Sure, but most people speculate that it won't be part of the base price of the car so it's much easier to add a few dollars to the cost of the DC charging option to take care if a larger gauge cable.
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Chevy Bolt - 200 mile range for $30k base price (after incentive)
- Thread starter FredTMC
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Ah, either install higher power DC, or install AC. It makes even less sense to install expensive but slow DC charging in that use case. L2 DC should never had existed. In the interim, vehicles like the Leaf, i-MiEV should have had J1772 @ 80A. That way the infrastructure build would be identical to the eventual destination charging network that would be needed in the 2020's. Instead, we got a lot of J1772 @ 24A in the wrong places. And a lot of 24 kW CHAdeMO at really high prices. And more poorly thought out 45 kW CHAdeMO. We are still stumbling through, when it was obvious what the charging infrastructure had to be for a BEV future, way back in 2009.
Actually, the levels were pretty much sorted in 2009. The actual standard didn't happen until 2012, after Tesla shipped. And the standard that was finalized was a SAE Level 2 standard, woefully inadequate for Tesla's purpose or for any long distance BEV. But they knew this when they deliberately did not finalize a SAE Level 3 standard at that time.
Again, in 2009, or 2011, or 2012, it was possible to model the electricity consumption on light passenger vehicles and realize that SAE Level 3 is required for BEVs.
In 2008 or even 2012 it wasn't clear yet that battery prices would drop as fast as they have. Commonly affordable BEVs with 70-100 mile ranges cannot take advantage of Level 3 rates even if the charging stations were nominally capable of it. Nobody would have installed 90 kW stations if all of the non-Tesla cars were only capable of drawing 40-50 kW so we would have ended up in much the same situation as we are in today even if the Level 2 spec never existed and the original spec provided for 350A. Charger makers still would have made cheaper units limited to 50 kW and site hosts still would bought them and hooked them up.
You are wringing your hands about how terrible it all is but I see metro DC charging stations as useful and adequate for what they are. It is mostly along highways for long distance travel that 40-50 kW becomes an especially noticeable limitation and 70-100 mile cars aren't going to do much of that anyway which is why there aren't many on highway routes.
The stations we have installed now are a fraction of what we will have 10 years from now or even 5 years from now. The important thing is not the existing infrastructure for yesterday's cars but the new infrastructure for the new and more affordable 200-mile generation cars. It's important that the non-Tesla charging providers recognize the need for faster highway-oriented stations capable of 90+ kW.
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ProphetM
Member
I submit that if the I-MiEV and the Leaf had 40A J1772 standard, and 80A as an option, and no CHAdeMO, our destination charging infrastructure build in the US would have been far better.
We likely would not have wasted $100 million on 20-24A J1772. Those that charge during the day to boost range, would still charge during the day. An hour of charging at 24kW is not that much different than charging for 1.25 hours or so in a destination charging scenario. Both an hour and 1.25 hours would be terrible for long distance driving, as the cadence would be 1 hour of driving, one+ hours of charging. In no case were these low range BEVs really long distance vehicles anyways and therefore it is foolhardy to try to build expensive infrastructure to try to force them into use cases that don't really work. The best place to invest into infrastructure for supporting these vehicles is 40A or higher destination charging at the workplace and home. It's better in the long run since it matches the long term charging goals, it is more convenient for the drivers, and it is better for the grid and the batteries. Low speed DC charging should not have entered the picture until SAE Level 3.
It was easy to see this in 2009. It was easy to see this in 2011/2012. Therefore, SAE establishing a Level 2 DC standard in 2012 was really a slap in the face and a recipe for wasting a lot of money.
And now, the Bolt still falls short. We have yet to see just how short. Hopefully the first customer Bolts would be at least upgradable to the upcoming CCS revision. It is particularly frustrating because of how close it is, but clearly the incentive programs were insufficient to force GM into making a proper solution.
How bad are the Bolt sales? What is the real CCS 100 mile charging time? At 75mph with the AC on and 3 people in the car, how is the actual range? What is the best price you've found for Bolts? Did the salesperson know their product when they did the delivery?
And most importantly, where are they going to abandon the 100,000 (mostly in CA) short range EV's on the road in the USA? If 200 miles is a crippled car, then the 80 mile cars will have to be discarded immediately and Project LA-NY MegaBattery should be accelerated. Without a 2500 mile battery, I just can't see how a car will sell next year.
You're being disingenuous. techmaven's point was about what is known about the bolt, which is that it doesn't come with L3 DC charging standard, and even unlikely to have L3 DC charging at all, most likely only L2 (50kw CCS).
How do you know what the charging technology of the 2018 Bolt is (the Model 3 competitor) before the 2017 is released?
Heck, how do you know the 2017 charge rate is in real life in the retail product?
