We're Charging Our Cars Wrong
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?
I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers
I wouldn't go back either, even with the occasional 20-minute charge break on a very long trip.
And the one closest to my commute has a massive queue _every_ time.
I just rather drive home, plug in and the battery will be at 80-100% next morning, depending on how much I drove that day.
The gas stations are on the main road that passes through the town, I don't use it for my commute, I literally have to go out of my way to hit a gas station - which is owned by my uncle (small town, I know)
Plus for us at least, because we have a very low KwH _night_ rate, our EV is 10x cheaper to run than our ICE. It's a significant difference.
And that's not counting the environmental concerns.
Multi-day trips are another story. But we take very few of those.
Does that affect the calculation at all?
EDIT: I was totally wrong - it's more like 7%. Still interested whether that affects the calculation, although it's much less likely to!
EDIT: I can't find that source, and I found a load of sources around 7%. Thanks for the correction.
Since cars are more like 80% waste heat, it still works out better to generate the electricity and feed it to EVs.
However, not every country has oil or gas. In fact, only a minority does. China is investing in EVs to avoid being dependent on energy imports. Many other countries are following. Russia and the US being laggards in EV adoption isn't really surprising.
As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.
As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)
As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.
As far as
> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)
Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].
There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.
1. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/evs-clean...
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
3. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...
4. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
5. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-do-government-subsi...
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.
Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.
Your car just radiates it wherever, benefiting no-one (except during winter)
And most people tend to keep their cars for 10+ years. The power grid is changing all the time, and it's likely in the time that you own your EV, the sources it gets powered from will become cleaner.
And it's pretty reasonable to explain how current chargers exist before suggesting the alternative. There are nicely labeled sections to help with skipping forward.
Fast chargers work because they can regulate the current flowing into the battery and convert the grid voltage to allow that to happen. Batteries are charged by feeding them with a constant current until you reach a certain voltage near 100% charge, then letting the current drop to get to a complete charge (which is part of why 20% to 80% charges are much faster than complete charges). This is 100% not what you get if you just cut out the charge circuit completely, you instead get a blown fuse at best or a fire at worst. There may be cheaper options for the charge circuit if you don't need them to provide the isolation, but they don't really discuss that, they just talk as if the cost would go to zero.
(For slow charging, this circuit still exists, it's just in the car instead. But it's quite hard to fit something that can handle the power involved in fast charging into a car, which is why it's in the charger side instead).
> [If] we are to get rid of galvanic isolation [there's still a ] need to prevent mismatches between the utility’s AC line voltage and that of the EV battery.
> The solution to this problem is a device called a buck regulator (or buck converter). A buck regulator is similar, functionally, to a step-down transformer, except that it handles DC current rather than AC. In the event that the utility’s AC voltage exceeds the battery voltage, the buck regulator operates like a transformer and steps it down. In comparison with an isolation link of the same power rating, a buck regulator would cost less than 10 percent and the power loss would be less than 20 percent.
For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors.
When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery.
And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them.
Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper.
I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.
The gas piston engine didn't just power cars, it also powered aircraft, armoured vehicles, and trucks. Anyone using electric vehicles by the time World War 2 broke out against a gas piston enemy would've been constantly outmanoeuvred and outgunned. And the logistics chains to bring men and materials to the front of the enemy's front lines would've been far faster then any electric trucks at the time. Especially without the modern day micro controllers that make modern battery management systems possible.
https://hbr.org/2024/05/how-one-chinese-ev-company-made-batt...
Nio is just a company that's providing a much needed solution to this problem.
There's an Australian company https://www.januselectric.com.au/ doing them. They do electric conversions on existing trucks.
To me, it's not really viable. The 3 main problems are - The extra costs in a vehicle to allow swapping within say 5 minutes is non-trivial. The physical space required to house X number of batteries ready, X number swap ready is a lot at any moderate volume. Last, Batteries are not universal and now you're constricting either the design of all cars or you have to go to a specific swap station that houses your battery, related to the physical space. I would not accept a battery w/ less volume.
