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EV Fast-Charging Standards In Flux
savuporo writes "With the first battery electric vehicles becoming available on markets worldwide, there is an increased push to establish standards for fast-charging plugs. Unfortunately, the story is far from simple. The US hopes to establish its own DC fast-charging standard by 2012, and Europe cannot come to an agreement about their version. Meanwhile, the CHAdeMO fast-charge standard developed and widely deployed in Japan, used on both the Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi MiEV, is gaining momentum with deployments underway both in the US and Europe. CHAdeMO is limited to a 62kW charge rate, able to charge smaller battery packs to 80% SoC in 15-30 minutes."
You don't want to wait 5 minutes for a recharge? It takes longer than that to fuel a gas car. If it were such a big problem they would have invented swappable gas tanks long ago.
Besides, it's far easier to standardize a plug than an entire battery pack. Car manufacturers would hate the constraint of standardized battery packs--it's much easier to design a usable car if you can shove batteries wherever you want. But it's relatively easy to put any kind of plug on any kind of car.
It's also one thing for a gas station to have three different plugs at each booth; another thing to stock 10 different kinds of batteries for trucks, SUVs, sport cars, family cars, mini cars, etc etc etc. Not to mention the huge investment in robotic battery changers at all the gas stations--that costs way more than plugs on a rack.
Don't worry, by the time EVs are common enough for battery swapping to make any sense at all, the batteries themselves will be so advanced they will charge in a reasonable amount of time and it will be unnecessary. In the meantime, we have to put up with the practicalities of boot-strapping an entire market in the face of subsidized competition (petroleum industry).