Chevrolet tends to over-deliver. BMW/Toyota/MB folk will never understand that, but that doesn't change things.
Nice deflection with a straw-man. No one mentioned anything about a 2018 bolt, so it was implied to be about the 2017.
Knowing what we know about the 2017 bolt, and that GM isn't Tesla (they don't do iterative development - just look at the volt to see what changes can be expected between years and versions). The 2018 bolt won't be much different from the 2017, as supporting a higher powered DC charging standard isn't exactly plug and play - at minimum all your conductors (copper or aluminum) needs to support the higher current. Someone else had already mentioned the penny-pinching that GM does so don't expect them to pre-wire their BMS to support 90kw charging.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
To be fair to GM, I put a caveat of if "old GM" bean counters are still around. Under "old GM" operating standards, it is expected to go cheap. With "new GM" that might not be the case anymore. I don't follow GM enough to know how their corporate culture has changed, so the caveat is there.
Actually, I think the Bolt will sell well. That's the problem. Just like the Nissan Leaf dominated sales and led us down a path of wasting lots of money on incorrect infrastructure, I hope the Bolt's sales success does not continue to lead us down the wrong path of CCS v1 deployments. Or CCS v2 incorrectly deployed to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
BTW, I'm not talking about abandoning the short range BEVs. They have their use case, which is up to 40-50 miles of driving a day by charging at home or at work. Or more with destination charging. I'm talking about stretching their use cases by installing expensive infrastructure that few will have the patience to leverage in that way. And that infrastructure will be haphazard and poorly thought out for the congestion issues, primarily because the cost of each plug is so high for DC slow charging. And since it costs so much per plug, the cost for charging is actually higher than using gasoline in many places. That's just not a sane way of building infrastructure.
And then things start to change... clearly, the next generation of short range BEVs will have ~110 miles of EPA range, or about 75 miles of reliable range for daily driving. The Bolt and the Model 3 have different charging and use patterns. In the next 5 years, the infrastructure we are building today needs to built in advance of the needs in the short and medium term tomorrow. And with DC slow charging, that's a lot of money spent the wrong way. The Bolt, by all indications so far, makes this worse.
Similarly, the Bolt's 32A J1772 is going to cause people to install 32A J1772 EVSE's. Much like the Volt and the Leaf caused people to install 16A through 24A J1772. Which is not enough for the long term. At high enough volume, the pricing difference between 32A and 40A isn't all that much. But the 40A solution can charge long distance BEV's overnight. Or provide a lot more range for the limited hours of super-off-peak ToU rates. But EVSE manufacturers will over 32A and that will be the short sighted installation of choice. This stuff should be installed for long term... like 15-20 year service life. You can see this in the distortion of the pricing of J1772's... 40A and above EVSE's are not competitively priced since there's little demand. Only really Tesla's charge that fast in the U.S. The ClipperCreek 48A unit is actually pretty well priced, except in comparison to the Tesla HPWC.
The fundamental problem is that poor design choices in popular products have far reaching consequences. Since the Bolt is designed to primarily fulfill government incentives, the incentive structure was not set up correctly to force GM to make the right design choices to then drive the right infrastructure and product ecosystem build outs.
CuriousG
Active Member
Define sell well? I don't think Chevy has announced any presale numbers or refuse to do so. The only thing they have going for them is the jump on Tesla for a sub $40k car. I think they'll do well the first quarter, then sales will plummet after that and negligible when Model 3 comes out.
If I needed a 32a L2 charger at home to get to work each day? I'd quit my job.
I used to drive 150 miles a day roundtrip for 6 years. Most days had me behind the wheel for 5 hours or more. The amazing part was I remained that shortsighted for 6 years. Yeah, the pay was big, but what good is money if you have no life?
If I needed DCFC to commute? No way. I don't care if it's 2 minutes at 800 amps x 492v 3ph ac. No ICE car needs that hassle.
My threshold for pain is perhaps 16 amps. That supports 3 hours of time wasted behind the wheel each day.
The beauty in my eyes about electromotive powertrains is NEVER waiting at a gas station or charging station. It's one of the coolest luxury features of EVs.
I think the Bolt's range will get the job done for nearly all motorists WITHOUT remote charging. If I had to remote charge constantly? Thanks, but no thanks, I'll kill dinosaurs in comfort at 85mph in all weather, anywhere, anytime, any load, any distance.
I think they will do much better than that. First, GM doesn't do pre-sales, just some dealers are taking deposits against their allocation. There are quite a few people that won't buy Tesla, are loyal to GM, want a hatchback, want a BEV before they can get their hands on a Model 3, and so forth. Selling their estimated initial annual production of 25 to 30,000 should be achievable.
3Victoria
Active Member
Do we know what the distribution of the Bolt will be? I am disappointed that most xEVs have distribution limited, mostly to California.
