Second-Largest US EV Fast-Charging Network Will Also Add Tesla Connectors - Slas...
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/07/02/0222215/second-largest-us-ev-fast-charging-network-will-also-add-tesla-connectors
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Second-Largest US EV Fast-Charging Network Will Also Add Tesla Connectors
Earlier this week the Society of Automotive Engineers, a U.S.-based standards organization, announced plans to support Tesla's EV "North American Charging Standard" (or NCAS). The Verge reported Tuesday that "With SAE supporting NACS, larger EV charging company holdouts like the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America may have an easier time making the jump."
And two days later, they did. The Associated Press reports:
The second-largest electric vehicle fast-charging network in the U.S. says it will add Tesla's connector to its charging stations, another step toward adopting Tesla's plug as the industry standard. Electrify America, with 800 direct-current fast-charging stations and more than 3,600 plugs nationwide, said Thursday it will work to add Tesla's connector to existing and future chargers by 2025. The Volkswagen subsidiary, formed as part of the settlement to the company's diesel emissions-cheating scandal, is second only to Tesla in number of fast-charging plugs in the U.S. "We look forward to continuing to support industrywide standards that increase vehicle interoperability and streamline public charging," Electrify America CEO Robert Barrosa said in a statement. The company also will keep the Combined Charging System, or CCS, connector at its stations. At present most electric vehicle models in the U.S. use the CCS connector. But Ford, General Motors, Rivian and Volvo have said they would join Tesla's large Supercharger network and adopt its North American Charging Standard connector in new versions of their electric vehicles. Others such as Stellantis and Hyundai are considering joining Tesla's network. Also, ChargePoint, which has the most charging stations of any U.S. network, said it will start offering Tesla connectors for use by charging site hosts later this year... Others, such as Blink Charging also have announced plans to add the Tesla connector.
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And never made much sense, anyway.
Not really, it interferes with current events. #electrical-joke
[Sorry, got a bit too amped up.]
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> (even Tesla has, in Europe at least)
The EU created a law forcing everyone to use CCS. This is the ONLY reason Tesla uses it, and consequently the only reason Tesla vehicles and chargers made after 2019 support CCS at all (including those sold in North America). Make no mistake about it, Tesla has not done this willingly.
> Tesla chargers operate at 480V and up to 250kW
On paper they're only rated for 200KW peak, 100KW continuous.
> By adopting the Tesla plug, the USA might end up locking itself into an obsolete standard.
The plug is just the plug, and to their credit there is a 1000V rated version of it. The contacts they currently use are only rated for 200A (400A peak) so, again on paper, that's 400KW peak. Tesla skirts this rating by overloading it and monitoring the temperature, throttling power to keep the connector from melting. It's unclear to me how underwriters and safety code enforcement feels about this now that third party manufacturers get involved.
People complain about the CCS connector and cable being bulky, but it's like that mostly because it's compliant with its ratings and not being deliberately overloaded. If third party manufacturers are made to comply with ratings, then either the 'elegance' of the Tesla cable goes away or charging power will be limited. We'll have to see how it goes.
=Smidge=-
To be fair, the elegance of the NACS connector is not due to them skimping on the lower amps rating, it's just a better design. The same terminals are used for both AC and DC, whereas CCS is basically just a Mennekes AC connector with a separate DC connector bolted on (when using a home AC charger, you'll plug a Mennekes connector into half the charge port). CCS does allow for 3 phase charging though.
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"To be fair, the elegance of the NACS connector is not due to them skimping on the lower amps rating, it's just a better design."
It's not, it's just a less capable and smaller design, and skimping on the contacts and cable sizes was not done for elegance, it was done for cost savings.
"The same terminals are used for both AC and DC, whereas CCS is basically just a Mennekes AC connector with a separate DC connector bolted on"
And this was not done because they wanted inelegance or were bad engineers, it was do
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To be fair, the Tesla connector was rolled out >2 years before the first CCS spec was ratified. It was CharIN that introduced the incompatible connector.
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And this was not done because they wanted inelegance or were bad engineers, it was done so that CCS targets can use J1772 chargers as well. This is the feature that Tesla does not have because Tesla didn't have a vested interest in having its customers to use 3rd party charging infrastructure. Tesla made an incompatible connector to exclude the capability of its customers to have options. You call that "elegant". Now we are supposed to institutionalize this bullshit by making an industry standard? Certainly
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That makes no sense. First, it makes no sense that Tesla would want their customers have fewer options. And Tesla made their connector at a time when the charging station infrastructure in the US was nearly non-existent, so for most of the US there didn't even exist that "capability" to be excluded.
In any case, Tesla provided an adaptor free with each car sold to use the other type of charger if you wanted. If their goal was to exclude the capability to use other chargers, that made no sense.
More like, they
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Why did CCS go with these frankenconnectors, anyway? Why didn't they just have a separate socket on the car for DC charging? It never uses the AC and DC pins at the same time anyway. Duplicating the auxiliary pins for communication in two connectors is surely more practical than requiring the bulk of the unused AC portion of the connector on DC chargers.
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"Make no mistake about it, Tesla has not done this willingly."
And yet the EU no longer has to deal with the shenanigans that the US has now. The US should have mandated CCS as well.
"People complain about the CCS connector and cable being bulky, but it's like that mostly because it's compliant with its ratings and not being deliberately overloaded. If third party manufacturers are made to comply with ratings, then either the 'elegance' of the Tesla cable goes away or charging power will be limited. We'll ha
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To be fair, CCS also allows for higher power than the cable can sustain if it is monitored for overheating.
A lot of the new 400kW chargers deployed in Europe work that way. Previously they were using water cooled cables, but those are more expensive and the vibration can damage paintwork. So for consumer vehicles that can't sustain 400kW anyway, they just allow them to deliver peak power until the temperature reaches some threshold and they back off.
