Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NEW2elec]

BMW and Porsche and their 450kW chargers are ready when you are.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bmw-porsche-just-beat-tesla-105813422.html

[Ashveratu]

News articles with headlines like that show just how ignorant some journalists are. All non-Tesla EVs are promoters of Tesla and competitors to ICE vehicles. The only thing BMW and Porsche are beating is the need for fossil fuels and proving that Tesla has been correct all along.

[NEW2elec]

Tesla makes some good cars and they have made the EV cool and usable for most needs but it looks like most every car company is coming out with one or more EVs by 2020.
At that point the real race starts and we'll see who pulls ahead. 
Tesla may crush them all I don't know, but super fast charging <15 mins will be needed to kill gas.

[Richard230]

For me it will be interesting to see if all of the auto companies can sell enough EVs to make various "first-World" countries happy, while also making a profit for their stockholders and investors.  All government bureaucrats want to see lots of EV sales to address global warming and other issues, but I am not at all sure that the majority of the car buying public is willing to embrace this new technology any time soon, especially when it comes at a premium price and gas prices are so low. Large pickups, like the Ford F-150, are currently the most popular vehicles in the U.S. To me, it would seem that large pickup trucks are not the best vehicles for using electric power, considering the space needed to accommodate their cargo bed and limited carrying capacity.    

While electric vehicles might be popular in European cities, I am not so sure about the wide open spaces of the U.S.  Around the SF Bay Area, you see Teslas and Leafs all of the time, driving back and forth between SF and San Jose.  But get out in the boondocks, not so much. 

[Doug S]

Tesla has been doing this for a while, and though I agree the other mfrs have some great engineering teams, batteries != engines. The devil is in the details, and Tesla has had many years and several models to sort through a lot of the bugs in the whole EV system. It WILL take the others some time to catch up, though not as long as it's taken Tesla to get to where they are.

But the other advantage the years have given Tesla is time to create, from scratch, a Supercharger network. That's going to take a while, and a fair amount of investment, to duplicate. If you can't charge your car wherever you want to go, it's just a commuter wagon.

[NEW2elec]

Tesla's network of chargers and super chargers is impressive, for now.
I still feel they fall short of what will be the endgame speed of charging needed to kill gas.
The UK has mandated all gas stations must have charging stations in the next few years which is a perfect transition idea in my opinion.  They have been spaced out over decades based on volume and distance needed by populations in those areas.
Leave level II charging at home and Ultra Charge on the road.

[Doug S]

I still feel they fall short of what will be the endgame speed of charging needed to kill gas.

Oh, I agree, no question about it. But Tesla does have a good jump on everybody else.

The UK has mandated all gas stations must have charging stations in the next few years which is a perfect transition idea in my opinion.

But whose standard? What protocol? I was ticked off recently when I tried to buy a car charger for my Samsung S9+ phone that would keep up with the discharge caused by my dash cam, Google maps and Torque app while I drive. There are so many standards out there, and it's hard to figure out who uses which -- to this day, I don't know what's the name of the  "standard" my phone uses. On the third try, I finally did find a charger that's actually capable of fast charging my phone.

Of course that happens all the time in industry, when companies try to distinguish their product from other companies'. Remember the VHS/Beta fight? Blu-Ray versus HD DVD? Situations like that cause everybody to lose. By contrast, WiFi has never had that problem. All manufacturers adhere to the same standard, and newer equipment is always backwards compatible with older equipment.

Whenever you have two (or more) protocols in the same market space, it's really NONstandardization.

[NEW2elec]

I had to go digging to find this but it stuck in my memory for some reason.  It's not cost efficient but it's a start.
And I agree there will have to be a true standard but there isn't a type that is good enough yet to be an end standard like a common gas pump.

[Moto7575]

450.000 watts at 100 volts = 4500 amperes
This is huge. You need a cable with 17 cm radius (unless you have special materials / cooling) using the 1000 km/sqinch rule...

[Richard230]

450.000 watts at 100 volts = 4500 amperes
This is huge. You need a cable with 17 cm radius (unless you have special materials / cooling) using the 1000 km/sqinch rule...

17 cm?  That is not going to be very easy for the customer to drag to their vehicle and push into the power receptacle. 

[Richard230]

I just watched that Fully Charged video and I really like what Shell was trying to do in the UK.  However, (someone correct me if I am wrong), in California it appears that our petrol suppliers, such as Shell, Chevron and Union Oil, don't seem to have the same vision as they do in the UK. My limited experience is that local managers of fuel stations around here (most of which are franchised businesses) don't want to have anything to do with electric vehicles.  I can only assume that they see electric vehicles as taking away their business and would prefer to see them just go away, much less installing recharging stations that would attract them.

To my way of thinking, it would make a lot of sense for an established petrol station to install charging stations that would operate just like a gas pump by inserting your credit card, plugging in your charge cord and then be charged only for the amount of energy that you consume, just like if you were at a gasoline pump. That seems like a simple plan and one that the typical car driver is currently familiar with and could easily understand.

