Make Level 3 charging standard on i-MiEVs

[Don]

All good points, though I still believe only a small portion of the EV community is really interested - Early adopters better be able to use the car 'as is' because the wait for this technology could be several years in most places, and it may never catch on in smaller towns

I suspect what's really holding things up is that the world hasn't yet settled on a standard - Once that happens, probably more people will be interested in investing in charging stations. If you had several thousand to invest in installing one of these in your town right now, what would you do? There may never be enough CHAdeMO customers for you to break even, let alone make a profit - You need to have confidence in the long term future of what you're buying, and that means nearly every EV on the road needs to be able to connect to one plug using a common charge controller

The all in one concept, which is backward compatible sure makes sense. Hopefully it will catch on soon

Don

 

[Vike]

I suspect what's really holding things up is that the world hasn't yet settled on a standard - Once that happens, probably more people will be interested in investing in charging stations. If you had several thousand to invest in installing one of these in your town right now, what would you do?
...
The all in one concept, which is backward compatible sure makes sense. Hopefully it will catch on soon

The world isn't settling on a standard, any more than it has for residential electrical outlets. The U.S. will use Yazaki/J-1772 flavored CCS, while Europe will use Mennekes/VDE flavored CCS (seriously, check the details - this is what "Type 1" vs. "Type 2" means). Nobody knows what Asia's going to do, though if you believe what the players in China and Japan are saying, they have no interest in CCS.

But isn't that all beside the point? For the foreseeable future the U.S. will continue to do whatever the hell it wants, and that means that J-1772-CCS has done more than "catch on" - it's the U.S. standard, end of story. As is so often the case in such matters, there are entirely sound, practical reasons for preferring the "single port" design, but it has the added bonus of messing with Japanese momentum. If we can still buy EVs five years from now, they'll have J-1772 ports with or without CCS, and I strongly doubt anyone will be selling cars with CHAdeMO. Once CCS L3 chargers are available, there will be approximately zero market (except perhaps at your local Nissan dealer) for L3 chargers without CCS, so however many L3 chargers we have in the U.S. five years hence, they will support CCS, no question. But here's the thing - there'll be a small enough total user base that the overwhelming majority of those chargers (except perhaps those at your Ford or Chevy dealer) will also support CHAdeMO to maximize their opportunity. If you're spending tens of thousands for real estate and power service and a charging station, what's several hundred more to hang another cable off the side if it means access to incremental business to help pay the freight? GM might love to skew the market to tip EV buyers into Chevy showrooms, but it's the interests of the folks writing the checks for those chargers that will prevail.

And if I were installing a L3 charger right now? You ask that as if it needed ponderin', but you absolutely know better, right? There's nothing but CHAdeMO, end of story (again). And if you're buying today, you make absolutely sure that the unit can cost-effectively add J-1172-CCS as it becomes available. That commitment's already being made by manufacturers with new models.

Which brings me back to my original argument - CCS might be bad for CHAdeMO in the long run (and so what?), but the deployment of CHAdeMO is an unalloyed good for CCS, since every CHAdeMO station will be a CCS station when all the dust settles. And unless/until sales of CCS-ready EVs reach such heights that the number of CHAdeMO-ready EVs is reduced to a rounding error, I expect CHAdeMO support will be included in nearly every L3 station as well.

 

[MLucas]

I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Why isn't inductance being looked into? A company already makes inductance kits for Leafs and Volts, hopefully they'll make an i MiEV version. I get tired of having to plug in the car in, especially at work when I'm running late - there is no cache' in this for me. Maybe I'm lazy, but I'm also looking at efficiency. A possible by-product of inductance is being able to recharge at speed in special lanes on the highway.

 

[garygid]

Inductance charging, of the drive-over type, are substantially less
efficient, and generally require accurate parking to get the best
coupling.

No, one is unlikely to see lanes of inductive charging buried in the
freeway, because of the huge expense. At $1000 per foot, or 5
million per mile, to provide one minute of charging... not likely
to happen.

Good, reliable, well-located Quick Charge stations would be a
huge step forward. If you have not tried QC, you have missed
an addictive experience.

How reliable will the new "standard" charging control mechanism
be in the field? We know that Chademo works in the field.

 

[Don]

Good, reliable, well-located Quick Charge stations would be a
huge step forward. If you have not tried QC, you have missed
an addictive experience

I think if I owned a Leaf, the last thing I'd be interested in doing is Quick Charging it - Not with the reported battery problems that some cars less than 2 years old already seem to be experiencing.

I suppose I'm a bit biased on this subject though - I bought my car specifically because it 'works' for 95% of our driving needs recharging it only in our garage, every 2nd or 3rd day. I've put more than 4500 miles on it since May and it's never received a single Kw of juice anywhere else. I haven't put 300 miles on the 2 ICE's that it shares the garage with since I bought it. If my battery lasts the 8 years, 100K it's supposed to, I'll be one happy camper and if that means never Quick Charging it, that's fine with me

If I regularly needed to go farther than a pure EV could go, I would have bought a Volt . . . . seriously. My car goes quite a bit farther than a Volt in the EV mode, so for what we need, it was the better choice

I understand that one day most EV's will probably have a 250+ mile range and all sorts of ways to extend that so they'll be able to serve as an only car for many more people . . . . I just don't think that day is here yet, though it will be interesting to see what the Tesla Model S can do in actual real world usage - That car may be the beginning of a new era, IMO . . . . assuming they can deliver them and not go bankrupt . . . . and if their battery can last 100K

Even more interesting will be seeing how long the battery packs already running the roads will actually last - For what they cost, if they can't do something near 100K, then driving these cars won't turn out to be nearly the deal we all hoped they'd be when we bought them. Until we see some proof that they can actually do 100K, I'd not get too excited about the ability to Quick Charge any of them. Time will tell

Don

 

[Vike]

No, one is unlikely to see lanes of inductive charging buried in the
freeway, because of the huge expense. At $1000 per foot, or 5
million per mile, to provide one minute of charging... not likely
to happen.
. . .
How reliable will the new "standard" charging control mechanism
be in the field? We know that Chademo works in the field.

Excellent points, both - I was scratching my head over the "let's wire the interstates" fantasy myself. Self-guided flying cars are more likely (which should give you some idea....).

The question about feasibility/reliability of the toner-still-hot-on-the-spec-sheet CCS was very much the point of my "Theory is great, but engineering is about delivering solutions to a messy, complicated, and sometimes unpredictable world" comments earlier. On that front, I just noticed this important bit of red flagging over at ChargedEVs magazine (http://www.chargedevs.com/content/news-wire/post/sae-releases-new-combo-charger-standard-plug-vehicles):

GM announced a few months ago that its Chevrolet Spark EV, which will go on sale in 2014, will be the first vehicle to implement the new SAE standard.
[all emphasis mine]

Given how wildly optimistic all the big EV promises/projections have been to date, I'm taking this to mean J-1772-CCS ain't happening for at least two years, and a meaningful body of real world, ordinary user experience some time beyond that. When I compare that to CHAdeMO's track record and extraordinary safety measures, add in the hard truth that CHAdeMO was designed and deployed by power grid experts while CCS comes from automotive engineers, and then consider the higher maximum current levels specified for CCS, I think CHAdeMO's going to remain an important part of the U.S. EV scene for at least a few more years.

Barring some catastrophic bad luck or unexpected design flaw, I expect CCS to be widely supported and eventually become the charging standard in the U.S. and most likely in Europe (albeit with a different connector ). But for those of us buying EVs today, CHAdeMO is the only available L3 charging solution for those that value the flexibility and increased margin for error that a 20-minute charging option provides.