What does the connector have to do with it? All new Tesla chargers in Europe are CCS and I haven't heard of anyone having any problems with it.
I mean, in 2012 there were people claiming that there was nothing wrong with Micro-USB and that the Lightning connector was just silly and incompatible. They weren't "wrong" exactly, but... no, they were basically wrong. Apple provided a vastly better charging experience.
But in the USB case, the industry recognized that fact and cloned the important features into the still-not-perfect-but-really-very-much-improved C plug. With CCS, everyone is still sitting around with their heads in the same hole they dug a decade ago when they rejected Tesla[1].
It's just a bad product and a bad standard. It just is.
[1] And also CHAdeMO, itself superior to CCS. Really this was the real reason for CCS, it was an attempt by western auto manufacturers to preempt the threat they perceived from Nissan. As it happens the threat was more real than they knew, but they had the wrong villain in mind.
Seriously, just go to youtube and find videos of people plugging in their cars. Watch them fumble with a CCS connector for 5+ seconds, using two hands, almost every time. Plugging in a Tesla is instant, and one-handed. CHAdeMO is in between.
Obviously it would be better still if you could share the connectors for both purposes like Tesla does.
In ths US, this AC charging, Level 2, is handled by J1772. So for a car in the US with CHAdeMO, I'll have a J1772 plug, and then this whole other CHAdeMO connector which is again the same size as the J1772 connector.
Or, I just add two pins at the bottom of the J1772 plug, and call it CCS.
And yeah, maybe it would have been better for it to be like the Tesla connector and have the same pins used for HVDC and AC power. But in a large family of makers using the plug it seems pretty risky reusing pins for HVDC and high amperage AC systems. Tesla can manage it because for Tesla only Tesla makes Tesla, but in a much larger network who knows what might happen.
And I repeat: for a CCS[1] car, you have a J-1772 connector, and a DC connector both on the car and both taking up space. And it's worse, because they're glued together! Going back to my USB example, imagine if USB-C worked by having a USB3 and USB2 connector side by side, and you couldn't charge your phone or connect your mouse without using both.
It's literally that bad, and I genuinely can't imagine why you think otherwise. Have you ever actually plugged a Tesla in?
[1] Strictly CCS Combo 1 as deployed in North America. Europeans get an IEC connector glued on instead. Which brings up the other bit of CCS madness: it's not even one standard, it's two completely incompatible plug designs with the same name!
Tesla has had five different plug designs on its cars. It's apparently not the problem you think it is.
https://picolio.auto123.com/art-images/156317/chademo_connec...
vs
https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/PYwkW/s3/european-ccs-type...
Which is a more compact solution to a whole charging system on the car?
For CCS vs CHAdeMO, I'd take CCS every time. I don't want to have two completely separate plugs, I'd prefer just one plug. If you can't look at these two pictures above and understand what I'm talking about, I don't know what to tell you.
I've plugged in Teslas. I've plugged in CCS. I've handled CHAdeMO cables, which were roughly the same size and flexibility as the CCS ones on the stalls. I do agree Tesla connectors were the easiest to work with, but Tesla continuing to put it behind their patent pledge means nobody else is going to really use it. I do wish they would have actually opened it up or licensed it under some normal kind of licensing terms, but they didn't, so we're left with the standard the rest of the market came up with.
As for CCS being different in the US vs Europe, I guess I'll have an issue if I drive my EV across the Atlantic Ocean. I'm not planning on making that road trip anytime soon, so I don't think that'll be an issue for me. If I move to Europe, I'd probably just sell my car and buy something over there rather than deal with import duties and getting it compliant to EU standards and what not, and vice-versa.
I do somewhat care about the space needed for two charging outlets versus one. It's a much larger door to open. It's a larger moving part susceptible to a larger area of impact potentially breaking it. Larger door means probably more complicated hinge management. Two connectors instead of just one means more wires, more communications, more pins to potentially break or get dirty, etc. Adding CCS to J1772 adds two pins, adding CHAdeMO adds like 10.