Time will tell if I'm wrong; NIO might do it, but I'm a naysayer for sure.
The main obstacle is battery swap is capex heavy, hence PRC might do it, but most other places, less likely. It's pretty easy to extrapolate PRC auto parking / self driving cars sneaking out during low congestion to hit their battery swap queue. But that is a fairly significant logistics / infra issue when most countries would be lucky to get sufficient fast charging piles in place. Battery volume is probably not an issue since batteries will be rentals for minimum XYZ capacity. And algo might eventually bid for price, i.e. discount rental for partial charge if it means your car go for a swap by itself a couple days earlier.
I keep hoping flow batteries can overcome their issues as replacing depleted electrolyte with charged electrolyte is much more like 'refueling' in the current sense of the word.
What's patented? Seems like a ridiculous patent if it entirely covered all practical manner of swapping batteries to recharge an EV.
At some point we are going to have to stop comparing gas and electric cars.
They sell a tiny amount of cars still, but hit 500k total production last year, which is not insignificant.
If you look at old mobile phones with removable batteries, you'll notice that there is usually a lot of space taken up by the plastic around the battery which is designed to allow a user to replace it repeatedly. A car battery that's rapidly replaceable would need a large, strong structure around it to allow it to be replaced but also to hold together in the event of a crash. If batteries had to be swapped out, you would lose more cabin space and structural rigidity. Then you get to standardised connectors and mountings, data protocols, the list goes on. And that's before you think of the automated equipment to actually swap the batteries.
In a world where we can charge a car today from 10-80% in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like a worthwhile engineering challenge.
“In 2013, California revised its Zero Emissions Vehicle credit system so that long-range ZEVs that were able to charge 80% in under 15 minutes earned almost twice as many credits as those that didn’t. Overnight, Tesla’s 85 kWh Model S went from earning four credits per vehicle to seven. Moreover, to earn this dramatic increase in credits, Tesla needed to prove to CARB that such rapid refueling events were possible. By demonstrating battery swap on just one vehicle, Tesla nearly doubled the ZEV credits earned by its entire fleet even if none of them actually used the swap capability.”
Incredibly dangerous to put naked electrical connectors right next to something flammable that you can't even extinguish.
Would a standardised battery block in laptops work? The same battery would work in a Frame.work, System76, MacBook air, MacBook pro, a Lenovo Thinkbook and whatever gaming monster there is from Asus.
Sounds stupid, right? It's just as stupid for cars.
And if laptops had battery swapping, would you swap your brand new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station? Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
There does not have to have a single battery standard, could be s/m/l, like coincell, aaa, aa etc.
> Would you trust the people and systems that the battery hasn't been tampered with and is in good working order?
Do you trust random utilities/charger manufacture?
> new battery, but empty, to a random one at a swapping station.
Would you care if it is within regulated thresholds and you can get another one any time you want?
I can't imagine much worse than being on a road trip and quick swapping to a new battery that you discover, after driving away, has significantly degraded performance and range.
I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too...
Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?
The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
The other question is how this fits in with regenerative braking. Is this power conversion circuit dual purpose?
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
The article does point out they believe non-galvanically-isolated can be as safe in practical usage; similar to half of Japan outlets are all protected by GFCI and don't use a ground, yet have a similar safety record. The authors built a system using the motor as an inductor and the inverter as a step-down buck regulator to charge the batteries, back in the 90s; they know what they're talking about.
> Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
Not sure how you square this with your opening paragraph.
But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient.
I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.
Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
Another comment [0] is lamenting because that is exactly what they did.
States could get funding if they built the stations, which includes figuring out any permitting issues.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...
Folks act so salty about this all, such snark. But in my view so much was smartly done. There's so many layers of problems that needed to be tackled for consumers to actually get success, and it felt like these were gone through slowly carefully over time to make something useful and helpful.
