Every automaker has to sell this percentage of ZEVs. If they fail, they have to buy credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail that, they are banned from selling cars in California
Meanwhile, in the real world, automakers can simply pay $5000 for each missing credit they didn't earn or buy. So for a 2,5% ZEV mandate, that's an average fine of $125 per vehicle. For earning no credits whatsoever. And there are lots of ways to earn credits besides selling BEVs (although a given fraction must be from BEVs or FCVs). Manufacturers can earn credits for good fleet fuel economy. They can earn credits for making advanced tech prototypes. They can get credits for PHEVs, NEVs (think "glorified golf carts"), banked credits from PZEVs, etc. It's an extremely flexible process.
New product adoption rates tend to track sigmoid curves ("S-curves").
While there's noise (such as changing tax / regulatory environments), EVs around the world have generally tracked S-curves quite well, with Norway having exceeded 50% on new sales.
Indeed - modern combined cycle natural gas plants can exceed 60% efficiency (burning a cleaner fuel, at that). A typical (non-hybrid) gasoline car peaks at around 35% efficiency and averages 20-25% efficiency in normal driving.
Coal is such a red herring regardless, as it's been dying, keeps dying, and there's not realistically anything that's going to save it. The overwhelming majority of new power added in the developed world is solar, wind, and natural gas.
Here's where the US grid has been heading. Here's where it's going. So note that using, say, 2012 data above actually downplays the improvements of EVs vs. ICEs. Same story with the energy used in battery manufacture (which has been falling in almost direct correspondence to battery prices)
If I was wrong in my assumption that you're an American (most people who ask this question turn out to be), let me know where you're from and I'll give you data appropriate to your location. For example, major EU countries.
I don't think you should assume this. Tesla uses a small cell even for large packs.
You're talking about cell format. I'm talking about pack overhead (structural, insulative, venting, cooling, wiring, control hardware, etc). Even Tesla has made it clear that their larger packs (Roadster, Semi) will gain in energy density simply due to the increased size, without any need for improved cell energy density.
Yeah, 260Wh/kg is pretty close to the cell density. But that's A) easier to achieve when you're making such a large pack, and B) for aircraft roles, you can afford to spend more on lightweighting and have lower requirements on ability to withstand impacts.
It's clearly a very lightweight composite aircraft. Lightweighting costs money, but when you're talking electric aircraft, that extra expense is well worth it.
Q-400 fuel tank = 6526L. At $1,50/l for aviation fuel, that's about $10k in fuel costs per trip, for a typical 82 passenger capacity configuration (90 max configuration), about $119 per passenger.
Alice battery = 900kWh. At commercial rates of $0,08/kWh, that's $72, which works out to $8 per passenger
Even when you factor in the range difference (2040km vs. ~1050km), clearly the energy costs are far lower for the latter per-passenger per unit distance. Practically irrelevant.
As for how much everything else costs (pilot, maintenance, depreciation, etc), I can't say. But as for energy, it's a blowout comparison. Aviation fuel is expensive even compared to road fuel costs, which are expensive compared to residential electricity rates, which are expensive compared to commercial electricity.
Obviously such an aircraft is not designed for busy routes. But it looks like an obvious contender for lesser-trafficked routes. It would be awesome for our domestic flights here in Iceland; our airports could probably charge at around $0,06/kWh, but fuel here is crazy-expensive. Scaled-up aircraft for busier routes will come when their smaller brethren prove their worth in their roles.
Today's battery tech already supports electric aircraft in such "puddle jumper" roles. Battery tech advancement is only required for longer-range air service.
Wait, you're saying that a startup company's first aircraft isn't going to suddenly displace the many tens of thousands of turboprop commuter aircraft operating today?
Gee, too bad their business model assumes that their first aircraft will displace all current turboprop business, I presume based on no evidence whatsoever and against all common sense.
It could very well be that the first half of the trip is climbing, and the second half is very low power or unpowered descent.
A typical cruising altitude is ~10km. So 98100J/kg, or 27Wh/kg. Velocity is 123m/s, so that's another 7,6kJ/kg. Call it 30Wh/kg. Now factor in battery / wiring / motor prop losses - you're now closer to 40Wh/kg. Now look at what percentage of your total loaded mass you want to be batteries. A quarter of the aircraft? That's 160Wh/kg (at the pack level, not the cell level), assuming your airplane had zero drag and an infinite L/D ratio. Which obviously it doesn't!
