Electric Car Charging Technology Is About to Surge Past Tesla's Superchargers | Hacker News Reader

Electric Car Charging Technology Is About to Surge Past Tesla's Superchargers

thedrive.com

19 pointsscottie_m15 comments

Couple of points here

Firstly, this is still years off and you seriously expect Tesla not to be developing the Mega-charger? Well here's a big hint, it has a fucking massive electric truck that will need to be charged somewhere and a supercharger is not going to cut it

I like the fact I can go to any gas station and not have to worry about which nozzle fits my car, why cant all these guys just agree on something, I thought Tesla had open-sourced its patents for this so anyone could make the supercharger adapter or was that just BS from Tesla?

Tesla seriously needs some competition, I'm seeing a digital camera replacing a film camera moment of history in action with EV's but the auto makers and gas stations are still scratching their arses or in denial or just promising us cake tomorrow, until I see this in the flesh it is nothing more than a marketing FUD.

What's the point of megacharger if your cars don't charge on it? I don't see any indication that existing Teslas can even charge above 150kw.

All of them agree on CCS (and the Japanese on chademo). Why should they take up Tesla's own standard?

> until I see this in the flesh it is nothing more than a marketing FUD.

Skepticism is good, I hope you use it when Elon musk makes statements too.

I like the fact I can go to any gas station and not have to worry about which nozzle fits my car

In seven years of ownership of a Nissan Leaf, that been neither a concern or a problem of mine. Every public charging station I’ve used worked fine with the Leaf. Not that I use them all that often because the “gas station” I go to most often is in my garage.

This. The infrastructure to fuel the cars of the future already exists. A basic 120v outlet charging for 12 hours afterwork and through the night nets most EVs about 60 miles of range. That covers the roundtrip commute of 90% of the population[1]. A 240v outlet completely charges a battery overnight – even huge batteries like on the Model S or Bolt.

[1] https://www.statisticbrain.com/commute-statistics/

That actually sounds terrible, 5 miles of range per hour? I assumed most ev could charge faster than that...

Home charging is that "fast" for everyone.

Nobody has 50 or 100 kw chargers at home.

Yes, it is slow on a basic outlet. But they are capable of charging much faster on higher amp circuits. A 240v 32-40 amp outlet, like a clothes dryer outlet, pushes 20-30 miles per hour. This is what is called Level 2 charging and the majority of public charging stations are at this amperage.

Level 3, also referred to as quick charging, is typically 50-100 amps, and can get you 100 miles in 30 minutes. It is for a different use case, like a road trip.

> I like the fact I can go to any gas station and not have to worry about which nozzle fits my car, why cant all these guys just agree on something, I thought Tesla had open-sourced its patents for this so anyone could make the supercharger adapter or was that just BS from Tesla?

It was just BS from Tesla. All Musk said that they had no current plans to enforce the patent, but never actually licensed any of them to competing companies. Of course, that didn't stop his marketing department from trying to confuse people into thinking they actually open sourced the patents.

The entire sitution is such a cluster fuck now. There are way to many different standards[1] some with the same plug but different protocol!

This is the 1990s cell phone charger debacle all over again. Can't we just all agree on a nice global standard? Additionally let's not build another bluetooth please...

[1] https://greentransportation.info/ev-charging/range-confidenc...

Well to be fair they didn't for phones either, the EU had to slap them into it