For example, the charging standards require a certain amount of availability. Otherwise, folks might build some crappy chargers, not maintain them, and still claim money.
Folks have had all kinds of issues with chargers being not in service. Or fully used! One of the big requirements that took a while to hammer out was that chargers neede to live report their status: how many chargers are there, at what power outputs, at this location, and which are in use & what capacity is remaining? So you can get to the charger you are aiming for and have some real hope of charging up!
It's been just under two years since the standards got made. They're good, important standards, that insure this money was going to be for public benefit, that it really would tackle the problem. It is unsurprising as hell to me that there's not a ton of deployments yet!
For a "hacker news" site, I would expect a more reasonable set of expectations about product development lifecycle. Simply manufacturing compatible chargers is gonna take at least a year, in all probability. Site planning can somewhat happen in parallel, but going through the state to get the fed money is going to be a bit complex, especially at first. This stuff just takes time! The pool of money was mostly unspent, and I expect over time, as roll outs ramped up, the difficulty & costs would have been going down.
The political appetite & cycle is so contrary to the actual pace of the world some time. Sometimes we have to be willing to let good things take time to happen. It all felt so with-cause to me.
Tesla also has been operating on chargers for years! They took their own sweet time we just don't think about the first years!
Tesla never built standards. They just made something that sort of worked for them. That sort of somewhat helped some specific consumers find chargers, albeit with not enough status available to know what to expect when you got there.
None of that is at all good enough for actual infrastructure the world needs to be able to depend on. "Works for my car" isn't how gasoline works, and it's not how ev charging is gonna ever succeed.
From Tesla's own website: "NACS was originally developed by Tesla, deployed in 2012 with the first Supercharger and Model S vehicle and eventually published by Tesla in 2022 with the goal of industry-wide adoption."
https://www.tesla.com/support/charging/supercharging-other-e...
As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
Over the course of the Biden-Harris Administration, the number of publicly available EV chargers more than doubled. With approximately 1,000 new public chargers being added each week, there are over 200,000 publicly available charging ports.
It's irritating to see Joe Rogan's moronic talking points repeated uncritically in these hallowed halls. Truly, as Brandolini[0] observed, public discourse is flooded with misinformation faster than we can bail it out.
The trick being played here is counting all charging stations in the US and pretending they're part of the IRA's funding.
> As of July 2024, eight states had opened their first NEVI-funded stations, totaling 61 ports, and powered thousands of charging sessions.
As of FY 2024, $2.385 billion had been allocated from the funding. For 61 ports across 4 (four) charging locations. $39M PER PORT.
This, per NEVI's own numbers: https://driveelectric.gov/files/nevi-annual-report-2023-2024...
I would sure like to see a breakdown in how that 2.3B was spent.
in accounting rules, it's spent money. the notes say that 61 ports have been built from that allocated money.
like I said, I would love to see the cost breakdown. is all that allocated money spent? are some projects still being constructed? three years seems like a long time to get 61 ports when you allocated $2B.
My guess would be that the money is also allocated for an X amount of sites / charging ports still in progress. Or do they only allocate the money after the site is fully operational?
If that's the case, I think saying '2B spent for 61 ports' is disingenuous at best.
From what I can tell from the newsletter I get from a big European charging infrastructure provider the lead time of a new charging location tends to be 1 - 2 years depending on the specific location.
While I do agree these numbers are disingenuous, looking at politics I definitely see the next administration counting the chargers that will come up past January 2025 to their win list. Oh well, I guess that's politics.
That's not good for a law that was ratified in November of 2021. It might be about par for the course for the federal government, but that's the problem.
ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy?
> Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0]
0. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda...
1. Everywhere you go, you know there'll be somewhere to charge overnight.
2. It's the cheapest per installed spot, by far, allowing way more locations.
3. Renters can safely by an electric car and have home charging.
4. Coin-op 120V are far more robust than cables with valuable copper.
5. It de-incentivizes excessive parking.
If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions.
