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Standard For Electric Car Charging Announced
SchrodingerZ writes "The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), an international syndicate, has unveiled what is to become the standard for electric car charging. In today's market there are hundreds of different methods and plugs to charge a variety of different cars, now a single multi use plug is announced as the world standard. Called the J1772 , it 'has two charging plugs incorporated into a single design and is said to reduce charging times from as long as eight hours to as little as 20 minutes.' The cumulative work of over 190 'global experts,' the plug can cater to both AC and DC currents for charging. The plug also sets a new standard on safety regulations, including 'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.' The J1772 beat out its Japanese competitor the CHAdeMO, used as an option on the Nissan Leaf."
We went through all this in the 90's. Even had "standard" charges at the public transit stations. Ah well, perhaps it'll stick this time.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Seriously... they called it the "JIZZZ"?
How can there be 100's of different plug varieties when there areonly 10's of different elctric cars yet. Also, how can plug-design speed up charge time 24 times?
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
In Europe we want micro-usb.
They should have had the DC standard finished a decade ago so it was ready to go, at least in draft form, for the electric and hybrid cars that have come to market over the past few years.
CHAdeMO was an entirely reasonable bit of hole-plugging - the SAE hadn't done its job, so the Japanese manufacturers furnished themselves with a suitable substitute. Fair enough.
(I also predict that this topic will attract a heap of replies saying "the SAE plug is ugly", as if anyone should give a shit about what the plug looks like.)
'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.'
never ask a question you don't want to know the answer to
The J1772 beat out its Japanese competitor the CHAdeMO, used as an option on the Nissan Leaf."
I heard the fact that is was also a wise cracking robot with an obsessive fetish for "80081E5!" didn't help matters.
Any particular reason why they didn't support three-phase power supply?
Maximum current of 6.6kW seems a bit on the low side...
It's in the works, but the engineers responsible for it are busy making airplane windows openable.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Electric cars have at least two batteries: One main battery for motion (the traction battery) which is the one everyone focuses on, and a traditional 12-volt lead-acid car battery that operates all the normal 12-volt lights and accessories that modern cars are fitted with. If the main traction battery is completely dead - which would be an extreme failure case but let's say it did - the charger controls are all fed from the 12V system so at worst you'd need a quick zap from a set of jumper cables to get things going.
=Smidge=
...the guy who designed the battery now used in hybrid cars has died. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20004190
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Becasue it would produce an abundance of Tulips.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the EV1 had a charging paddle that was an inductive connection. safe to use under water.
Instead we get a version that means a 100% dead car = a trip tot he mechanic as it cant "command" the connection to start charging.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
None that I have ever worked on did that. they just has a 12V power supply that ran off the main 48V or 96V battery bank.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I hope this was a joke. All cars have a 2-phase AC charger on board, and the top portion of this connector will always work with a standard AC J1772 plug. Only some cars (and some very special stations) will have the additional circuitry for DC charging, and those will have the additional pins for the DC charging jack. DC charging is much higher power than AC charging (usually supplied by a capacitor bank), and with today's batteries it actually causes significant wear to charge them that fast. So until we get better batteries, DC fast charging is irrelevant to most consumers. It is a shame that policymakers are so obsessed with fast-charging before either the standards or the batteries are actually ready for prime time--that money could be better spent on more useful AC charging stations and public awareness.
From TFA:
[The New standard is] based on the 2009 J1772, which had only an AC charging plug. The current version includes a DC plug underneath the AC plug, which means that not only are both options available, but cars with the older J1772 couplings, such as the 2012 Nissan Leaf and 2013 Chevrolet Volt, can still use the new plug.
For some cars, like Tesla, if your main battery dies (i.e. drains itself), you will have to buy a new $40,000 battery that is not covered by warranty.
Do not use your mouth when siphoning fuel from an electric car. The back-wash is much, much nastier than gasoline.