Why does this seem so difficult to accomplish?  Why do you have to pay a fee to subscribe to a particular charging network, then try to find one along your travel route that was operated by that network and then pay via a smart phone app that might charge you for the amount of electricity you consume, or maybe just the amount of time that you are connected to the station? The whole system seems goofy to me, when the infrastructure already exists for refueling ICE vehicles, which could also accommodate EVs. 

[NEW2elec]

Moto the Porsche Taycan is a 800 Volt operating system. 
Shocking right?
So around 560 Amps.  Still a thicker cord and I do think there was active cooling talked about as well but not 17cm  cord.
This is the key to the OP story that they beat Tesla to the charging time goal.

Richard, that's what Doug and I were talking about the UK mandate so Shell UK has to do it, no choice.
i agree the simple card to pay will be the future.  The stand alone charging at level II is a doomed business model even if they had all chargers going 24/7.  The small about of range that cars get from them isn't worth what they need to charge to be profitable IMO.

If gas stations were smart they would embrace it as a more profitable model in the future.  Just think about all the overhead cost of shipping all the gas from oil well to refinery to stations.  Now all of that cost is gone.

The electricity would be 2X or 3X what you pay at home but just like the soda and bottled water and candy they sell is 3X what it would be at a grocery store.
I think it's the natural solution and just a matter of cutting a deal with one of the big chains once true <15 min charging is reliable.

[Richard230]

Moto the Porsche Taycan is a 800 Volt operating system. 
Shocking right?
So around 560 Amps.  Still a thicker cord and I do think there was active cooling talked about as well but not 17cm  cord.
This is the key to the OP story that they beat Tesla to the charging time goal.

Richard, that's what Doug and I were talking about the UK mandate so Shell UK has to do it, no choice.
i agree the simple card to pay will be the future.  The stand alone charging at level II is a doomed business model even if they had all chargers going 24/7.  The small about of range that cars get from them isn't worth what they need to charge to be profitable IMO.

If gas stations were smart they would embrace it as a more profitable model in the future.  Just think about all the overhead cost of shipping all the gas from oil well to refinery to stations.  Now all of that cost is gone.

The electricity would be 2X or 3X what you pay at home but just like the soda and bottled water and candy they sell is 3X what it would be at a grocery store.
I think it's the natural solution and just a matter of cutting a deal with one of the big chains once true <15 min charging is reliable.

I keep getting the impression that oil companies, refineries, fuel trucking companies, and petrol station owners all feel that if they can ignore electric-powered vehicles they will eventually go away.  Not going to happen, but it is tough to get your head out of the sand at times. 

Meanwhile, an article in my newspaper today says that California has adopted a regulation that would require all new public buses to be zero-emission designs, such as electric or hydrogen powered within 10 years. All existing ICE buses are expected to be phased out by 2040. The article mentioned that public bus companies would need to order 12,000 electric buses, with funding help from government grants and the VW emission-cheating software fine. Right now there are 153 zero-emission buses on the road in California, with hundreds more on order.

[DonTom]

Tesla makes some good cars and they have made the EV cool and usable for most needs but it looks like most every car company is coming out with one or more EVs by 2020.
At that point the real race starts and we'll see who pulls ahead. 
Tesla may crush them all I don't know, but super fast charging <15 mins will be needed to kill gas.

Even as it is, I see time advantages to my Tesla because it never needs to stop at a gas station ever-and the only times I have ever charged on the road is when I had other things to do for the time being charged.

I normally only charge at home. How many people have a gas station at their house?  Even as it is, EVs can save time compared to ICE vehicles.

-Don-  Tucson, AZ

[Erasmo]

450.000 watts at 100 volts = 4500 amperes
This is huge. You need a cable with 17 cm radius (unless you have special materials / cooling) using the 1000 km/sqinch rule...

That's why EV's apart from exceptions don't operate at 100V.

I still feel they fall short of what will be the endgame speed of charging needed to kill gas.

Oh, I agree, no question about it. But Tesla does have a good jump on everybody else.

The UK has mandated all gas stations must have charging stations in the next few years which is a perfect transition idea in my opinion.

But whose standard? What protocol? I was ticked off recently when I tried to buy a car charger for my Samsung S9+ phone that would keep up with the discharge caused by my dash cam, Google maps and Torque app while I drive. There are so many standards out there, and it's hard to figure out who uses which -- to this day, I don't know what's the name of the  "standard" my phone uses. On the third try, I finally did find a charger that's actually capable of fast charging my phone.

Of course that happens all the time in industry, when companies try to distinguish their product from other companies'. Remember the VHS/Beta fight? Blu-Ray versus HD DVD? Situations like that cause everybody to lose. By contrast, WiFi has never had that problem. All manufacturers adhere to the same standard, and newer equipment is always backwards compatible with older equipment.

Whenever you have two (or more) protocols in the same market space, it's really NONstandardization.

Chademo and CCS, you don't need anything else on those fast chargers although they often include a Mennekes because why not. The AC-DC or DC-DC conversion is made by the same converter and the only major difference is the plug that you put in your car.