I'm home again trip completed. 4kW charge rate is not that great really, it needs to be more. 1kW charge rate is just super dumb; don't do like I do!
Congrats on your first electric road trip Shadow!
Hey you have to learn somehow, lol!
For a short day trip of ~250 miles, a single J plug and 6-8 kW charger is good
For a small road trip of ~400 miles/day I would say 2 J plugs and 14 kW should be considered a minimum.
For longer trips or touring (we aren't there yet) where some days might be 400, some might be 800 miles or more, I would eventually recommend a modular system where you can add additional chargers for the trip. There are routes from Vancouver Canada to San Diego along the west coast, and Montreal to Miami along the east coast where there are 6 J plugs available over 50% of the time and 4 J plugs in all but a few locations for the rest.
Since the number of charge stations going in is increasing every day, this will only become better as time goes on. A good touring rate to me would be 36 kW or using 6 J plugs at 6 kW. This would be if an 18 kW battery can be charged at a 2C charge rate. We might be years away from this still, but it's something to shoot for as someone who has gone 1000 miles in a single day on my 2012 Vetter Zero, I can tell you that with 36 kW you can "blast and go" which is appealing.
Blast and go means you can stop, plug in the 6 plugs real quick, take off your helmet, gloves, and jacket and lock them in your top case (you always plug in first and unplug last) and walk to the bathroom, grab a drink, walk back, gear up and unplug. So your charge time to regain 40-50% of your battery might be 12-15 minutes. This is highly desired for stops between meals. Meal stops will be 30-60 minutes and using only 2 or 3 J plugs is fine for those 2 stops each day.
The key is to have enough battery capacity and the aerodynamics that the battery can cool while riding from its very low C rate of discharge. Then you blast the battery hard at 2C where it would take about 15 minutes to go from 35 Celsius to 50 Celsius and where the chargers would be sized to go from 25 Celsius to 70 Celsius in that same 15 minute time frame. You could oversize and over design the charger to run at 7 kW continuous or 10 hours, but that is really silly. If the accessory charger needs to run longer than 15 minutes, just have a thermal strategy that reduces power output over 70 degrees C. It would be better to make the charger half the size and carry twice as many.
Anyway the idea that the battery can cool 10 degrees C and the charger can cool 50 degrees C while riding for an hour or so, and then heat up within the limits to allow max charging for 12-15 minutes without either hitting its thermal cutback limits. If you have to charge for longer that's ok. But either the battery will tell the chargers to cut back power at 120F/50C or the chargers will reduce power at 70C first, or ideally both at almost exactly the same time. Then you know you got it right.
But for this the aerodynamics have to improve, so at 70 mph the battery can actually cool faster. Right now pulling 15 kW out of a 10 kWh pack is a 1.5C discharge and the battery can't cool and actually heats up slightly. We need aerodynamics to allow 6 kW at 70 mph with an 18 kWh pack for a 0.3 C discharge which will allow cooling while riding, and if the internal resistance of the cells can continue to go down, the cooling only improves, as well as less heating from the lower impedance while charging rapidly.
With this strategy I see 1500 mile/2400 km days being possible in 24 hours, or more practical would be 500 mile trips in the same time you would likely do it on a gas bike because you are never waiting to charge. A good metric will be the 400 mile San Francisco to Los Angeles trip in about 6 hours which is what it takes gas bikes that ride at about 80 mph and have about 2 or 3 12-15 minute stops and 1 30 minute stop for lunch. There is no need to be able to charge any faster than this as this is the behavior from most riders where they aren't limited by anything. So it is a good metric to shoot for to be considered an equal choice for a road trip. The charging locations will improve on their own to eventually be everywhere you would want to stop along a highway to eat, pee, take a break.
Lets just say all this is many many years away, but I like where it's going as it all makes sense and works very well together. Long distance touring on an electric will make much more sense than long distance touring on a gas bike eventually. Because the cost of fuel per mile will be a lot less, and the maintenance needs will not interfere with the trip saving time and money while touring. And with battery costs slowly but surely coming down each year, the premium to own an electric motorcycle will narrow and make more financial sense overall for everyone.
For now though, a good goal to shoot for would be a dual J plug setup like Brian Rice, Ben Rich, myself, Luke Workman and others are seeing is the logical way to go to make the Zero useful to pretty much go anywhere you want within about 500 miles a day. For it being 2016 and Zero not even existing more than 10 years ago this is pretty darn good! Just imagine where we will be by 2026! My guess is something fairly close to what I described above except you would pull from one power source instead of 6.
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Topic: California USA lend me your quick charger? Reno to SF Bay 9th-Oct-2016 (Read 2294 times)