These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less.
Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
You simplified what they said to the wrong word. It's an outlet that is more robust than a cable.
The system still has a cable, but a car cable faces less risk and a cut doesn't affect future users.
When you say "all about coin-op" you are still doing an incorrect simplification of "coin-operated 120V outlet".
I know they forgot to repeat the word "outlet" on point 4, but even then they didn't just say coin-op, they said coin-op 120V. It's referring back to the first sentence, and 120V itself has implications of not being one of those beefy EV cables (and the only 120V cable alternative to a grossly underutilized EV cable is like a C13, and a dangling C13 that plugs into your car is a pretty silly interpretation).
Outlet is aka a receptacle. In this case a NEMA 5-15r.
And no need to invent new ways to charge people – paid parking is a solved problem. Just set out a section for EVs (and EVs only).
240V could use the same wires and double available power, but existing portable chargers never draw more than 16A from 120V, so people can't screw it up.
That covers everything the existing system doesn't already.
> The average car is driving 60 minutes per day
This is a sleight of hand. Non-average situations arise all the time.
Your proposal is ridiculously burdensome and not especially helpful.
12 and 16A L1 chargers are common which is 1.44 and 1.92kW respectively at 120V. Its not 100% efficient but they definitely deliver more than 1kW to the battery.
Of course. We already have blanketed the country with level 3 charging. You can reach 99% of the country solely using Tesla Superchargers. The non-average problem is solved.
What we need to solve is the "can renters buy EVs knowing they will always have reasonably-priced place to charge" problem.
The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.
Instead of galvanic isolation, use redundant ground connectors that are monitored for continuity.
I'm not sure I agree with this. It puts too much responsibility onto the EVSE side, as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens. If something like emergency pyro disconnects are mandated, I might be able to trust it a bit more.
Are you talking about the case where both of the ground wires fail while charging? If either is non-functional when charging starts, it disallows charging. If one fails during charging, charging disconnects.
This would increase the cost, but by many times less than the insulated power converters used today.
The charger tries to interrupt the flow, but the short circuit fries the power electrics in the buck converter (MOSFET/IGBTs can fail _short_). The charger will have contactors that physically disconnect the line from the converter, but they normally interrupt the line with zero voltage when the controlling IGBTs are closed.
In this case, they'll have to interrupt high voltage and high current flow. Can they do it reliably within the fractions of a second?
Cars, at least modern cars, are also built with safety systems in mind. The fuel line from inlet to tank isn't open as it used to be, nowadays there's a spring actuated flap that is pushed aside by the nozzle (as well as vapor suction systems in the nozzle) so vapors cannot escape and form an explosive atmosphere.
On top of _that_, all parts from nozzle over hose to pump to tanks have safety features to prevent a catastrophic explosion: flame arrestors and inertization, and buried tanks.
So, we didn't ban petrol stations, but in the interest of safety and environmental protections (reduction/near elimination of VOC escape) we mandated changes in how cars and petrol stations are made so that even the dumbest possible user (aka, someone smoking a cigarette right next to his Ferrari getting refilled with 102 octane fuel) will more likely than not either not explode at all or the explosion will be relatively harmless in scope.
So not even an exploding car would be able to prevent the disconnection of the chargers by some of the protection circuits.
And more to the point, right now with galvanic isolation this scenario fails safe. The current won't go through the ground. In fact, you can peel away the insulation from the charger cable and touch one conductor while a fast DC charging session is in progress. You will be fine, as long as you don't touch the second conductor at the same time.
I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up.
Seems ridiculously high, like paying some military/space grade premiums, or just using very niche parts without economies of scale driving the cost down.
This kind of checks out with the price of 200kW and 400kW chargers from Alpitronics: https://www.connect-gp-joule.de/en/shop/dc-charging-stations...
Between €67k and €102k (for some reasons VAT included in that price) for these units.