Small increases in battery energy density make a big difference for electric aircraft, because so much of your energy is just used to get up to altitude / speed. And the higher you go, the faster the optimal speed.
Apparently you consider 20% margins "barely succeeds at selling Teslas at a loss".
Apparently you think nearly a billion dollars in free cash flow, when they're still far from having finished optimizing their production processes, and beating NASDAQ by 30% in the past several months, is a giant "Meh".
How are your investments looking these past couple months, AC?;)
Sold some stock in the mid-to-upper $370s, and then he dropped the stock price down to the lower $360s, so I turned it immediately around into some Feb '19 calls:) Gotta love having a CEO who doesn't care whether he tanks the stock by saying things like it wouldn't bother him if his company went bankrupt if someone else made a better product;)
So long as people keep basing their buy and sell decisions based on Elon's off-the-cuff statements, profiting on this stock's volatility will continue to be too easy. For me, it's all about the quarterly reports, so until then, it's just buy high, sell low, while ignoring any such short-term "news".
As for GM factories... meh. I assume they'd be stripped bare, like NUMMI was, which is good in terms of not buying something tooled in a way that's useless to you. You're mainly buying the floor space and utility / transport connections. But it's not going to be configured in a way optimal for their production processes. And right now, their main need is not more US production, but China and EU production.
Maybe they'd end up doing some of the development that they had planned for GF1 at a former GM facility instead - who knows. If they do buy a Michigan plant, however, UAW will surely step up their campaign - and most of the local workers would probably be pro-UAW, unlike in California where UAW had basically backstabbed them during the negotiations that led to NUMMI's closing.
Honestly? I expect that the main reason Musk said this was just to get some political leverage - hanging out the possibility that they might buy these factories in the future. But who knows, it could be entirely serious.
92% efficiency could be possible with optical rectennas. PV-tinted class could also be done with it.
You might actually start to see practical solar cars at 80+% efficiency. Not "drive continuously forever", but "drive with extended range, park all day, then drive again".
The problem is akin to the fractal coastline problem: How long is the coastline of a country? The answer between "theoretically" and "actually" is different. Theoretically, it's like a Koch snowflake - the perimeter is infinite, because each time you zoom in, you get new curves superimposed upon the curves. In practice, you hit real-world limits due to a change in physical processes at small scales.
Ideally, there's no practical limit to how fast you could sample frames. Indeed, an ideal implementation would be direct spline accumulation, with readout triggered only when the threshold is exceeded (that is to say, the act of photoaccumulation itself builds the spline, with inhibition occurring between the different spline parameters corresponding to their exponents). In such a case, you'd be limited by nothing more than the minimum number of photons required to build a valid spline to the point of it exceeding its threshold.
With a standard CCD like we use today, however, where you have to read out rows at a time with no individual per-pixel logic, you have to pick a readout speed. The highest acceptable readout frequency is based on how much light you're receiving in your scene. That said, even on consumer-grade cameras, in outdoor daytime situations readout speeds measured in the thousandths of a second can be quite acceptable. True, these are not "infinitely short" periods of time, but they sure are pretty dang short. To put it another way: the "worst case" is what we do now. The "best case" is vastly better.
To point out a specific advantage: Super slow motion is a popular feature on cameras these days, but you generally only get short bursts at limited resolution. You're accumulating entire frames of raw data - the vast majority of which could be described by only a few splines throughout an entire burst, with only the most active areas requiring a meaningful number of splines. But rather than collecting a small number of spline parameters, it's reading out huge amounts of pixel data every frame, and it must store all of it. This limits A) maximum slow motion framerates, B) slow motion burst lengths, and C) slow motion resolutions. Spline accumulation would face none of these limits because the data stream you're accumulating would be vastly smaller (assuming its done directly in the sensor during CCD readout - there's no advantage if you have to buffer all the raw data and then process it).
This is going to sound weird, but I'd like to see the concept of "frames" disappear entirely. Although it'd be a pretty radical change. I'd like pixels to follow piecewise spline curves with their start/stop times being at arbitrary floating point values.
