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Europe Is Getting a Network of 'Ultra-Fast, High-Powered' EV Chargers (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: BMW Group, Daimler AG, Ford, and Volkswagen have entered into a partnership to create a network of high-speed charging stations for electric vehicles across Europe. The new chargers will be capable of doling out up to 350 kW of power -- which would make them almost three times as powerful as Tesla's Supercharging stations. The result will be "the highest-powered charging network in Europe," according to a statement released by the manufacturers. The automakers say that construction will begin in 2017 with "about 400 sites" being targeted, and that the network will have "thousands of high-powered charging points" available by 2020. Those four major conglomerates will be "equal partners" in the joint venture, but according to the statement they are encouraging other manufacturers to "participate in the network." One of the reasons for bothering to call on other automakers to hook into this system is because there's a standards war happening with fast charging networks. The charging network announced today will use the Combined Charging System (CCS) technology, which is what that most major automakers already use for their EVs. But Nissan, Toyota, and Honda are notable holdouts from CCS, because many of their EVs and plug-in hybrids use a competing standard known as CHAdeMO.
Why do tech companies even do this? Why can't everyone just agree on a standard and stick with it from the start instead of having a war that means us consumers who buy gear from the wrong side will suffer. No doubt there will be large dongle adapters between charging standards, but I bet an adapter that can handle 100+ kilowatts is pretty darn expensive.
I mean, the basic requirements for a plug are that it be mechanically sound and inexpensive to manufacture. It ought to have several conductor pins, filled in by order of amperage, so a 2 pin plug is 50 amp and a 4 pin plug is 100 amp and so on. The plugs for lower amperage would be the same size plastic mold, just missing the conductors for higher amperage. Not that hard to get right. It needs a data pin to do handshaking with the destination.
It's not worth fighting a war to get royalties, every electric car manufacturer has an incentive to use the standard used by the majority so everyone's vehicles can charge more places.
And then there's the Tesla charging standard, too?
So Tesla Super Chargers and at home chargers, CCS, and CHAdeMO. And I think there's a 4th standard, too...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Daimler has a long history of corruption, one of their fields of interest is debt in Greece... selling buses,cars,trains,etc to that government either over overpriced or unsuitable. VW, well the diesel scum is one of the many things that they do across europe. I bet the main electronics will come from the other overcorrupted-pay politicians to close deals Siemens, and why wouldn't they involve other corrupted and german industry giants!! Just send us the f'ing bill already, coz EU idiots like myself are going to pay overcorrupted german companies to "evolve" the E.U..
These guys need to get their heads out of their ass and us the standard that was in place first unless it has some serious flaw I am unaware of. This all smacks of collusion against Asian automakers that are eating the lunch of the European automakers in the EV market.
Not all humans agree, hence standards groups. Tesla is already a member of the CCS industry group...this is 'everyone' but a few in the industry falling in line with CCS. The other standards will wither. Probably.
The exact same reason why open source software is never forked, and everyone agrees on one particular standard and implementation.
Why do tech companies even do this?
Tech companies do this because standards organizations move too slow. Manufacturers want to ship something this (week, month, quarter, year...) and the standards people will still be arguing over the name of the new group. I work in 802.11 and we see this happen way too often.
The Trump administration will mandate a return to gas with lead additives.
Why is Snark Required?
We need new standards when the old standards are insufficient. Tesla developed their own standard because there wasn't anything else fast enough (CHAdeMO is slower). CCS is designed to work as an extension to the standard J1772 level-2 (240V) chargers, and I think it's faster.
The good news is that it should be possible to create adaptors. Tesla already has CHAdeMO adaptors, and I suspect CSS adaptors will be available soon. I would suspect that CHAdeMO and CSS will have adaptors for each other at some point. For the short term, it means carrying around extra cables, but eventually it will be all sorted out.
https://xkcd.com/927/
The other reason is no one is an expert until it's actually tried. Each "standard" has their own pluses and minuses, each of which wasn't readily apparent when it was created.
That, and most standards organizations are all about patent swapping - I'll get your patent into the standard, if you'll get my patent in the standard. They're less about pushing technology forward and more about how diplomatic you can be during negotiations.
Indeed, when a new standard is called for, usually there's a call to industry to propose their ideas and implementations and if there's only one working one out there, it will likely be the standard regardless if there's a better version in R&D right now.
"Why can't everyone just agree on a standard and stick with it"
And for the same reason, everyone should use Windows and MP3, MP4 and 720P and 110vAC/12vDC and drive on the right side of the road. Where's the fun in that?
...omphaloskepsis often...
At low voltage (400VAC), that is a nightmare to deal with. I just got yelled at for having an "ugly" transformer 150' from a standard Class 2 charger. With four of these chargers in a single location you would need a substantial utility transformer. Hopefully they will go medium voltage to simplify the deployment...
According to the wikipedia page, Tesla joined CCS, so maybe they are converging long term?
Smart, wireless chargers should ease the pain. However, the speed charging issue would remain if an agreement is not reached. Then comes the USB charger style regulation. Would the industry prefer that?
Building a high power charger is not easy. The connector has to be rugged enough to survive day to day use, waterproof, safe in the rain, and deliver tens or hundreds of kilowatts. When you get up to the 100kW range you start to need liquid cooling for the cable.
The good news is that most of the work is generating the high current DC power needed, so a single charger can easily have both CHAdeMO and CCS connectors available. The ones Nissan paid for in the UK are like that.
