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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..
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.
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/
CHAdeMO can only deliver 62.5 kW while this standard can deliver 350 kW which translates into faster charging times. Producing a better product is not collusion.
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...
What "standard that was in place first" are you talking about? There have been tons of EV charging standards over time as the technology has evolved. This isn't like some sort of wall plug, there's data exchange and negotiation before beginning a charge, and newer standards handle higher powers than old ones.
350kW is superb, I'm really glad to see them taking such a bold step. They'll even be able to recharge freight vehicles in plausible lengths of time at those power levels.
* Streamlined, efficient small car (200Wh/mi): 29 miles of range added per minute charging (60mph = 2 minutes charging per hour on the road)
* Typical crossover SUV (350 Wh/mi): 17 miles of range added per minute charging (60mph = 3 minutes charging per hour on the road)
* Large freight truck, ~30 tonne load (2 kWh/mi): 2.9 miles of range added per minute charging (60mph = 15 minutes charging per hour on the road)
In the last case the slowdown is measurable... but probably well worth the fuel cost savings. For passenger vehicles, the difference vs. gasoline is insignificant
That said, I do hope that they're putting battery buffers in these chargers. Otherwise, grid operators are not going to be very happy with them, and they'll need to have a good supply line. But with a buffer you could run them off of a small solar panel out in the middle of the desert, so long as your net generation exceeds your net discharge needs.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
will not matter. Once the M3 hits the market, new ICE vehicle sales will slow way down. That is to be followed by the German car makers switching to EVs only in 2021 ( the gov says 2030 for latest, but wants 5 years from now).
It does not matter what Trump does. Oil is headed downwards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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...
I've got a mate who runs a haulage firm, he reckons the average fill-up time was on the order of 45 minutes with all the fucking about with Tachometers, log books, AdBlue etc in addition to actually fueling the vehicle, I suppose this is why places that have the high capacity diesel pumps also have space to park 3 or 4 wagons in addition to whoever actually filling up.
In which case 3 miles a minute isn't unreasonable if you can plug it in and fuck off to do something else, it may even represent a time saving.
OK, Trump winning was crazy enough but now you're actually having hallucinations. With all the conspiratorial nutheads around, a publicly announced plan by the federal government to willfully poison the voters would be unlikely to gain traction (unless you're talking about battle tank tread traction in the next civil war).
Ezekiel 23:20
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
isn't unreasonable if you can plug it in and fuck off to do something else, it may even represent a time saving.
Exactly. This is one thing that people who don't have practical experience with EVs don't consider. My mobile phone takes hours to charge, but I don't sit there staring at it while it does it.
- Chuq
No.
* Large freight truck, ~30 tonne load (2 kWh/mi): 2.9 miles of range added per minute charging (60mph = 15 minutes charging per hour on the road)
I think your estimate is on the low side, Tesla X + big boat = ~4.7 ton = 575 Wh/mi average so I think 30 ton load + 5 ton car would be closer to 4 kWh/mi. On the other hand, if you just put say 8 of their 85 kWh battery packs in there and hooked them up separately you wouldn't need such exotic connectors. Sure it'll add a little extra inconvenience for the truck driver to hook up and unhook but if we say 10% -> 80% fast charge = 85*8*0.7/4 = 120 miles = 2 hours driving. Each battery needs to charge 60 kWh, with Tesla's current superchargers at 120 kWh that's 30 minutes or 80% uptime. It's not great, but also not terrible. Make that 4 hours and 90% uptime if 2 kWh/mi is correct and it actually sounds quite good. And you could put in more batteries for longer drives at higher cost and lower efficiency. If this is a regular route maybe you can have some sort of swap meet or car in rotation or something to make it work. Of course once you have self-driving cars stop-and-go driving wouldn't really be an issue at all, though that might be a bit off still. OTOH the costs of an electric truck are also pretty prohibitive right now. And big trucks have actually managed to reduce NOx and PM emissions way more than cars, it's pretty much pure CO2 now in Euro VI class trucks. It would make more sense to replace personal vehicles first.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
The VDE (the applicable standards body in the car industry) has already decided on a standard: CCS.
Tesla X + big boat = huge aero drag problem, not weight problem. And even concerning weight, freight truck tires are much more efficient than normal car tires.
2kWh/mi is what the electric cargo crate haulers at the Port of Los Angeles get. Maybe reduce the efficiency some for higher average speeds, but it's ballpark.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
Can't we have one article without a end-of-the-world Trump thread? Or, better yet, without Trump at all? This article has nothing to do with him or American politics.
Well, he sure as hell won't allow any standard that wasn't developed in the US. So yes, it has to do with him.
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.
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.
us the standard that was in place first
So not the Asian standard then.
unless it has some serious flaw I am unaware of.
Such as that it's weak and slow and takes ages to charge a car? Given that this standard so far has proposed a significantly higher power output than the VARIOUS previous standards, and the VARIOUS standards currently in use (How many sockets does an Asian Leaf has? Hint: One is not the right answer) one could say the previous ones had a serious flaw.
This all smacks of collusion against Asian automakers that are eating the lunch of the European automakers in the EV market.
Yes the introduction of a new standard that better suits current use cases always smacks of collusion against people who don't innovate and forever implement older standards. Did they specifically exclude Asian automakers? Funny you mention Asian since the current most popular standard in Asia is one partially championed by Renault.
EVs are probably a good thing but range anxiety will take a lot of overcoming.
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.