The basic AC connector lets the car provide basic information like "ready to charge" and "charging error" to the charging station. I believe the new standard also allows for data-over-powerline communication, so the car can talk directly to the charger and the smart grid. Can't wait to see what the security holes are in that arrangement.
Looking at that plug, I have to wonder how easy it will be to plug and unplug.
You presumably only work on conversions or kit cars, then? I know of no commercially produced EVs that use less than 300V nominal pack voltage.
=Smidge=
http://xkcd.com/927/
There definately should be a standard for swappable batteries.
Swapping could be done in minutes, station could charge overnight.
Batteries could be leased, decreasing the up front cost of car. The
charging station could handle the maintainance of batteries.
Year 2024...
Gasoline: $21.50/gal
Ethanol: $29.45/gal
Electricity for quick 20-min charge: $20/min
Yeah.
Weird, I read the title as 'Standard For Electric Chair Announced'. I was actually surprised that they didn't already have one......
"If A equals success, then the formua is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is keep your mouth shut" - A Einstein.
I hope this was a joke. All cars have a 2-phase AC charger on board, and the top portion of this connector will always work with a standard AC J1772 plug. Only some cars (and some very special stations) will have the additional circuitry for DC charging, and those will have the additional pins for the DC charging jack. DC charging is much higher power than AC charging (usually supplied by a capacitor bank), and with today's batteries it actually causes significant wear to charge them that fast. So until we get better batteries, DC fast charging is irrelevant to most consumers. It is a shame that policymakers are so obsessed with fast-charging before either the standards or the batteries are actually ready for prime time--that money could be better spent on more useful AC charging stations and public awareness.
Battery health isn't the issue here.
It is trivial for a charging station to limit DC output, and with the requirement that the charger listen to the car, it would be trivial for the car to regulate charging speed as well. You can set a default preference in your car (rapid charge or standard charge, just like toner saving modes on printers, or rapid charge options for iPod like devices), or a one time override at the charger or with an app on your phone. You could even specify how long you expect to be gone for and the car can figure out how to balance % charged and battery health based on your ETA.
The problem is as follows:
A car that can charge via AC has more complicated and more expensive internals.
A car that can charge via DC has simpler and cheaper internals.
If some cars in the future are sold as DC-only to save on cost, they will still have to support this AC/DC combo plug, which is ugly, heavy, and thicker than my cock during Wheel of Fortune. The end result will be charging stations that support both AC and DC, most homes supporting AC, few homes supporting DC, and cars supporting both even though a lot of money could be saved if we transitioned to DC-only cars and DC-capable stations (including stations in homes).
The real thing about standards is that the biggest corporate swinging dicks dominate the committees and have full control.
It looks like they didn't consider the need for a data connection until just recently (in the 2012 standard, according to Wikipedia). That seems like a MAJOR failure of imagination, as a data connection would be useful for time-of-use charging, mileage-based taxes, firmware updates, parking fares, and POS services [e.g., browse the web or watch a complimentary sitcom while you wait the 20 min. for your car to recharge]. Heck, it would be worth it for automated billing alone... just "park & plug" while doing your groceries... no need to fiddle with swiping your card at a grimey public terminal.
It looks like they are now planning to hack it on (send signals over the powerline), but you'd think that would have drawbacks in terms of extra equipment, lower data rates, and perhaps functionality if the charging pins must be energized. IAMNAEE (I am not an electrical engineer) though... anyone with an EE degree care to comment on this apparent gap in the standard?
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
...and it just looks complicated. I have zero interest in putting that onto my car. But I'm also not interested in attaching a communication protocol to my car. Pouring fuel into a tank can't crash my stereo, and can't disable my power-steering. It either goes in or it doesn't. Why can't charging my battery be the same way. Power flows or it doesn't. A fuse in my car solves the obvious overload scenario. And that's it.
How often do you go more than 1000km in one go???
Depending on what I'm doing, two or three times a week.
incompetent drivers will demand to drive because their tax money paid for the road. I can't see courts buying that argument.
