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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."
I could claim that my phone "charges" in 30 seconds, and I'd be correct. Of course, it only charges ~1% in 30 seconds, so that's not very useful.
When they say this charger will charge your car in 15 minutes, I'm assuming they don't mean a full charge. But what DO they mean?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If this catches on (I don't see any Japanese partners in TFA), it could be a sudden outbreak of common sense. Maybe even... convenience for the consumer?
Standardization sounds like a good plan, so we can focus on one format of charging infrastructure.
With my prostrate, it takes me about that long to pee anyway, so it's good to see progress is being made.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
This just in, gas stations rolling out new chargers that will charge your vehicle for a whole week and it will only take 2 minutes. Please have your credit card handy.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
This is endorsed by Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Daimler, Ford, GM, Porsche and Volkswagen. Tesla is conspicuously missing. The Tesla Roadster and the Tesla Model S are the only electric cars in or near production that are close to road-trip worthy, so the omission is unfortunate.
1. Different vehicles with the same battery profile. Or have standards. Small medium large.
2. If you get to a gas station and they are out you are screwed.
3. It isnt that hard, there are already prototypes. We refill flying planes with other flying planes and you think this is 'far from simple?
4. Then dont include the battery with the car. 20k or whatever for the car and some 'battery insurance' in case you rally your car and the battery falls out. At that point you don't care what condition the battery is in, it isn't yours.
etc etc etc please do go on, the one and only problem is getting an entire nation to roll out stations which is expensive with a slow return on investment and getting auto manufacturers to standardize batteries.
And predictably, the only 2 major players in the EV market now, Nissan and Mitsubishi, will just stick to the only widely-deployed fast-charge connector to date, CHAdeMO http://www.chademo.com/
By announcing this new American-only Frankenplug, the SAE only helps delaying the (IMHO much-needed) EV adoption in the US and related charging infrastructure. But that's probably exactly what Chrysler & Co want, so they have more time catching up with the Japanese automakers...
Yeah! Standards!
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Actually, it's not all that stupid.
1. Standardized battery packs can only be a good idea. Auto manufactures should develop and conform to standard packs (at least size, shape, and voltage). As battery chemistry progresses, it's not difficult to get the benefit of an upgrade. Just put it in.
2. If you run that close to the edge that you arrive at the station with little or not charge left, you are a fool. That being said, I'm sure that they could spot you with a quick (15 minute charge) so you can get to the next station or get home to do a proper charge.
3. You are not a mechanical engineer, are you? It is not really that hard to build an automated battery swapping system.
4. This is the hard bit. You would get a choice: It comes with a standard capacity (low cost) battery that the dealer/charging stations/whoever owns but you pay a small amount extra per swap. If you want a better battery that you own, then buy one outright, and charg it at you home / work / or other plug in charging station.
It's not rocket science people.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
When did Audi, BMW, Daimler AG, Porsche, and Volkswagen become American companies?
3. It isnt that hard, there are already prototypes. We refill flying planes with other flying planes and you think this is 'far from simple?
Aerial refueling is far from simple, but it is performed by highly trained operators in billion dollar equipment. And you use that to justify why installing 100,000 battery changers, performing hundreds of millions of changes a year, operated by idiot consumers with cheap vehicles is somehow easy? You might as well say "We put a man on the moon, why don't we all travel in miniature scramjet pods?"
etc etc etc please do go on, the one and only problem is getting an entire nation to roll out stations which is expensive with a slow return on investment and getting auto manufacturers to standardize batteries.
So the only problems are that the infrastructure is too expensive to be profitable and the vehicles are too expensive to be profitable. Sure, that sounds totally viable in a free-market economy. /sarcasm.
Why are people so obsessed with having gas stations for electric cars? That defeats the whole purpose. Charge the car at home and at work, like your smartphone. No trips out of your way, no cruising for the cheapest price, no waiting by the pump, just a few seconds before and after to plug/unplug. If you need to go long distance, take a train/plane/bus, enjoy the view and relax for once in your life. And if your commute is too long, then you're not in the target demographic anyways.