It's going to be interesting to see if this has any implic
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The EU created a law forcing everyone to use CCS.
The EU made a law requiring all charging stations to provide CCS. Thereâ(TM)s nothing to prevent them providing other charging systems alongside that. It don't think there's even a law requiring cars to support CCS charging.
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>>> The contacts they currently use are only rated for 200A (400A peak)
So what purpose does the current rating on a connector serve? It's to keep it from getting so hot that things around it start catching on fire, or (pushed to the extreme) that it starts to melt. How can you use a connector for higher power? Keep it cool enough that none of the bad things happen, monitor it to make sure that you're coolant supply hasn't failed, and shut it down if anything looks out of the ordinary. Perfectly
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"Tesla chargers operate at 480V and up to 250kW, CCS can go up to 1000V and 400kW..." It would be nice if naysayers like you bothered to actually do some research for a change - like reading the specs of the NACS connector, which compare favorably to CCS without the bulk of CCS.
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That is they key - having specs that allow for greater charging capability, even if current charging stations do not make use of all the plug's capability. That accommodates the inevitable growth in battery capacity and charging requirements while maintaining backward compatibility. Unless a standard is adopted chraging risked being like wall outlets where prior to a standard design.
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"...which compare favorably to CCS without the bulk of CCS."
Not interoperating with industry standards is not "comparing favorably".
Also, existing CCS1 chargers actually support 800V charging and cars on the road use it. How does Tesla compare to that? Will NACS ever support these modes, or will Tesla exploit the opportunity to degrade charging rates of its competitors? We know what Elon Musk will do.
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NACS supports 1000V. Whether Tesla offers degraded charging to non-Tesla cars in the US at SuperChargers is unknown, but you wouldnâ(TM)t be limited to using the SuperChargers.
The question is who will have the most >400V chargers deployed by 2025 - Tesla or Electrify America? EA has the lead as theyâ(TM)ve started already (though have not deployed many) and Tesla has only a small number of v4 charger pilots.
Historically, Tesla has rolled out more chargers per year than the rest of the industry
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A reminder, the great majority of electric vehicles on the road are Teslas. In practical terms, the Tesla charger is the industry standard, because in practical terms Tesla is the industry. CCS is there for the 10% of electric vehicles that aren't Teslas.
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That's not how standards work though. Beta had bigger marketshare before VHS was released. WiMAX had more towers operating before LTE was established. Pretty sure HDDVD had more player son the market for a time before BluRay.
Especially in this case a standard has to be a free and clear, royalty free, patent free, ideally under control of a neutral authority or working group like SAE or USB-IF. Apple has the highest marketshare for phones but Lightning will never be a "standard" connector because Apple r
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> It would be nice if naysayers like you bothered to actually do some research for a change - like reading the specs of the NACS connector
Those numbers are directly from Tesla's published documentation [thron.com]. (PDF)
Tesla stans like you probably only ever skimmed over the physical connector document [thron.com] (PDF). (More likely: You watched a youtube video of some dipshits gushing about Tesla and just ate up anything they said...) That document does not contain any specification for current, because - you might want to
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The latest revision (published in 2022) of the CCS plug and inlet standards support up to 1,500 volts and 800 amps for DC charging [wikipedia.org]. Some charging networks are already using 400 kW CCS chargers [wikipedia.org].
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I worry that this is going to hold the US back. Super high power chargers are important for large commercial vehicles, for example. Tesla appears to be stuck at just 250kW peak and about 100kW sustained, with years of promises to upgrade having not turned into anything actually deployed.
It seems like it would have been better for everyone to just say all vehicles need to have CCS2 from now on. Chargers can be dual-head, like we already have in Europe for combined CCS/CHAdeMO or CCS/Tesla. We even have tripl
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Large commercial vehicles use a different standard than cars: MCS.
Tesla has more >150kW chargers deployed than the rest of the industry right now. There are higher power CCS chargers out there, but relatively few. Tesla v4 chargers are 500V or 1000V with 615A. Max is 307kw for 500V and 615kw for 1000V. There are a few pilot sites, but these will be the replacement for the v3. Also, Tesla will not be the only supplies of NACS charging â" you still have EA.
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Not in Europe. There is something very wrong with the roll out of chargers in the US.
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It's not like we haven't seen charger shenanigans before with Apple and Samsung. It's a tried and true moneymaker.
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This isn't "insightful", it is incorrect. The electrical capabilities of NACS and CCS (J1772-2009 Combo) are not significantly different. The real difference is the EU legally mandated the use of CCS2, with Japan (CHAdeMO) and China not committing and the US encouraging CCS, but letting the market sort it out. Suck it up and buy an adapter if it bothers you that much.
Tesla's NACS spec is here [thron.com] in PDF form.
Page 26 gives us these two specifications:
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I was kinda thinking that this was getting settled, great. I'm all for it coalescing. Then to hear that were getting VHS? I want my money back.
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Europe uses CCS2. The US CCS1. Different connectors and protocols.
CCS1 is a committee brain damaged design.
CCS2 is somewhat better but still much bulkier and more complicated than NACS.
Good to see NACS being widely adopted in the US. -
And V4 superchargers are expected to support up to 1000V at 1000A - a good, solid MegaWatt. And with all the pedestals and high-voltage AC electric connections already in place, upgrading a V3 supercharger installation of say 8 chargers is probably an afternoon's worth of work.
What's that again about an obsolete standard?
And, by the way, there is no charging standard "CCS" - there's CCS1 in North America, and CCS2 in Europe, and the two are incompatible. So it's a bit disingenuous to decry North America u
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