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Comment by Faaak | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's called CCS is EU/USA.

For asia, it's still undecided between CCS and CHAdeMO

CCS is kind of a mess due to backwards compatibility. Tesla’s plug design is a better standard, but it’s unlikely for companies to abandon CCS.

How come? CCS is fantastic, because it's backwards compatible with Type 2 connector by default, so you don't need to have both on a car, it literally works with any Type 2 charger OR any CCS charger, using one socket. The only thing it doesn't work with is Type 1, but the last car commercially released with a type 1 socket was the Outlander PHEV, like half a decade ago, at least over here in the UK. Type 1 just doesn't exist as a standard anymore, special order only.

Sure praise be to backwards compatibility today, just realize the added costs never go away.

Tesla’s connector is lower weight among other advantages and a simple adaptor allows for Type 2 or CCS charging as well. We are very early into the EV transition to be worrying about backwards compatibility.

It’s not backwards compatible as in Type2 would be obsolete. Type2 is for AC charging (up to 22kW) and that what home chargers use. So it is not going away.

CCS just adds two large pins under the Type2 for DC charging. No sense to have those heavy pins when you’re charging from small 3.7kW home wallbox.

Type2 is over engineered for home charging, and even ignoring that it’s not a great long term solution. I doubt wireless charging will ever be popular for 150kW fast charging, but it would be convent for daily trickle charging and electrified roads for truly unlimited range. IMO, some in road charging system is the long term future of EV’s and using whatever that is for at home charging is probably going to eventually take off.

Anyway, using slightly larger pins in a home connection is trivial vs the overall advantages. It’s the heavy gage wiring and active cooling that makes fast chargers heavy and that’s where you notice the added bulk and weight of the backwards comparable connector.

Type 1 definitely still exists as a standard. In NA, every EV other than Tesla has a J1772 (a.k.a. "Type 1") charge port.

https://evcharging.enelx.com/resources/blog/552-ev-charging-...

A css adapter is huge and unwieldy compared to the Tesla one. It's about double the size of the tesla adapter.

What do you mean by adapter? Adapter from what to what?

Forgive me. I flubbed.

https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/connector_co...

If I were Asia, I would choose Type2 CCS in a combo with ChaoJi (the new version of Chademo). It's like the European CCS, but with its main flaw being resolved (namely, allowing you to plug upper and lower parts separately and not in one unwieldy piece).

Here is a picture: https://www.chademo.com/wp2016/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/co...

Correct, I noticed that at a lot of newly built charging stations along motorways here in the UK it's just CCS - no more Type 2, no more CHADeMO(sucks for Leaf owners I guess).

Evidence that's the best for next decades? Sorry but the word of EU bureaucracy is not enough.

What kind of evidence would you find sufficient? CCS supports 350kW charging speeds(as-is, it can support more with very minor changes to the cable/plug spec), higher than any car currently on the market. What exactly are your requirements to make a charging standard "best for the next decades"?

The Audi e-tron GT charges at 270KW. Pretty close already. A standard petrol/gas pump pushes 22MW, or ~7MW equivalent when taking into account ICE efficiency.

Right, but I think aiming for petrol pump equivalency isn't very helpful when planning a charging standard right now - this theoretical 7MW charging station would be absolutely insane in order to provide that much power through a single cable(I would love to see a calculation for how thick it would need to be to make that happen), second of all how do you cool down a battery charging at 7MW, and third of all how do you get that kind of power to the charging site(especially if we're talking about multiple charging points running at once).

Even right now the new FastNED or Ionity charging stations that have the latest 300kW chargers are very difficult to install due to the huge power requirements, especially with several of them running in parallel. Tesla Superchargers do actually slow down when multiple cars are charging at once.

So going back to the charging standard - the "default" CCS plug supporting "only" 350kW is going to be sufficient for a long time I think. And if it's not it can be made to support more with very minor changes to the design - after all it's literally just two prongs thar carry the power.

7MW is about half a high speed train at maximum power, but that's using a 25kV supply.

But running the cables is presumably easier when the railway has that convenient strip of land all across the country.

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