you can plug in at work too. Battery capacities keep growing, so you get more range awailable this way and fast chargers get faster, reducing the recharge times on the road. This progress shrinks the szenarios in which a battery swap would be needed.
That’s the bet of Tesla’s Supercharger Network, and in their view on a road long trip you still stop to take a leak, get coffee, stretch a bit, so why not do all that with the car parked at a charging spot for 20-30 minutes. The charger can also accept a credit card or do in-app billing, like Tesla or Chargepoint do.
Any shopping plaza or road stop can add chargers at fairly minimal (frequently taxpayer-subsidized) costs. Setting up a battery swap operation is just more difficult logistically - you have to dedicate real estate just to that, hire employees, train employees, manage employees, get compensated from car owners somehow, which would involve getting a cash register, running a cash register, etc.
It's my (limited, third-party) understanding that dual chargers on a Tesla will gladly saturate a 240V 80A J1772, while a single charger will take 48A off a NEMA 14-50 @ 240V.
I'm pretty sure it's a limitation of the rectifier circuit in the charger.
This process generates waste heat, which must be vented. At level 1, (wall outlet,) and level 2, (oven outlet,) it's not a big deal. When rapid charging, the heat dissipation is huge.
The AC to DC converters that can handle rapid charging are physically huge and There's no practical way to put that inside the car itself.
I suggest learning the basics about how charging a battery works. You need to apply a DC voltage directly to the battery. Electric vehicle batteries are in the hundreds of volts.
What these systems do is the car and the charger communicate, and the car ends up telling the external charger how to charge its battery. That's why there's a lot of competition among standards.
Ahh, that makes more sense now that I think about it. Because of the cross sectional area required to efficiently rectify and transform such high currents, the equipment is either very large (and thus expensive) and heavy (and thus inappropriate for a motor vehicle), or very inefficient (requiring considerable active cooling, and costing a lot more dosh).
Charging capacity is in kw. batteries are hours of that (kwh). A regular us outlet has 1.44 kw charging capacity (120v * 12 amps). A high power car like a tesla has 85kwh or 100kwh of capacity, so 100kwh/1.44 = 69 hours, so it's not practical to drive 250 miles in a day and charge again; for that you need higher power chargers. A leaf is only 3.3 kwh (unless they increased it in the new models), tesla model s were 11 kwh or 22 kwh.
Details The on board transformer has a limited capacity to charge the battery. If you only charge 120v you only need 1.44kw charger. But you'll never be able to charge faster. 220v 12 amps is 2.64 kw. Original tesla model s had either 11 kwh or double chargers, 22 kw. The model x split the difference with 11 or 17kw.
40 amp power is commonly available, 40 amp * 220 v = 8.8 kw, 71 amp * 220 = 15.6kw, 100 amps * 220 = 22kwh, the max that tesla has onboard.
Did you know, a tesla supercharger is just a bank of regular car transformers that are combined to make the high power 140 kw charging power of top end superchargers (used to be around 90kw, they have kept increasing the top end, but the same plug).
This page gives a nice breakdown of different models and shows the anemic charging limits of most non-teslas. https://www.clippercreek.com/three-things-determine-ev-charg...
Yeah, I'm aware of that; I guess I didn't think that charging the battery in pulses (direct from a beefy rectifier, followed by a the DC transformer) would be incorrect or unreasonable. I'm guessing it's harder than I thought to build a high-rated rectifier.
If the manufacturers agree on a standard so early in the development of the electric car industry, we'll be stuck with it for a while because there won't be anything pressuring them to improve it.
All of this ought to be moot for buyers anyway. When I travel to countries with different electrical plugs than my own, I just bring an adapter. Hopefully the car charging systems will develop in such a way that it's possible for electric car owners to just keep a few adapters in their trunks when they need to charge somewhere other than their homes.
Early ev charging standards had a fatal flaw, they allowed too little power. The j1772 only allowed about 30 amps. This was fine because early electric car and charagable hyrbrids only had tiny batteries that could be filled up in a few hours, there was a giant failure of imagination to see larger in the future batteries, or deliberate sabotage, so there was no planning for what would be needed to support large battery cars with needs for traveling.
Then tesla came along with a giant battery & it couldn't be recharged in a reasonable timeframe. What good is 250 miles range, 80 kwh if it takes 2 days to recharge it? So there was an extension of the j1772 standard to support 80 amps, 220 v and this let you charge the tesla at 60 miles of range per hour. The early leaf barely had 80 miles of effective range. So this extension of the j1772 was great, but only tesla needed it. afaik, no other evs support the higher power of the j1772. Then tesla forsaw if they built high power dc chargers, then you could have long range travel - there were the superchargers, 120 kw - this used dc. dc has an advantage bc it can directly charge the batteries. There was no good standard for that, so telsa made their own. They offer it free of charge if people agree to not sue them. Then the american automative engineers came up with a different plug standard that had sepaate ac and dc chargers, and it had the fatal flaw that there was one using it, it was less attractive than others.
Next, in europe, the car makers noticed that tesla was impossibly building long range, good cars that people wanted and even reduced their sales a bit. They built their own standard. There were claims it could have larger power than tesla super chargers but I think it was limited in practice. and again, no cars using it (eventually a few came on the market), and few or no high powered chargers. There was a law mandating so teslas in europe use that plug format.
Then porsche decided they'd build a new standard that was better than teslas, and it's like double the power. But tesla has already built thousands of super chargers in their worldwide network for years. The new porsche format would be faster than teslas but i believe there are none in existence outside of a test system, and it would also not work on normal commerical power systems, afaik.
The tesla plug has another advantage, it is small and light and supports both ac and dc through the same plug.
The other car companies would never accept that the tesla plug could be the defacto standard, so we have all these different things showing up.
Chademo was a better plan, it was 50kw, it was in lots of place in Japan. It is the only widely used standard that approaches widespread use that is close to the supercharger.
What's really needed is a world wide standard, free of patents and chargers, that spans ac and dc, and supports chargins and v2g, but also allowed for very high power rates. These plugs negotiate the amount of power that you send, the car controls it, so you can have a plug system that for some cars sends 120 kw, for others sends 120v 10 amps (1.2kw). We need a standard that can imagine charging 100kwh battery in 5 minutes in the distant future, but works for things today. Tesla could probably have been that. The likely thing is j1772 + one of the 3 major intl standards (higher power than 50kw chademo, or the euro standard or the us standard).
Meanwhile, I'll keep driving my tesla, like I have since the end of 2012.
The mirages of modern journalism...
You got a good point - the architecture, weight trade-off, capabilities trade-off and cost trade-offs matter. Who is responsible for what. As long as the industry changes quickly and big players don't agree the vertical integrated solutions will stay. In the long run there is a need for a platform as it will be cheaper to do as much as possible in the shared infrastructure. When lower cost cars are getting on the market in larger numbers may mark the time when things are settled.
They took the European charge Mennekes connector, swapped the polarity of the pins, and then declared it "promoting indigenous innovation".
China also has a DC charging plug that is completely different from everything else. Now every Chinese car needs TWO plugs.
The dream of a world wide standard is impossible to achieve, since setting differing standards is much easier than imposing duties. It is similar to why North American cars seldom have yellow turn signals at the rear ... FMVSS vs EU-Directive and the likes.