The data would effectively be captured thusly for each pixel**: the first part of a new piecewise step would be used to determine the curve shape, and then no action would be taken until the deviation from this curve exceeds a breakout threshold - the point where no adjustment to the curve shape can accurately described the data gathered thusfar. This curve accumulation / breakout be done in hardware, atop the CCD layer**. Recorded pixels** would increase or decrease the breakout threshold of their neighbors, in order to encourage whole blocks of pixels to transition between splines at the same time (for compression reasons - you wouldn't want to have to record a header spelling out the coordinates** and start time for every pixel** individually). A step between splines might be so fast that you have to watch at 1/1000th speed slow motion to even see it - or it might last for seconds. It all depends on the scene.
Note the asterisks (**) in the above paragraph. Because rather than referencing pixels by the x,y coordinates of a CCD pixel, one would ideally have a layer of separation that maps CCD pixels to fixed polar coordinate positions centred around the camera's focal point ("virtual pixels").This would let you shift the CCD-polar coordinate mapping based on the camera's accelerometer data, so if the camera is rotated, the virtual pixels still correspond with the same real-world object (e.g. slewing the camera doesn't invalidate all your splines). Virtual pixels in polar coordinates would also support full 360 recording and playback.
The video file format would be grouped into blocks (each sharing a single start time) containing clusters of pixels (each containing metadata describing what run of pixels you're updating), followed by each pixel's spline data (in a compressed format that makes use of data correlation between adjacent pixels). The more the compression is desired, the more it fudges the start times to group together larger blocks. A player just reads through the blocks, waits for said floating point start time to occur, then updates the splines for all pixels described therein. The screen displays whatever splines are in its memory, at a hardware level.
All blocks could also be tagged with a camera ID, and camera metadata (containing said camera's coordinates and orientation relative to some fixed coordinate system) could be periodically provided. This would allow different cameras to record the same scene simultaneously and be played back simultaneously. This would allow, for example, stereoscopic 3d, or for the data to be used in actual 3d scene reconstruction. I'd also love for information about the frequency bands recorded by each cxamera to be stored in metadata (with any number of frequency bands allowed, rather than just a generic "RGB"), so multispectral imagery could be recorded and reconstructed.
To me, something like that would be the ultimate recording / playback system.
100kW is not a good "field trial" for anything; "100kW" CCS chargers have been around for quite some time (175kW, actually). There's nothing new to "trial".
Nor is 100kW equal to 350kW, which is what they've been claiming endlessly in one breathless press release after the next that they're building. When in reality, that's "for some future date".
If they're waiting for higher power-consuming CCS cars - let's ignore that they're already on the road (Kona, Niro, I-Pace, and lots more next year) - before making higher-powered chargers... hello, chicken-and-egg problem. You don't "wait" with EVs, or you fall behind. It's so stupid to pretend that you're "catching up" when in actuality you're "waiting".
And again: I seriously, seriously doubt that all of the inverter racks are just sitting around gathering dust because someone decided "let's install a bunch of (expensive) inverters that won't even be powered on until we get around to retrofitting this place we just built".
Glycol-cooled CCS cables have been available on the market since 2016.
Those 150kW chargers support 200A and 500V on the existing CCS 1 system for cars that support it
Now multiply 200A times 500V. That is the best case (read: not real-world) charge rate you can get from it, in kilowatts. 100kW. Versus the advertised 350kW. The highest-reported charge rates for real-world EVs on such chargers are in the lower 70s (Hyundai / Kia) and mid 80s (I-Pace).
It is capable of 920V and 500A.
That's certainly the design spec. But there is no way on Earth that they would build a charger cabinet that has all of its inverters (the expensive part) for 350kW but leave off high-power cables (the cheap part). I guarantee you, if you open up those cabinets, you're going to find a bunch of racks for the extra inverters to be installed in when they upgrade the stations.
The simple fact is that they've been selling these as 350kW stations... and they're not.
200A does not deliver 150kW to a 400V EV. And that's the problem. What they've only just started installing only a bit over 2/3rds the power of where the Supercharger network (vastly more extensive) stands today. But Tesla is switching to more powerful V3 superchargers starting early next year.
