
Plug wars: the battle for electric car supremacy - prostoalex
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-electricity-charging/plug-wars-the-battle-for-electric-car-supremacy-idUSKBN1FD0QM
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_ph_
Here in Europe, CCS is now the official standard for DC charging. Europe had
already Type 2 as standard for AC charging. CCS is a Type 2 plug with 2
additional large pins for DC. Tesla is using Type 2 both for AC and DC. So the
plugs of a Tesla supercharger actually fit into a CCS socket. But of course,
it won't charge. Tesla seems to be at the limits of the Type 2 plug with their
superchargers, CCS is supposed to scale to larger power levels.

So, while there probably was a tactical component in the German manufacturers
pushing for CCS, one can also make quite good technical arguments for CCS. In
true German fashion, it is bulky and somewhat overengineered for current cars,
but for a reason.

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jwatte
J1772 was fine until they added IP networking. I do not want a physical
network connection between some unaudited charging station code and my
likewise unaudited car control code. I don't even want to turn on telematics,
until the car industry subcontractors start hiring security engineers instead
of EEs for their software.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
i've never heard that j1772 has ip networking to the car, are you sure of
that? it's at least optional, because you can have home j1772 chargers without
needing an internet connection.

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aunty_helen
_unlike the one-size-fits-all nozzle that can refill all petrol cars_

Current petrol stations (in NZ) have 4 different 'one-size-fits-all' nozzles.

91/95/98RON + diesel, some places also have adBlue for diesel trucks.

It's wasteful to have multiple plugs but not the end of the world.

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donatj
Dumb question I've been wondering for a while: why not standardize the
batteries themselves, make them easy to swap, robotically from underneath
maybe? Then have stations that switch out your battery like a propane tank
rather than having to wait and recharge?

~~~
jwatte
Most electric car owners never charge other than at home, while they are
sleeping. The "I need to take my car across the country on a whim" theory of
car ownership isn't /actually/ a thing for most people, and "range anxiety"
was engineered by the petroleum industry.

Put an outlet at every parking spot for topping up while you work or shop in a
more remote location, and you'll solve the problem for 95% of all urban cars.

(If your commute is > 80 miles, you have a bigger problem!)

~~~
totalZero
> "range anxiety" was engineered by the petroleum industry.

Can you substantiate this claim? It seems a little Alex Jones-y without any
evidence to support it. My understanding from reading the Wiki page is that
this phrase popped up 20 years ago in a newspaper actually talking _about_ a
GM-made EV.

Frankly the chicken-and-egg scenario between charging infrastructure buildout
and EV takeup is a very well-known dynamic of the market for this technology.

There was a time about ten years ago when many market participants were diving
headfirst into EVs, but rapid-charging infrastructure was totally nonexistent
and EVs didn't come anywhere close to the range of gas-powered cars, no matter
how much you paid.

~~~
jdietrich
The auto industry has spent billions of dollars promoting a completely
unrealistic image of motoring. When was the last time you saw a car commercial
where someone was stuck in traffic on their commute?

The median car journey in the US is just over 12 miles each way. 93% of
households drive less than 100 miles on any given day. Current electric cars
have more than enough range for the vast majority of users the vast majority
of the time, but people have been trained by marketing to place excessive
weight on abnormal journeys like road trips.

The majority of households have more than one car, so it would make perfect
sense for them to have one electric car for routine journeys and keep an ICE
car for those rare longer journeys. People who do actually take the plunge and
go electric consistently report that they charge much less often than they
thought they would need to, especially away from home. If we had a realistic
sense of how we actually use our cars, EVs could achieve >50% market
penetration without any infrastructure at all.

~~~
prostoalex
> 93% of households drive less than 100 miles on any given day.

But it’s not the same 93% of households driving short trips every single day,
while 7% of households drive long-haul day in and day out.

I might commute to work and back for less than 100 miles every single work
day. But every weekend or so I might take a longer trip - short getaway to the
beach, mountains, skiing resort, wine country, theme park, national park,
relative out of town - you name it.

What am I supposed to do for that weekend or two? Take an Uber to Yosemite?
Show up at Avis/Hertz and request to be raped on prices for a hot holiday
weekend?

~~~
jdietrich
I didn't argue that _all_ car purchases should be electric, just that a very
large proportion of households could use one even without any fast-charging
infrastructure. As I said, the majority of American households have more than
one car. Your usage is highly atypical - most people don't actually take long
road trips very often. EV technology and infrastructure might not be ready for
_your_ needs right now, but it's more than good enough to replace a huge
proportion of ICE cars.

~~~
prostoalex
Yeah, that advice makes sense for a multiple-car household (that actually
describes my real-life situation, although ironically I prefer my Model S over
wife’s hybrid SUV for longer road trips).

For single-car households people would still seek comfort in the fact that
even if they have one long trip a year, they’re covered. And the costs of
ownership of a compact gas/hybrid vs compact electric still lean in favor of
the former.

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greglindahl
Tesla's Chademo adapter is $450, so it doesn't sound to me like it's a life-
or-death issue for any car company with volume to back the right or wrong fast
charging technology.

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microcolonel
The article repeatedly states that DC chargers can deliver more power than AC
chargers, but I don't see how that could be a thing. Is it some limitation
with the onboard power supplies?

