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Comment by worldmerge | Hacker News Reader

This is good news.

But, why don't EVs have a standard to follow like gas cars have a standard fill port? It seems like there is a lot of proprietary tech going on in the EV market at the moment, like early 2000s cell phones that all had their own unique charging port.

Edit: Thank you for your replies! I'll look into the CCS EV plug.

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That's not right, the only "proprietary" connector is Tesla's, every other connector is completely open. Tesla claims theirs is open, but clearly not enough for others to adopt it. The non-Tesla connectors, none of which are proprietary or unique to a manufacturer:

* J1772 "Level 2", the slower 240V AC that's common for home charging (this was incorrectly labeled as "type 2, thanks for the correction jsmith45)

* CCS - fast DC charging, the form factor is Type2 plus a bit of an extra shape.

* CHaDEMo - a separate fast DC charging connector

Also, CHaDEMo is only still being used on one or two new models in the US. Everyone else (except Tesla) has adopted CCS on vehicles that support fast charging.

Don’t underestimate the “Not Invented Here” syndrome for why other carmakers don’t use the vastly better Tesla adapter.

This image shows the size difference: https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/connector_co...

Those same carmakers didn't invent CCS either. So by the same logic they'd be skipping the non-proprietary CCS standard just like the proprietary Tesla one.

No, but they’d rather pick a 3rd party standard than acknowledging the value of their main competitor’s innovation.

That wasn't the argument you made above.

Being reactionary to a competitor’s approach is absolutely part of NIH. Also, many carmakers were actually involved in the CCS standard. If you want to use a different phrase than "NIH" to more precisely describe this reactionary refusal to use a better technology because your competitor thought it up and you don’t want to look bad by adopting it, that’s okay by me.

I'm struggling to see why anyone would give even the smallest fuck about the size of the plug.

Up to a certain size, it doesn't really matter. But anything larger than the tesla one does get increasingly unweildly.

Yeah, if you haven’t ever used the alternatives (Chademo or US CCS) and compared to Tesla, it’s hard to grok why it’d be a usability issue.

Chademo is ridiculous but also dead and nobody ever has to use it. Most EV owners, most of the time, are charging from the smaller AC J1772 plug at home or at a public charger. Fast DC charging for long trips is now and will remain a minor use case that pretty much nobody cares about, and having to use a slightly larger plug on 1% of your trips is not going to be something people get worked up about.

Aesthetics matter to some people. I would be a little more sad if I had to plug in a chunky CCS charger rather than the relatively-small charger Teslas have now.

(To be clear, standardizing on CCS is likely a good thing and I'd support it, but, y'know … I'd be a little sadder)

Except in the US Type 2 is not really a thing (there is a local standard based on it intended for semis and buses), and everybody is using type 1. Even the version of CCS used as the de-facto DC standard in the US is based on a type 1 plug instead of a type 2.

In Europe, tesla uses the Type 2 CCS plug on Type 3. Older models ones used a seldom used part of the Type 2 specification that permitted DC charging without the extra pins from CCS.

Oops, you are correct, I meant level 2 not type 2! It's still the J1772 connector in Europe, unless I'm mistaken. I have zero first hand EV experience on that continent.

Europe uses the Type 2 "mennekes" Connector, which has been standardized as the SAE J3068 for use in big trucks/busses (think the kind of vehicle where only diesel is even an option for the ICE versions).

The main advantage of the Type 2 is that for AC charging it allows for three phase power at up to 480v (50 kw max). (vs 250v single phase maximum for Type 1).

Other than connector shape/size, type 1 is a strict subset of the Type 2 standard, to the point where a simple passive adapter can convert a type 1 charger to a type 2 vehicle just fine.

A single phase type 2 charger of the right voltage range could potentially work with a type 1 vehicle with a simple passive adapter, but this direction is more risky, since it appears that voltage and phase counts are not a negotiated parameter, and that the control signals are not limited to 5v like in the Type 1 connector.

The reason is because it’s new - there’s no clear winner for what’s the best, and not getting the standard right would likely mean the downfall of EVs. CCS is looking good and Europe has effectively forced it upon manufacturers, though.

The Tesla adapter is MUCH smaller: https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/connector_co...

The Chademo and Us CCS plugs are terrible. Objectively bad (expensive, heavy, etc).

The European CCS plug isn’t quite as good as Tesla’s but is probably good enough.

The Us should adopt either Tesla’s plug or the European plug.

Why is CCS so big compared to the Tesla one? Why does one plug have to connect to both AC and DC even if you're using only either one?

One is designed by committee, the other is designed by a company with a focus on trying to make electric cars more usable and desirable than fossil cars.

Also, CCS wanted to reuse some of the pins from the L1/L2 J1772 plug, but the original plug didn’t have room for larger pins. Tesla’s plug was designed from the beginning to be eventually capable of fast charging.

There is a standard for EV charging ports: CCS.

Unfortunately, there's a competing standard: CHAdeMO and Tesla being the first mover has their own proprietary connector.

Yowza, there's a CCS adapter for Teslas, but it's $600 and really big: https://www.setec-power.com/ccs-adapter/

In the US, it's CCS.

Manufacturers that supported Chademo, like Nissan, are switching to CCS.

At this point Telsa is the only non-CCS manufacturer.

That's cool, it's good that there is some convergence on a standard.

The only unfortunate thing, then, is that Tesla had 79% of the EV market share in the US in 2020 (cf. https://electrek.co/2021/07/14/tesla-tsla-leads-95-increase-...).

And they are not using CCS.

(edit: CCS... not CSS)

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