For the cost of installing battery-swap infrastructure in a handful of locations, we could cover a city with standard charging stations. Then you could charge no matter where you park. Even installing networks of the fast-chargers on major corridors will end up being cheaper and more versatile.
Besides, you've seen how long it took them to agree on a standard for a charging plug. Just think how long it would take them to agree on standards for whole battery packs. By the time they finish, we'll have 400-mile Litihium-Air batteries and hydrogen fuel cell backups, and no one will care anymore.
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.
Besides, you've seen how long it took them to agree on a standard for a charging plug. Just think how long it would take them to agree on standards for whole battery packs. By the time they finish, we'll have 400-mile Litihium-Air batteries and hydrogen fuel cell backups, and no one will care anymore.
What I find hilarious about this is that I've started seeing a number of proposals to switch to parking spot mounted inductive chargers. They're agreeing on a standard plug when the plug might end up going away anyways. In which case you wouldn't even need to spend a minute plugging your car in - just park and accept the charge for the electricity while inside your car(assuming that it's not a subscription and therefore fully automatic).
I don't read AC A human right
Not to mention that at 20 minutes, I'm not going to a 'gas' station. I'm going to the grocery store to pick up my food for the week along with the charge. Heck, I fill up there anyway, it'd be even faster for me. No 5 minutes at the pump waiting for the tank to fill, instead it's 30 seconds plugging my car in before I head inside, then 30 seconds disconnecting when I get out.
That or a restaurant, mall, movie theater, etc....
Of course, most the time it'd simply be charged at home, maybe work. Charging outside of there would be when I'm traveling, and 300 mile range EVs like the Tesla would be running dry about the time I need to stop for a break & food anyways.
I don't read AC A human right
Why can't they just use micro USB like everyone else?
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Oh, stop it. Sorry, but this debate isn't over. Don't try to bully this forum by simply resorting to name-calling.
A standard set of battery sizes (A, AA, AAA, C, D, camera batteries, 9-volts, watch batteries, etc.) and capacities has prevented electronic device makers from building different devices? No, it hasn't.
The electric car battery issue is also a bigger deal, so there's even more motivation to come up with a standard solution. People aren't terribly worried about charge times for their flashlight, but they are for their EVs.
Your point number 2 ... do you worry about gas stations being "out of fuel"? (you actually did in the 70s, but that didn't stop people from wanting cars). You're exploiting the fact that any new technology has certain chicken-and-egg issues. As soon as EVs are prevalent, charge stations will exist to meet demand, like what you see for any other product.
3? Don't confuse "simple" with "not able to be done by hand". No, a person can't lift an EV battery pack. That doesn't mean they can't be made modularly to be swapped out by a machine with some mechanical advantage. A gas pump can pump hundreds of pounds of fuel in a few minutes. A battery lift isn't fundamentally more complex.
4 can be addressed. First of all, you're not stuck with the battery you swap in at a charge station, any more than you're stuck with the one that comes with your car. Like an odometer in a car, you attach a lifecycle monitor to each battery pack, so it's known how many cycles it's gone through. For a multi-thousand dollar pack, that's easily a justifiable expense.
You'd also probably have to sign up for some kind of network to be allowed to use the swapping system. That way, if you try to leave them with some kind of battery that's had its cycle counter tampered with, the charge station knows who you are. Lack of anonymity is a minor inconvenience for getting a full battery in a few minutes. Besides, nobody today (except tinfoil hats) buys gas with anything but a credit/debit card, which certainly isn't anonymous.
You're out of excuses.
One of the things I've discovered is that I almost never need to charge away from home. I've been driving my Leaf for a year and so far I've charged at public stations 3 times, and really only one of those times did I really need to.
Ask yourself this question. If you could fill up your gasoline car in your own garage, how often would you use public gas stations?