It's my (limited, third-party) understanding that dual chargers on a Tesla
will gladly saturate a 240V 80A J1772, while a single charger will take 48A
off a NEMA 14-50 @ 240V.

~~~
gwbas1c
It's a limitation in the car. When you have an AC based charger, the
conversion and step up to battery voltage happens inside the car itself.

This process generates waste heat, which must be vented. At level 1, (wall
outlet,) and level 2, (oven outlet,) it's not a big deal. When rapid charging,
the heat dissipation is huge.

The AC to DC converters that can handle rapid charging are physically huge and
There's no practical way to put that inside the car itself.

I suggest learning the basics about how charging a battery works. You need to
apply a DC voltage directly to the battery. Electric vehicle batteries are in
the hundreds of volts.

What these systems do is the car and the charger communicate, and the car ends
up telling the external charger how to charge its battery. That's why there's
a lot of competition among standards.

~~~
microcolonel
> _The AC to DC converters that can handle rapid charging are physically huge
> and There 's no practical way to put that inside the car itself._

Ahh, that makes more sense now that I think about it. Because of the cross
sectional area required to efficiently rectify and transform such high
currents, the equipment is either very large (and thus expensive) and heavy
(and thus inappropriate for a motor vehicle), or very inefficient (requiring
considerable active cooling, and costing a lot more dosh).

------
boznz
Shame all these players cant get their shit together before we all have
electric cars :-(

~~~
NotSammyHagar
There are multiple failures. There is a standard for ac power, j1772, it works
fine. Pretty much every electric car can use it, even the tesla (it comes with
a free adapter).

Early ev charging standards had a fatal flaw, they allowed too little power.
The j1772 only allowed about 30 amps. This was fine because early electric car
and charagable hyrbrids only had tiny batteries that could be filled up in a
few hours, there was a giant failure of imagination to see larger in the
future batteries, or deliberate sabotage, so there was no planning for what
would be needed to support large battery cars with needs for traveling.

Then tesla came along with a giant battery & it couldn't be recharged in a
reasonable timeframe. What good is 250 miles range, 80 kwh if it takes 2 days
to recharge it? So there was an extension of the j1772 standard to support 80
amps, 220 v and this let you charge the tesla at 60 miles of range per hour.
The early leaf barely had 80 miles of effective range. So this extension of
the j1772 was great, but only tesla needed it. afaik, no other evs support the
higher power of the j1772. Then tesla forsaw if they built high power dc
chargers, then you could have long range travel - there were the
superchargers, 120 kw - this used dc. dc has an advantage bc it can directly
charge the batteries. There was no good standard for that, so telsa made their
own. They offer it free of charge if people agree to not sue them. Then the
american automative engineers came up with a different plug standard that had
sepaate ac and dc chargers, and it had the fatal flaw that there was one using
it, it was less attractive than others.

Next, in europe, the car makers noticed that tesla was impossibly building
long range, good cars that people wanted and even reduced their sales a bit.
They built their own standard. There were claims it could have larger power
than tesla super chargers but I think it was limited in practice. and again,
no cars using it (eventually a few came on the market), and few or no high
powered chargers. There was a law mandating so teslas in europe use that plug
format.

Then porsche decided they'd build a new standard that was better than teslas,
and it's like double the power. But tesla has already built thousands of super
chargers in their worldwide network for years. The new porsche format would be
faster than teslas but i believe there are none in existence outside of a test
system, and it would also not work on normal commerical power systems, afaik.

The tesla plug has another advantage, it is small and light and supports both
ac and dc through the same plug.

The other car companies would never accept that the tesla plug could be the
defacto standard, so we have all these different things showing up.

Chademo was a better plan, it was 50kw, it was in lots of place in Japan. It
is the only widely used standard that approaches widespread use that is close
to the supercharger.

What's really needed is a world wide standard, free of patents and chargers,
that spans ac and dc, and supports chargins and v2g, but also allowed for very
high power rates. These plugs negotiate the amount of power that you send, the
car controls it, so you can have a plug system that for some cars sends 120
kw, for others sends 120v 10 amps (1.2kw). We need a standard that can imagine
charging 100kwh battery in 5 minutes in the distant future, but works for
things today. Tesla could probably have been that. The likely thing is j1772 +
one of the 3 major intl standards (higher power than 50kw chademo, or the euro
standard or the us standard).

Meanwhile, I'll keep driving my tesla, like I have since the end of 2012.

~~~
tlb
AC is straightforward to standardize (it's just a plug, and signaling for the
maximum current), but DC charging is complex because the charging electronics
are in the charging station. A charge station would have to support all
present and future pack voltages, and be able to deliver a requested current
at that voltage (and the request can change second-by-second.)

~~~
heisenbit
Based on the article AC is not so powerful as DC. Makes perfect sense as the
former changes direction while the latter is more direct.

The mirages of modern journalism...

You got a good point - the architecture, weight trade-off, capabilities trade-
off and cost trade-offs matter. Who is responsible for what. As long as the
industry changes quickly and big players don't agree the vertical integrated
solutions will stay. In the long run there is a need for a platform as it will
be cheaper to do as much as possible in the shared infrastructure. When lower
cost cars are getting on the market in larger numbers may mark the time when
things are settled.