Not including both is just being a dick.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The charging network announced today will use the Combined Charging System (CCS) technology, which is what that most major automakers already use for their EVs. But Nissan, Toyota, and Honda are notable holdouts from CCS, because many of their EVs and plug-in hybrids use a competing standard known as CHAdeMO.
If there are different proprietary standards, can't EV users just use dongles like Apple users do?
There's millions of reasons...
Waiting for an agreed standard is no good, because that takes forever. And most standards just merge together a few of the most popular proprietary methods and call it a standard, so you can't just start on step 2 in any case.
Adopting whatever came along first is no good, because what comes later might have higher requirements and crippling yourself to the older one gives you little or no benefit.
It can be slow and expensive to design something that makes everybody happy. Sometimes you have to do what's best, right now, for your product.
It's often less expensive to start simple and proprietary, then convert and adapt later, when something better comes along, or once it eventually becomes competitively priced.
Companies don't want to spend all their time and money designing and developing infrastructure, only to have some cheaper imitator with the 2nd mover advantage come along and undercut them and be able to use their work without effort.
Companies only need a big enough market to develop economies of scale. Making their market larger than necessary to do that offers them no extra benefits.
And that's just scratching the surface.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So in your opinion we should all still be using USB 1.0?
Do you understand that this is nothing more than an extension of an existing standard for charging that currently tops out at 50kW? My connector works fine at 1kW and at 50kW.
My 50kW capable connector uses 2-pins for DC and the pins are already capable of 200A so you appear to want to replace those 2 pins with 8 pins to get 50kW and for 350kW we need 56 pins? Is that sensible? Nope. And that's why real automotive engineers have designed the CCS instead of you.
let the IEEE decide and leave manufacturers out of it.
I think that in Europe we have more than 20 different plugs for mains connections. EV Chargers are a good occasion for industry and EU bureaucracy to bring into use a dozen more plug formats, and for sure it will not be missed.
I think that in Europe we have more than 20 different plugs for mains connections. EV Chargers are a good occasion for industry and EU bureaucracy to bring into use a dozen more plug formats, and for sure it will not be missed.
Did you just actually blame the different local power plug standards on EU bureaucracy? You Brexiters have no shame nor brain.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
1. There are 7 different plugs. 6 of them are mostly interchangable (type C plug fits into nearly any european socket, type F and E are pretty much integrated nowdays. The slightly different ones are found in Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Greenland and Liechtenstein, but you don't really have to worry unless your device needs a grounding pin), with the one used in the UK being the odd one out (but they want out of EU, so soon it'll be a non-issue anyway).
2. Do you remember how mobile phone charging used to look? Do you know what caused the manufacturers to adopt a single standard (mini-USB)? Spoiler: it was the EU.
3. Standards and reasoning for the charging standards are complicated, as we're dealing here with 2 distinct problems: AC charging (rectifier in the car, more convenient, doesn't support fast charging), and DC charging (rectifier in the station, less convenient, supports fast charging). Different standards solve different parts. CCS combines existing AC standards and extends the plug to support DC charging as well. AFAIK EU supports either one of the AC standards (Mennekes, aka IEC Type 2, aka "the EU one") or CCS based on that standard. From what I heard, you're free to add whatever plugs you want to your charging station in EU, but it has to have the officially supported one.
They will charge you enough to pay for those chargers there.
My god do you have a lot to learn about what goes into plugs.
I have an idea for a few things you missed out. But I don't want to post them here or we'll end up with 2 different standards again.
EVs are probably a good thing but range anxiety will take a lot of overcoming.
400 sites? So there will be a good chance I'm within 100 km of one. That's nice.
Wouldn't mind, I'm sure they are way more complex. I was just thinking an all in one plug needs to support earlier cars with slower max charging rates and the cord/plug needs to be cheaper, saving you the weight and expense of several extra kilograms of copper that the high amperage cord would need.
Indeed but the cords already come with the cars. There's no reason even with the existing standards that a cord will be larger than what a car would need to charge.
This isn't a standards war, it's stock standard (pun intended) evolution. The prior standard is based on a design from 1993 with CAN bus signalling. There's 2 major standards at the moment (3 if you count Tesla's). Some of them are largely compatible with the ability to adapt between the DC ones anyway. But none of them have the requirements needed to bring electrical vehicles forward which is why Tesla made their own. And definitely not if we're looking to a future of electric based haulage.
The car industry itself tends to converge. I expect that to happen in the next 5-10 years with electric charging standards too, and my guess is the most watts will win.
? I'm talking about the connector. The connector needs to support different charging rates by an array of parallel pins so slower cords can just have an empty connector for all but the minimum set of current carrying pins.
Right. But the metal inside the connector is an incredibly tiny portion of the cost of the connector, you're not saving much. Actually the opposite. Depending on the connector (if it's moulded around the pins like many such connectors are to improve their sturdiness) it may actually reduce the economies of scale. Also lots of parallel connectors have lower power capacity than single connectors at the correct size. Same reason why you can put 3 identical cables on a small cable tray, but when you put 10 next to each other you need far larger cables even if the load is the same.
Yeah that would be easier, wouldn't it. Requiring both high and low current chargers and high and low current cables to populate every conductor means the low current cables would have a long lifespan from having more total conductors than they need. So in your version, you'd make the low current cable have a thinner cable portion while the high current cable would have much thicker copper wires and even tubes for coolant water? (the coolant would be supplied by the charger)
High current cable might also need temperature sensors embedded along the main conductor to detect hot spots.