I had thought that Ionity was an attempt to catch or surpass the Supercharger network. This is not a promising start.
And no car could pull 350kW from the site he visited (I assume you're talking about the one he visited in Norway the other day). It's physically incapable of doing so.
I hardly see it as that ambitious of a statement. They'll be introducing the new generation in 2026. A platform can last decades.
That said, of the major automakers, VW is the most ambitious regarding EVs. It'll be interesting to see how they translate their talk into action over the coming years; I'm watching them closely.
I was disappointed to find out recently that the Ionity network which was supposed be the first real competition with the Supercharger network in Europe is... I hesitate to call it a "fraud", so let's just call it "poorly advertised". They're billing it as a network of 350kW chargers, but what they're actually installing at present in most locations is just your typical high-end V1 CCS chargers (maxing out at 200A - and some people are claiming that it only supports ~400V charging, although I don't know if anyone has actually tested ~800V charging on it). The 500A V2 CCS charging is supposed to be a "modification at a later date". Basically more of the "okay, not today, but we'll be competitive tomorrow" stuff we've been getting from major automakers for the past decade.
To major automakers and infrastructure developers: I'm a big Tesla fan, but I don't want you guys pulling this sort of stuff. I want you guys to be competitive. Put up a fight, for Thor's sake, don't just talk about doing it "in the future"!
A recent survey found that 45% of current non-Tesla EV owners want their next EV to be a Tesla (I expect these numbers to apply to the "buying their first EV" crowd as well). This was celebrated as great news for Tesla. But it also means that there's 55% of non-Tesla owners out there who want their EV to be a non-Tesla brand. We need you guys to serve them. We're not even close to this being a zero-sum game; right now, and for the forseeable future, the game is "cannibalize the ICE market".
Make it happen. VW (and Porsche), you're my best bet on serving the non-Tesla crowd. Let's see it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, in the real world, automakers can simply pay $5000 for each missing credit they didn't earn or buy. So for a 2,5% ZEV mandate, that's an average fine of $125 per vehicle. For earning no credits whatsoever. And there are lots of ways to earn credits besides selling BEVs (although a given fraction must be from BEVs or FCVs). Manufacturers can earn credits for good fleet fuel economy. They can earn credits for making advanced tech prototypes. They can get credits for PHEVs, NEVs (think "glorified golf carts"), banked credits from PZEVs, etc. It's an extremely flexible process.
Top five tradeins for a Tesla Model 3:
* BMW 3-Series
* Toyota Prius
* Nissan Leaf
* Honda Accord
* Honda Civic
Yep, that totally sounds like a profile of the rich! Why, just the other day I saw Bill Gates driving around in an old Civic....
New product adoption rates tend to track sigmoid curves ("S-curves").
While there's noise (such as changing tax / regulatory environments), EVs around the world have generally tracked S-curves quite well, with Norway having exceeded 50% on new sales.
Indeed - modern combined cycle natural gas plants can exceed 60% efficiency (burning a cleaner fuel, at that). A typical (non-hybrid) gasoline car peaks at around 35% efficiency and averages 20-25% efficiency in normal driving.
Coal is such a red herring regardless, as it's been dying, keeps dying, and there's not realistically anything that's going to save it. The overwhelming majority of new power added in the developed world is solar, wind, and natural gas.
Are there still people here who believe in this "long tailpipe" nonsense?
Start reading. Or, if you just want a cheat sheet for the US: here and here.
Here's where the US grid has been heading. Here's where it's going. So note that using, say, 2012 data above actually downplays the improvements of EVs vs. ICEs. Same story with the energy used in battery manufacture (which has been falling in almost direct correspondence to battery prices)
If I was wrong in my assumption that you're an American (most people who ask this question turn out to be), let me know where you're from and I'll give you data appropriate to your location. For example, major EU countries.
You're talking about cell format. I'm talking about pack overhead (structural, insulative, venting, cooling, wiring, control hardware, etc). Even Tesla has made it clear that their larger packs (Roadster, Semi) will gain in energy density simply due to the increased size, without any need for improved cell energy density.
It does however impose more significant loading on the landing gear and its connection to the frame.
That said, battery packs aren't dead weight - they function as stiffening elements to adjacent structural members.