Show me the IGBTs and inductors that cost 90k.
Of course this whole article is based on the notion that its assertions about cost are correct. They probably are high balling a few numbers. All I'm reading is that US charging companies are paying a high price for their infrastructure and are apparently failing to benefit from economies of scale, learning effects, etc.
High speed chargers are being deployed at scale across the globe. The US is technically behind on this front with relatively low EV adoption rates. So, I would expect US companies to be somewhat behind on the cost front as well.
Bottom line: done right, unsubsidized charging infrastructure should be doable and profitable.
Subsidies are of course involved in a lot of places. But it's not like fossil fuels are un-subsidized. Regardless of what you think of that, there's a good reason for that: governments are eager to sponsor energy infrastructure because it's an economic multiplier. Economic growth is strongly connected to energy availability and usage. Lucrative economic activity tends to be very energy intensive.
The US has invested many trillions in it's oil and gas infrastructure over the decades. And that's just direct investments. All those expensive wars in the middle east to secure access to oil are also part of this. And it has had a decent return on investment on those investments.
It's nowhere near matching that for the clean replacement for any of that stuff. Other countries are outspending the US so they can provide clean, cheap energy to their economies. The US should be spending more and spending smarter or it risks pricing itself out of the market. China in particular has built up quite a lead here. I don't think the Chinese are wasting their money.
We never should have placed hardwired cables on the L2 or L3 chargers. The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? It's a joke.
Rented an EV in Europe... the cable is in the trunk! You own it. Take it out, plug it into the charger, plug it into your car.
Having a bad day? Drive over the plug? Smash it with a hammer? Don't know how plugs work so you tried to kick it off your car? No problem, go buy yourself a new one. The charger still works for everyone else.
The charger HW can be agnostic. Car manufacturers can make up whatever crazy plug they want for their car, just provide the cable.
Tesla wants a 1" cable? No problem!
You want a 300' cable? Do it!
> The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time?
Anecdotal, but this has not been my experience at all.
I would happily carry the cable on trips where I planned to stop and charge if it meant the L3 was guaranteed to work.
Anecdotal for me as well. EVgo was so unreliable that I just stopped driving my EV for any trip that required charging. Almost every visit I’d have to try 2-3 chargers, hold the plug in or slightly bias it up or down to get past some comms/short/? check to start charging.
Usually no issues with ChargePoint L2 or L3, (it’s not the car). But there just aren’t that many around.
Maybe the CCS plug is just not up to the reps they get, hopefully NACS will be better.
They "estimate" this would save 60% on galvanic link, and on the rest, you can save another half. So that would mean you are at 20% cost plus some ground wire fault detection HW.
Cutting this part will makes the very same hw much cheaper.
Using galvanic isolation is 1 of the solution, but it's expensive. How about using something like RCB to detect mismatch between output current and input current. This is well tested after all
I still think road charging would be cool and obviously the fastest if we never have to stop anyways. Couldn’t work everywhere in the US probably but I can dream.
Trains and buses do it already where I live.
So.. wouldn't increasing overall range be the "one thing" you could do to actually improve this?
Consider this movie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Order_of_Disappearance
The protagonist plows snow for a living, using 200-300 bhp diesel truck for like half a year each year, day after day. This thing just can not be replaced with an electric no matter what you try. And without it there would be zero traffic, electric or no.
It often looks like people here mostly do not comprehend what snowfall is.
Second, that's not a particularly large number for horsepower. Please explain why you think it can't be electric. Note that charging time can be solved by having a bigger fleet, and while that is expensive it's well within the range of "no matter what you try".
https://www.designwerk.com/en/post/e-truck/pioneering-work-e...
I also saw a person in Norway commenting about their high uptake of EVs noting that at the end of the day the snow piles in the city are noticeably cleaner than they used to be when ICE engines were more common.
Not really sure what your comment has to do with the article, though. Seems like you're just here to complain about EV advocacy?