They haven't announced any pre sale numbers because there aren't any yet so the number is currently zero. You can't "officially" order a Bolt until the build sheets come out. The build sheets will be out soon, though. Even then, I doubt GM will announce the order numbers, since they don't need to. Tesla does it for marketing and to give confidence to investors so they can get more funding.
The particular case is using up all your range on a weekend trip and then needing to charge for work trip the next day. And doing it within a 6 hour off peak ToU rate. That's 60 kWh or so... 9.6 kW is about right for that. Or, with a long range BEV, needing to gain 80-100 kWh within 8 hours or so. 32A is fine for everyday for the vast majority of people. But not very comfortable for long range BEVs in cases that might happen every week or two. Installing 40A to 80A destination charging makes sense, especially if the price can be driven down. Tesla is selling 80A destination charging for $500 and $550 per EVSE, so clearly the at volume price difference between 32A and, say, 48A charging is pretty minimal. But as long as a large number of vehicles are sold with 32A on board chargers, the ecosystem will naturally push 32A. And that number was 24A before.
Clearly, when the Audi A6 e-tron, the Porsche Mission-E, and other large battery pack BEVs hit the market in a few short years, these vehicles with 90-105 kWh of pack capacity will need to be charged in 8 hours as a norm. That's 48A charging, 40A is likely tolerable. 32A would pretty much suck but that EVSE cost is then already sunk... a short sighted amount from the era before long distance BEVs.
The point is ICE replacement. That's why we put so much battery into each vehicle. Why build a 200 mile range BEV that really isn't an ICE replacement? At that point, put in 40 or 45 kWh, charge less, be a bit more efficient, and pretty much cover the same use cases.
A Leaf or other similar ~100 mile range BEV is not suitable for long road trips, but with proper infrastructure, it is reasonable for a regional trip. For example Portland, OR to Eugene is about 120 miles. Portland to Seattle is slightly more. A college student who lives in Portland, but going to the University of Oregon might want to take their Leaf with them when they go off to school. The I-5 coridor has a lot of CHAdeMO chargers which makes it possible to take a 100 miles BEV on a regional road trip.
Because there was no central plan to rolling out CHAdeMO chargers, their distribution is not ideal. For example there are 5 in Salem, OR, and only 1 in Eugene (that appears to be listed twice on plugshare.com).
For countries where things are closer together than the US, short range BEVs with decent charging infrastructure are feasible for road trips. I've been watching Robert Llewellen's Fully Charged and he's talked about the charging infrastructure in the UK. The driving distance from London to Cambridge is only 62 miles. London to Manchester is a little over 200 miles.
GM can't afford for the Bolt to be appealing outside the EV enthusiast world. They couldn't get the batteries to mass produce it if they wanted to and if they did make an appealing BEV, it would collapse the market for their ICEs. The goal of the traditional car makers is to make BEVs that are just appealing enough the automotive press says good things about them, but they will sell poorly so these makers can go back to legislators forcing them in that direction and tell them they make BEVs, but nobody wants them.
The existence of Tesla is a complication to their argument, but they can currently dismiss Tesla as a rich person's toy and that the bulk of the car buying public who can afford the average car doesn't want BEVs. They are just hoping Tesla makes some major mistake with the Model 3 and it will be a disaster. A successful Model 3 is an out of business scenario for many car makers.
They will only be building 30,000 a year worldwide. Some will go to Europe and be sold under a different nameplate. I think GM has about 5000 dealerships left in the US, if just 5000 got to Europe, that leaves 5 cars per dealership, per year. They have said they will sell them everywhere in North America, so you could order one to be delivered to your local dealership.
On a day to day basis, the charging scenario will be the same as a Tesla, which is about 1-2 hours charging, even at 40 or 48A. I think the lowest my battery has been pulling into the garage is about 150 miles of range left.
Most CCS chargers will probably be slower than superchargers, which will leave the Audi and Porsche drivers with supercharger envy as they sit for a couple of hours where Teslas can come and go in less than an hour, but for day to day charging the scenario will likely be the same as a Tesla now.
When I was shopping, I was looking for a car capable of road trips that wouldn't leave me stove up. I only considered Tesla because of the supercharger network. If that wasn't there, it would have quickly been crossed off my list like all other BEVs.
Like most people, most of my driving is local and for that I could have gotten a shorter range BEV, but a third car means extra car registration, extra insurance, and one car ends up outside. The only reasonable consideration was a car that met all my needs.
It will be Opel Ampera-e over here. Vauxhall Ampra-e in GB? Opel Ampera (witout the -e) is it's version of the Volt. That was if I have got it right withdrawn from the Norwegian marked as it did not sell. Not sure about in the rest of Europa?
In the video under they say it will be introduced next year. So we are now expecting deliveries here in Europa "late 2017" (sounds familiar?).
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