Yeah, 260Wh/kg is pretty close to the cell density. But that's A) easier to achieve when you're making such a large pack, and B) for aircraft roles, you can afford to spend more on lightweighting and have lower requirements on ability to withstand impacts.
It's clearly a very lightweight composite aircraft. Lightweighting costs money, but when you're talking electric aircraft, that extra expense is well worth it.
Q-400 fuel tank = 6526L. At $1,50/l for aviation fuel, that's about $10k in fuel costs per trip, for a typical 82 passenger capacity configuration (90 max configuration), about $119 per passenger.
Alice battery = 900kWh. At commercial rates of $0,08/kWh, that's $72, which works out to $8 per passenger
Even when you factor in the range difference (2040km vs. ~1050km), clearly the energy costs are far lower for the latter per-passenger per unit distance. Practically irrelevant.
As for how much everything else costs (pilot, maintenance, depreciation, etc), I can't say. But as for energy, it's a blowout comparison. Aviation fuel is expensive even compared to road fuel costs, which are expensive compared to residential electricity rates, which are expensive compared to commercial electricity.
Obviously such an aircraft is not designed for busy routes. But it looks like an obvious contender for lesser-trafficked routes. It would be awesome for our domestic flights here in Iceland; our airports could probably charge at around $0,06/kWh, but fuel here is crazy-expensive. Scaled-up aircraft for busier routes will come when their smaller brethren prove their worth in their roles.
Today's battery tech already supports electric aircraft in such "puddle jumper" roles. Battery tech advancement is only required for longer-range air service.
Wait, you're saying that a startup company's first aircraft isn't going to suddenly displace the many tens of thousands of turboprop commuter aircraft operating today?
Gee, too bad their business model assumes that their first aircraft will displace all current turboprop business, I presume based on no evidence whatsoever and against all common sense.
You would not put a "generator" on it. But it surely has a RAT as an auxiliary power supply.
It could very well be that the first half of the trip is climbing, and the second half is very low power or unpowered descent.
A typical cruising altitude is ~10km. So 98100J/kg, or 27Wh/kg. Velocity is 123m/s, so that's another 7,6kJ/kg. Call it 30Wh/kg. Now factor in battery / wiring / motor prop losses - you're now closer to 40Wh/kg. Now look at what percentage of your total loaded mass you want to be batteries. A quarter of the aircraft? That's 160Wh/kg (at the pack level, not the cell level), assuming your airplane had zero drag and an infinite L/D ratio. Which obviously it doesn't!
Small increases in battery energy density make a big difference for electric aircraft, because so much of your energy is just used to get up to altitude / speed. And the higher you go, the faster the optimal speed.
Apparently you consider 20% margins "barely succeeds at selling Teslas at a loss".
Apparently you think nearly a billion dollars in free cash flow, when they're still far from having finished optimizing their production processes, and beating NASDAQ by 30% in the past several months, is a giant "Meh".
How are your investments looking these past couple months, AC? ;)
Sold some stock in the mid-to-upper $370s, and then he dropped the stock price down to the lower $360s, so I turned it immediately around into some Feb '19 calls :) Gotta love having a CEO who doesn't care whether he tanks the stock by saying things like it wouldn't bother him if his company went bankrupt if someone else made a better product ;)
So long as people keep basing their buy and sell decisions based on Elon's off-the-cuff statements, profiting on this stock's volatility will continue to be too easy. For me, it's all about the quarterly reports, so until then, it's just buy high, sell low, while ignoring any such short-term "news".
As for GM factories... meh. I assume they'd be stripped bare, like NUMMI was, which is good in terms of not buying something tooled in a way that's useless to you. You're mainly buying the floor space and utility / transport connections. But it's not going to be configured in a way optimal for their production processes. And right now, their main need is not more US production, but China and EU production.
Maybe they'd end up doing some of the development that they had planned for GF1 at a former GM facility instead - who knows. If they do buy a Michigan plant, however, UAW will surely step up their campaign - and most of the local workers would probably be pro-UAW, unlike in California where UAW had basically backstabbed them during the negotiations that led to NUMMI's closing.
Honestly? I expect that the main reason Musk said this was just to get some political leverage - hanging out the possibility that they might buy these factories in the future. But who knows, it could be entirely serious.