Sure, there are proposals for inductive charging systems, but they are years away from any reasonable standard, and I don't think "fast charging" speeds are even physically practical at the moment. Inductive charging will always be less efficient than plug charging, and given the likely cost of deploying permanent inductive charging stations, uptake will be slow in markets where the plug works just as well. I certainly don't anticipate everyone digging up their driveways and garages to install them. Besides, there is no way they can sell an electric car without a standard 120V "contingency" charger, and that needs a plug. Trust me, friend, the humble plug is going nowhere, and we will be thanking them in a decade that all our cars have the same standard.
Charge the car at home and at work, like your smartphone
The problem with charging at work is that charging everyone's car during peak electric demand hours is a terrible idea. Cars should be charged in the middle of the night with cheaper electricity, not dumped on the grid just as the day starts heating up.
The average commute in the US is 40 miles round trip.
Electric vehicles use zero power while stopped, and damned little while moving slowly in stop-and-go with regenerative braking. It's maintaining the highway speeds that kills the battery faster. This isn't like an internal combustion engine, which makes peak efficiency at more-or-less highway speeds and wastes power idling in traffic.
Yeah, if we were to have a world-wide universal standard, then we could drive to Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and both Americas in the same car.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You'll also notice that while this is standard practice for propane tanks for barbecues, they never swap the tank on your vehicle if you have a propane powered car... probably because it's quite awkward to do so.
Not to mention that at 20 minutes, I'm not going to a 'gas' station. I'm going to the grocery store to pick up my food for the week along with the charge. Heck, I fill up there anyway, it'd be even faster for me.
You an idiot to believe you grocery store will have a charging station or that I won't unplug your car and use your money to charge my car instead.
You're an idiot to not read up on how the connector works - it makes a data connection with the car so it knows who is using it. If you plugged it into your car it would know that and start to charge you (money, and electricity) instead. The fact that you're a douche and unplugged someone else's (lockable) charger is not something unique to the two of you having electric cars. You're probably the guy who doesn't put the cart back after shopping and just leaves it blocking a space or just push it away so it crashes into someone else's car.
So, your commute was about a mile and a half each way? Would you even bother driving that kind of distance?
In parts of the world there is no alternative. I remember seeing a nice restaurant across a highway from a hotel in Texas once, and after wandering around for a bit I realised the only way to get to t was to get in the car, drive half a mile to an exit with a loop under, then drive back again.
So, your commute was about a mile and a half each way? Would you even bother driving that kind of distance?
I used to commute half that distance.
Sure, it's only three quarters of a mile, why not break the American mold, get some exercise, and save money in the process? Because I always sucked at playing Frogger, that's why. There are no sidewalks, there are no crosswalks, and there is no respect for pedestrians between here and there. It's good exercise running like hell trying to avoid getting hit by cars going 20 mph over the speed limit, true enough, but running for your life tends to make you show up for work looking sweaty and haggard.
This phenomenon is one of the bigger things that I really wish America, or at least my corner of it, would fix. I actually like to walk, and I'd be happy to walk that distance and more every day if it weren't such a fundamentally suicidal undertaking.
I guess it's all moot now anyway. I lost that job, and now I have to drive 115 miles round trip.
Yeah, but there are a vast number of people that are desk jockeys. Just because the system doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's not ready at all.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Only in batteries not designed for fast charging.
That may sound like a snarky answer, but it's not. There's a huge number of engineering design decisions and tradeoffs that one can make, and you can basically pick and choose your ability to deal with different challenges by how much you care about them versus other challenges -- namely, cost and energy density. Of course, today's LiPos and spinels have advanced so much that it's not hard at all to deal with fast charging, from a cell chemistry perspective; the main challenge now is simply designing a pack that can be cooled properly without being overly heavy or complicated.
FYI, A123 has packs that can repeatedly be charged and discharged in just a couple minutes without any special cooling that are popular in the RC world, but they're quite expensive.
And anyway, beyond all this -- how often do you think the average person goes more than 100 miles on a tank? No, seriously? A couple times a year perhaps? A couple fast charges per year -- let's say 6 -- and, say, a 10 year battery life = 60 fast charges. Not a freaking lot.
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