Alan unfortunately it won't be 15 minutes. Trouble is the stations are limited to 125 amps output at the desired voltage. At 400 volts that would be 50 kW or enough to do a 13 kWh battery in 15 minutes, but at 100 volts, it will take an hour. And if you have a power tank, even longer. If the cell manufacturer will approve 2C charging, or even 3C charging from 0-50% SOC and then 2C charging to 80% and 1C to full (they already should do this as the cells are plenty capable, they just give it a stamp of 1C all the way to 100% now which is silly, they should trust that their customers can taper the amperage according to their formula and keep the cell temperature below 45C or so while charging) we could charge faster if and when CHAdeMO goes to 200 amps. It's coming eventually, but all the stations already deployed and deployed in the next two years will be stuck at 125 amps.
What we really need is to series at least half the cells for DC charging purposes. So we could charge at 200 volts instead of 100. That would be 25 kW charging where right now we are stuck at 12.5 kW. From a guy who likes to charge at 24 kW or higher from 4 J1772 plugs at the same time, 12.5 kW is like.."meh, if I have to I guess"
Charging is the biggest area to gain with mass adoption of electric vehicles. All the car manufacturers are working on 30 minute charge times. Let's hope Zero has a plan somewhere down the line to fully charge in 30 minutes or perhaps even less in the future as well.
Once the charging technology is there, it would be rather simple to tell Farasis they want to switch from the most energy dense cell possible, to sacrifice 5-10% of range, and switch to an extremely power dense cell chemistry that can charge at 5C standard. The Enerdell cells going in the new Corbin sparrow II have a 5C standard charge rate. (12 minutes for a full charge!)
This would be much better for us! I'd much rather have 180 miles city range instead of 200 if it meant that I could refill that 180 miles range in 12 minutes vs 1 hour. Or more likely would be I'd rather have 90 miles highway range versus 100 miles highway if I could stop for 12 minutes every 90 miles to pee and grab a drink of water and to keep going. I hope this makes logical sense to anyone reading this.
Let's just hope the smartest guys making the future decisions at Zero (sometimes I feel like that is the invus investors versus people that actually ride the motorcycles very far distances and can see the real issues) can imagine riding as many miles as I have and seeing the future like I do. I can't promise, but I'm pretty sure I see the correct future on this one and where we are eventually headed.
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Topic: CHAdeMO for Zero (Read 4237 times)