Everybody point at the libertarian and laugh.
92% efficiency could be possible with optical rectennas. PV-tinted class could also be done with it.
You might actually start to see practical solar cars at 80+% efficiency. Not "drive continuously forever", but "drive with extended range, park all day, then drive again".
Not "may". It's warrantied for 8 years, rated for 15.
The problem is akin to the fractal coastline problem: How long is the coastline of a country? The answer between "theoretically" and "actually" is different. Theoretically, it's like a Koch snowflake - the perimeter is infinite, because each time you zoom in, you get new curves superimposed upon the curves. In practice, you hit real-world limits due to a change in physical processes at small scales.
Ideally, there's no practical limit to how fast you could sample frames. Indeed, an ideal implementation would be direct spline accumulation, with readout triggered only when the threshold is exceeded (that is to say, the act of photoaccumulation itself builds the spline, with inhibition occurring between the different spline parameters corresponding to their exponents). In such a case, you'd be limited by nothing more than the minimum number of photons required to build a valid spline to the point of it exceeding its threshold.
With a standard CCD like we use today, however, where you have to read out rows at a time with no individual per-pixel logic, you have to pick a readout speed. The highest acceptable readout frequency is based on how much light you're receiving in your scene. That said, even on consumer-grade cameras, in outdoor daytime situations readout speeds measured in the thousandths of a second can be quite acceptable. True, these are not "infinitely short" periods of time, but they sure are pretty dang short. To put it another way: the "worst case" is what we do now. The "best case" is vastly better.
To point out a specific advantage: Super slow motion is a popular feature on cameras these days, but you generally only get short bursts at limited resolution. You're accumulating entire frames of raw data - the vast majority of which could be described by only a few splines throughout an entire burst, with only the most active areas requiring a meaningful number of splines. But rather than collecting a small number of spline parameters, it's reading out huge amounts of pixel data every frame, and it must store all of it. This limits A) maximum slow motion framerates, B) slow motion burst lengths, and C) slow motion resolutions. Spline accumulation would face none of these limits because the data stream you're accumulating would be vastly smaller (assuming its done directly in the sensor during CCD readout - there's no advantage if you have to buffer all the raw data and then process it).
This is going to sound weird, but I'd like to see the concept of "frames" disappear entirely. Although it'd be a pretty radical change. I'd like pixels to follow piecewise spline curves with their start/stop times being at arbitrary floating point values.
The data would effectively be captured thusly for each pixel**: the first part of a new piecewise step would be used to determine the curve shape, and then no action would be taken until the deviation from this curve exceeds a breakout threshold - the point where no adjustment to the curve shape can accurately described the data gathered thusfar. This curve accumulation / breakout be done in hardware, atop the CCD layer**. Recorded pixels** would increase or decrease the breakout threshold of their neighbors, in order to encourage whole blocks of pixels to transition between splines at the same time (for compression reasons - you wouldn't want to have to record a header spelling out the coordinates** and start time for every pixel** individually). A step between splines might be so fast that you have to watch at 1/1000th speed slow motion to even see it - or it might last for seconds. It all depends on the scene.
Note the asterisks (**) in the above paragraph. Because rather than referencing pixels by the x,y coordinates of a CCD pixel, one would ideally have a layer of separation that maps CCD pixels to fixed polar coordinate positions centred around the camera's focal point ("virtual pixels").This would let you shift the CCD-polar coordinate mapping based on the camera's accelerometer data, so if the camera is rotated, the virtual pixels still correspond with the same real-world object (e.g. slewing the camera doesn't invalidate all your splines). Virtual pixels in polar coordinates would also support full 360 recording and playback.
The video file format would be grouped into blocks (each sharing a single start time) containing clusters of pixels (each containing metadata describing what run of pixels you're updating), followed by each pixel's spline data (in a compressed format that makes use of data correlation between adjacent pixels). The more the compression is desired, the more it fudges the start times to group together larger blocks. A player just reads through the blocks, waits for said floating point start time to occur, then updates the splines for all pixels described therein. The screen displays whatever splines are in its memory, at a hardware level.