They do already. Try taking grandpa's license away before he runs over the kids at the bus stop. Cops (and judges) are terrified of the AARP coming down on them for discriminating against the elderly.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your argument is nonsensical. Under no consumer-relevant circumstances does off-boarding the AC charger make any sense, either operationally or financially, at either the micro or macro level. Unless your market is the ~500 off-grid DC-power solar cabin owners in the country (and good luck selling them a car with less than 200 mile range), every single customer will need to charge from AC at some point--at their own house. Now everyone has paid for an AC-to-DC charger anyways even though you left it out of the car to "save cost", but they can only charge at their house so your vehicle is far less useful than your competitors with on-board charging. Good luck keeping that model in production for more than a year, or even staying in business.
Come back in 30 years and if, by some strange twist of fate, we all have 400-volt DC power in our homes, or if even "cheap" cars have 500 mile range and only charge once a week, you can laugh at our silly connector then.
If you see "xkcd 927" and already know the cartoon behind it, you're a nerd.
P.S.: I didn't need to click on that link.
Don't forget: on the Leaf, not only does it have the 12v battery, but it has a small solar cell (on the SV model) located on the rear spoiler. So if even the 12v 'control' battery was dead, just leave it in the sun for a bit. Then it'd have enough juice to control the main charger and activate it once plugged in.
I was hoping for two metal tracks down the middle of the road.
There are at least 5 known cases, from your links, but nobody has spoken with anyone that has had this happen to them.
though from an EV perspective, it sounds like a case where a person drains the oil from their car and drives it until it dies, then complains that it's broken. Maybe that's why none of the supposed 5 have come forward, they know they were wrong, and not Tesla.
Learn to love Alaska
They should have used 60 GHz bluetooth 5.0 for charging communication, with NFC as well for paying for the charge from public stations. That'd be fun.
Learn to love Alaska
Swappable Batteries.
So, cars can charge with DC much faster than with AC. What a great opportunity to innovate.
Solar panels generate DC, and it adds a lot to the cost and complexity to convert it to AC. How about co-locating car charging stations at solar power farms, and skipping the DC-AC conversion equipment. It is a win-win.
Many wind generators also have DC generators and convert to AC. Same opportunity there.
An AC motor - DC generator set should cost much less than $5000. It doesn't take a lot of horsepower to make lots of low voltage DC amps.
Con-Ed in New York City used to sell electric power in DC as well as AC. I think they dropped the DC in the 1980s (a NYC Slashdotter can probably set me strait there. ). Might there be other localities in this world where the utility still offers DC for sale?
Nice to see an open source implementation already.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-EV-J1772-Charging-Station/?ALLSTEPS
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Er, no, you're making things up here. The SAE only claims that the receptable on the car can be made to accept existing J1772 connectors, not the other way around. On all recent plug-ins and EVs I've seen, only the Nissan Leaf (ironically enough) might have enough clearance around its J1772 receptacle to accept this new proposed plug. Chevy Volt, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Prius plug-in, Ford focus... forget it.
(and to clarify, the charger all those have on-board is single-phase AC, not "2-phase")
Regarding the reality of DC fast-charging: first, it's here today (despite the SAE, not because of it) and it works very well. And yes, cables are thick and heavy, but certainly not more than a gas pump tube and nozzle.
Multiple automakers (Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Peugeot..) and charging equipment vendors (Eaton, Fuji, AeroViromnent, Efacec, Andromeda etc etc) already implemented another, existing standard, CHAdeMO, starting years ago. (none of them use capacitor banks btw, just a regular commercial electrical circuit).
The batteries in tens of thousands of EVs already on the road handle fast-charging just fine, thank you. Not just at fast-charging stations but also every time the vehicle slows down btw (regenerative braking happily pumps tens of kW back into the battery).
Second: unlike you I think that DC fast charging is critically important for wider EV adoption.
The two biggest hurdles for EVs today in the market are initial cost and limited range.