CHAdeMO could never charge at the rates CCS can. CHAdeMO's old plug has also been dropped for CHAdeMO 3.0. CHAdeMO 3.0 is a new plug and port design.
CCS didn’t support higher power until around 2017/18
They probably should have brought CHAdeMO 3.0 forward sooner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChaoJi
Japan and China will probably standardise on CHAdeMO 3.0. Though it would be much better if Japan switched to CCS type 2 combo so all the right-hand drive countries are on the same charging standard.
CCS lacked V2H/V2G support for a long time while CHAdeMO supports.
This is low-effort sniping. The upthread point was that at the moment the standardization process was happening, both CHAdeMO and Tesla presented superior technologies to what the committee ended up picking. And CCS is still suffering with those limitations in comparison with Tesla's much trimmer device (CHAdeMO hasn't kept up as well, it's true).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_WjeH3I8p8
It doesn't matter how "superior" you think they are. They didn't solve the business case and were dead on arrival because of that.
Though take this with a grain of salt, as I have no firsthand experience with other connector types.
I ran into this! Some recent MY's of Dodge Ram trucks had a weird angle with their filler neck and the pump nozzle[1] would get well and truly stuck. I had a 2018 Ram 1500 provided by work, and quickly learned what local gas stations were decent and which ones I had to avoid, lest I spend a few minutes really reefing on the nozzle to get it to come loose, worrying i'll break something the whole time.
[1]Vapor reclamation style pump nozzles, that is. Plain old straight nozzles were fine.
See:
https://www.classaction.org/media/kingston-v-fca-us-llc.pdf
"Specifically, Defendant’s defective fuel tank filler necks1 (the “Filler Neck Defect”) cause standard gas-station nozzles—which work perfectly well with other vehicles—to become lodged in the opening to Dodge Ram fuel tanks, forcing Dodge Ram owners to either physically wrench the gas nozzle free, contact their roadside assistance provider (if they have one) to have the nozzle dislodged, or even call their local fire department for help."
Tesla should have made its solution open for adoption so a real competing standard could have existed.
I understand that they would want to initially restrict their charging network to just Teslas, but that could be enforced through the software/service.
Surely it would be in Tesla's interest to allow Tesla owners to have the greatest flexibility as well as potentially opening things up to others in the future? (I know there is an optional adapter for Tesla owners to use to connect to non-Tesla chargers, but it always nicer/better/more-convenient to not have to use adapters)
Perhaps they were worried about the quality and safety of others producing a subpar equivalent/variant that might have led to incidents that tarnish Tesla's name and reputation? Similar to a few years back when there was a lot of controversy around USB-C chargers and how some deviate from the standard and could potentially damage your phone/device.
I know a few years ago Tesla "opened" up a lot of patents other auto-manufactures could use for "free". I'd be surprised if there wasn't anything related to charging (including connectors) included in these "open" patents?
Its kind of like the GPL, but imagine if the license was if you included GPL code in just one codebase you had to open source every bit of code your company had ever made.
A comprehensive approach would have been to create a standard for the charger, plus open source implementation of both the car and the charger software, including the software for automated payment. Also libraries for phones abs to integrate (or for others to integrate with the Tesla app).
Establish a conference for charger testing, these exist for the CCS standard. Maybe even a certification program.
They could have made home charger and the destination charger just work with any cars. And then made deals with specific auto makers for access to Superchargers. Or have program where they allow access at extra cost.
> Perhaps they were worried about the quality and safety of others producing a subpar equivalent/variant that might have led to incidents that tarnish Tesla's name and reputation?
Maybe.
If you want my opinion. Its simply not how Musk thinks, thinking in terms of Open Standards and Open Source or even Partnerships just isn't an Musk thing Musk does. And everybody else is to busy doing what Musk wants to do. I think it one of the biggest weaknesses in Musk
Maintaining a standard, having open software and partners and so on, is management effort Tesla just isn't interested in it seems to me.