All blocks could also be tagged with a camera ID, and camera metadata (containing said camera's coordinates and orientation relative to some fixed coordinate system) could be periodically provided. This would allow different cameras to record the same scene simultaneously and be played back simultaneously. This would allow, for example, stereoscopic 3d, or for the data to be used in actual 3d scene reconstruction. I'd also love for information about the frequency bands recorded by each cxamera to be stored in metadata (with any number of frequency bands allowed, rather than just a generic "RGB"), so multispectral imagery could be recorded and reconstructed.
To me, something like that would be the ultimate recording / playback system.
100kW is not a good "field trial" for anything; "100kW" CCS chargers have been around for quite some time (175kW, actually). There's nothing new to "trial".
Nor is 100kW equal to 350kW, which is what they've been claiming endlessly in one breathless press release after the next that they're building. When in reality, that's "for some future date".
If they're waiting for higher power-consuming CCS cars - let's ignore that they're already on the road (Kona, Niro, I-Pace, and lots more next year) - before making higher-powered chargers... hello, chicken-and-egg problem. You don't "wait" with EVs, or you fall behind. It's so stupid to pretend that you're "catching up" when in actuality you're "waiting".
And again: I seriously, seriously doubt that all of the inverter racks are just sitting around gathering dust because someone decided "let's install a bunch of (expensive) inverters that won't even be powered on until we get around to retrofitting this place we just built".
Glycol-cooled CCS cables have been available on the market since 2016.
Where would that be - Nunavut?
Why?
Do you not eat or take breaks when driving?
If so: get off the road. You're a danger to everyone else.
Now multiply 200A times 500V. That is the best case (read: not real-world) charge rate you can get from it, in kilowatts. 100kW. Versus the advertised 350kW. The highest-reported charge rates for real-world EVs on such chargers are in the lower 70s (Hyundai / Kia) and mid 80s (I-Pace).
That's certainly the design spec. But there is no way on Earth that they would build a charger cabinet that has all of its inverters (the expensive part) for 350kW but leave off high-power cables (the cheap part). I guarantee you, if you open up those cabinets, you're going to find a bunch of racks for the extra inverters to be installed in when they upgrade the stations.
The simple fact is that they've been selling these as 350kW stations... and they're not.
200A does not deliver 150kW to a 400V EV. And that's the problem. What they've only just started installing only a bit over 2/3rds the power of where the Supercharger network (vastly more extensive) stands today. But Tesla is switching to more powerful V3 superchargers starting early next year.
I had thought that Ionity was an attempt to catch or surpass the Supercharger network. This is not a promising start.
And no car could pull 350kW from the site he visited (I assume you're talking about the one he visited in Norway the other day). It's physically incapable of doing so.
I hardly see it as that ambitious of a statement. They'll be introducing the new generation in 2026. A platform can last decades.
That said, of the major automakers, VW is the most ambitious regarding EVs. It'll be interesting to see how they translate their talk into action over the coming years; I'm watching them closely.
I was disappointed to find out recently that the Ionity network which was supposed be the first real competition with the Supercharger network in Europe is... I hesitate to call it a "fraud", so let's just call it "poorly advertised". They're billing it as a network of 350kW chargers, but what they're actually installing at present in most locations is just your typical high-end V1 CCS chargers (maxing out at 200A - and some people are claiming that it only supports ~400V charging, although I don't know if anyone has actually tested ~800V charging on it). The 500A V2 CCS charging is supposed to be a "modification at a later date". Basically more of the "okay, not today, but we'll be competitive tomorrow" stuff we've been getting from major automakers for the past decade.
To major automakers and infrastructure developers: I'm a big Tesla fan, but I don't want you guys pulling this sort of stuff. I want you guys to be competitive. Put up a fight, for Thor's sake, don't just talk about doing it "in the future"!
A recent survey found that 45% of current non-Tesla EV owners want their next EV to be a Tesla (I expect these numbers to apply to the "buying their first EV" crowd as well). This was celebrated as great news for Tesla. But it also means that there's 55% of non-Tesla owners out there who want their EV to be a non-Tesla brand. We need you guys to serve them. We're not even close to this being a zero-sum game; right now, and for the forseeable future, the game is "cannibalize the ICE market".
Make it happen. VW (and Porsche), you're my best bet on serving the non-Tesla crowd. Let's see it. :)