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Auto Makers Announce Electric Car Charging Standard
Overly Critical Guy writes "Auto makers are launching a universal EV charger that charges an electric vehicle in 15 to 20 minutes. The standard, called Combined Charging System, has been approved by the Society of Automotive Engineers and ACEA, the European association of vehicle manufacturers, as the standard for fast-charging electric vehicles."
Why not make the batteries replaceable? Just switch them as a gas station, simple.
Because it's a stupid idea for reasons we've covered numerous times before.
1. Either you need a standard battery which prevents auto manufacturers from building different vehicles with different batteries, or the replacement station needs to store all possible batteries.
2. If you get there with a flat battery and they're out then you're screwed. That's not a big deal for a car where you can drive on to the next gas station twenty miles down the road, but a big problem if your electric car only does eighty miles per charge anyway.
3. Replacing batteries that weigh several hundred pounds is far from a simple task.
4. No-one wants to pay $30k for a new car, then drive it into a replacement station where they'll hand over their brand new battery and have it replaced by one that's done 500,000 miles.
etc, etc, etc.
Often when it comes to fast charge solutions, the quoted time is to reach 80% charge. The remaining 20% usually take a relatively long time because it's slower to charge a battery that's almost fully charged. You can see this in action pretty clearly if you own a laptop.
Nissan advises Leaf owners to only Quick Charge twice per month. Some of the newer cars will be able to do it more frequently, possibly without any consequence over slow charging.
Any day now, I'm expecting a lot of noise around owners who didn't RTFM and end up frying their batteries early.
It's too late. All the Japanese manufacturers standardized on CHAdeMO for charging.
According to http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-57427823-54/automakers-heres-how-well-charge-evs-in-15-20-minutes/ it is rated at 500 volts at 200 amps. So the total KWh for fifteen minutes would be 25.
What the J1772 CCS standard has going for it is that it's a free-license standard. (And that it can be covered by a single round "fuel cap".) All those cheapskate developing countries don't want to pay CHAdeMO royalties on every single connector they build, so once China starts producing them en masse the cost for the rest of us will come down. Unless CHAdeMO opens up its standard, it will slowly be eclipsed by the free standard.
Or, consumers will get frustrated that they never have the right plug in the right place, and give up on L3 charging altogether, which doesn't help anyone. Really not sure how this one is going to play out.
If we presume that this motor is sufficient for all modes of operation (probably true) then we can say that the car takes 110 kW to run at 80 mph.
No. A small-medium car like the volt will use 20-25 kW when cruising at 80 mph. As with gas cars, the peak motor output is really only used when accelerating.
We will see drunks piss on a cable, then their next of kin sue the station and everyone else upstream.
These problems have already been solved.
The Japanese fast charging standard CHAdeMO has both power delivery as well as a CAN bus data connection in the "nozzle".
A communications channel is opened, and a diagnostic run on the battery system to determine there are no problems before power is even engaged to the pump.
Shorting out the CAN data lines will do nothing. Unless your piss can speak binary using the right protocol and sending the right responses up the line, there will be no power to harm you.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/CHAdeMO_Plug_VacavilleDavisStDC2.jpg
There is no reason to NOT include such a basic safety feature, which is always the case for any such potentially dangerous machinery designed to be fully self serviced by the below average consumer.
Gas stations are already under heavy video surveillance to prevent both vandalism and theft of service. This will not change.