- With galvanic isolation baked directly into onboard charger, I'm thinking worst case outcome is charging infra and isolation link get fried, but that really expensive EV battery remains safe.
- Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.
They don't. If lightning strikes, you make a claim and get an insurance payoff.
> Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.
Nope. The lightning current won't go through the battery, it'll just melt the conductors in the charging cable.
Now, if lightning were to strike the charging cabinet itself, I imagine that most of the surge current would go through the cabinet into the ground. If any were to make it to the chassis of the car through the charger, it would probably (“educated” guess) be at a low enough potential to not jump through the tires, but rather off some other low-hanging metal components. If it’s below the ~dozens of kV needed for that, charge will build up for a good fraction of a second, and dissipate over the next few seconds (or close to instantly if the ground wires don’t melt in the charging cable).
Really, the level of isolation in either the current case or proposed case doesn’t do that much to help with lightning strikes. They’re both designed to mitigate shock hazards measured in the hundreds to single-digit-thousands of volts. When the arc distance is measured in kilometres rather than centimetres, a 3” galvanic isolation transformer isn’t going to save you.
The solution for lighting is the same as it always has been: ideally, don’t get struck by lightning; otherwise, install a lightning rod nearby.
The lightning discharge won't create a potential difference across the battery terminals, it'll flow around the battery through the car's body into the ground.
This strikes me as a direct consequence of galvanic isolation provided by isolation link stage in prevailing architectures, something the article proposes to eliminate.
I'm struggling to imagine how a magnitude of surge energy sufficient to "melt the conductors in the charging cable" while directly coupled to a charger and without galvanic isolation leaves an EV's battery unscathed in such an event. What exactly isolates/protects the battery again?
For the battery to explode, the lightning will need to cause a potential difference across its terminals. But why would it? The paths _around_ the battery cells (through the battery and car body) have much less resistance.
The conductors in the charging cable can melt, because the path from the car, though the cable, and through the EVSE body to the ground is another relatively low-resistance path.
I mentioned further down-thread, but pretty much the same way everyone else does: don’t get hit by lightning, or have a lightning rod. A tiny transformer isn’t going to stop lightning, and it’s not supposed to.
Put another way, how do gas stations guard against lightning strikes? The concerns are roughly the same. The answer, in general, is “they don’t,” because they don’t need to.
As far as I can tell there is no source provided for the number. Nor is there are source for the stall cost.
Tesla almost certainly has the lowest stall cost on the market, while consistently providing higher uptime and reliability. I want to see numbers based on them. It is no secret that the other charging stall manufacturers are incompetent (terribly reliability and uptime), so it wouldn't surprise me if their hardware was designed poorly AND terribly high in cost.
According to a bid in Texas, Tesla's cost per stall was about 20% of competing companies. So is the cost a problem when the charger is designed correctly, or only when not?
What is the cost of the tanks, fuel pumps, calibration, etc? Including the costs of rehabilitation of the ground from fuel contamination over the lifetime of the infrastructure as well?
That's what needs to be compared, not the current capital costs of infrastructure that is only just been sufficiently standardized and regulated to be able to be rolled out for all EVs, not just one brand or another.
But without comparing to existing ICE refuelling, which is what EV charging replaces/stands alongside, there's no real identification as to whether the capital costs actually are slowing the rollout.
What is driving the rollout is demand not supply. Of course, they're related, but EV fast charging will tend to be for distance travel, not commuting.
Commuters will plug in at home (or at work) and standard L1 charging is going to be "enough".
So EV charging will be for distance, on major highways etc.
How much is a highway "services" installation, where refuelling/recharging is combined with food or other services, an actual limitation of capital cost of the recharging compared to other capital costs?
I'm still not following here. Again, it just does not seem relevant.
> What is driving the rollout is demand not supply.
Uh, sure, but at lower capital cost there is some marginal demand worth pursuing. And lower prices to the consumer would stimulate higher demand.