Why is CCS so absolutely enormous and so technically limited? What's the story behind how it got so bad? There must be some kind of trade-off Tesla took that CCS didn't?
TLDR CCS wanted to be backwards compatible, while Tesla planned fast charging to be first class with their standard. At the time, no one was doing fast charging at Supercharger currents (150kw). CCS was bolted on to J1772.
1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
CCS isn't the absolute smallest way to add two more huge pins, but it's pretty close.
Then supporting the old cars just happens with a dongle.
At least in theory, it should be possible to make it mechanically stronger than a smaller connector.
I've heard of charge station cable connectors failing do repeated bending stress, and my car has multiple warning stickers saying not to plug into a charging cable that is under tension.
Is it? I can go to a 350kW charger with CCS1. What's the max for a supercharger? 250kW?
You are probably thinking of the megawatt charger for the semi, which is different.
A regular V3 supercharger caps out at 250kW. There are rumors that the V4 might get closer to 400kW, but as far as I know those remain rumors. There's also a rumor of an upgrade of V3 superchargers to about 325kW, which would at least be getting close to CCS1.
- Backward compatibility: CCS is backward-compatible extension of J plug, and can't share AC and DC lines due to that.
- Higher safety margins in CCS
- CCS design by committee
- Better engineers at Tesla