Batteries will remain pricey for the foreseeable future, so cheaper EVs will continue to come with relatively modest packs (say 16 to 30kW*h), and therefore only 50 to 120 miles range. Extending this range by recharging is only practical if it's quick enough, ie counted in minutes and not hours like with traditional AC charging stations -- I really don't mind stopping 15~30 minutes on an occasional 150 miles trip, in exchange for that lifetime 80%+ discount on "gas", and I could see such compromise being totally acceptable to a lot of people.
Now those 50kW+ chargers are big heavy expensive beasts, so keeping them outside the car (hence DC at the connector), usable by more than one vehicle, makes complete sense.
So yep, DC fast-charging is a very practical and cost-effective way to lift the range constraints otherwise inherent to more affordable EVs.
Freedom and $$ -- you were calling this 'irrelevant to most'?
My apologies for getting single-phase wrong. I'm an engineer--I should know better. Are you an EV owner? I am not, but I get most of my information from the crowd at the Washington DC Electric Vehicle Association (EVADC). We are a little bitter about fast-charging because there is virtually no fast-charging infrastructure on the mid-Atlantic coast, and we heard some dealers were going to install some *inside the show rooms*. What a waste.
On the new J1772 plug, what exactly are you complaining about? That you can't plug a DC charger into a car that doesn't have a DC charging port? Given their relative cost, there is no reason to occupy a DC charger when you are only using the AC charging function, so any logical DC charger will not even connect those pins. Any installation with a DC fast charger will also have several AC chargers, since they are order(s) of magnitude cheaper to install.
The two biggest hurdles to EV adoption are the perception of high initial cost and limited range. If you compare a Nissan LEAF or a Chevy Volt to a gas model with the same dashboard features and driving performance, you will find the price difference is much smaller than it first seems if you only compare them to base model gas cars. (Never mind that the 5 year TCO for a $35k LEAF is the same as an $18k Corolla, after fuel and maintenance savings.) As for range, precise numbers vary from source to source but the consensus is that approximately 75% of all American commuters drive less than 40 miles per day. Correlate that with the number of multi-car households who can use a different vehicle for long trips, and you have a large, untapped pool of potential EV owners who could make the most of today's technology without needing fast-charging at all.
DC fast-charging is only "practical and cost-effective" when there are a significant number of people needing to use it, and can easily be rendered useless by improper planning or standards wars. While I don't deny that there is a chicken-and-egg problem here, it doesn't make sense to get hung up on fast chargers for occasional trips while there remain so many holes in the basic, day-to-day infrastructure needed to make EVs practical. I certainly don't want to discourage any investment in the sector, but I have to assert that public money would be better spent promoting EVs for urban commuting *now* so that we can gain more experience to apply when building infrastructure down the road. Most important are incentives for apartment buildings to install charging stations in their garages, since today's EVs are so much better suited to urban living than suburban homes (which, ironically, are the only place drivers can install their own chargers).
So I don't deny your argument, I just want to make sure we don't get ahead of ourselves. While a robust fast-charging network would be awesome for those who need it, there are not enough players at the table yet for municipal governments to get it right and we are still far from the critical mass where such a system would be considered a good private investment. It is counterproductive to parrot the line that lack of infrastructure is holding back EV sales. EVs are practical now for a growing portion of the population, even if they don't meet your particular needs at the moment.
Why can't they just use micro usb like everyone else?
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Your links are to the same story covered on two different sites. The story was debunked on Slashdot at the time it first appeared.
OK, yeah there are potential issues of fraud with getting served with an undercharged battery. There would have to be some mostly-trusted monitoring tech to record actual energy extracted, and we'd have to eat whatever fraud slips by. But electric cars will never become mainstream until the long-distance travel issue is addressed, by (1) swappable batteries, (2) batteries rechargeable in a couple of minutes, or (3) gas prices so high that people will put up with waiting a long time for recharges at waystations.