See SAE vs CHAdeMO - Page 38 and the seriousness of the DC fast charging efforts in the US of the Frankenplug players: SAE vs CHAdeMO - Page 30.
My Nissan Leaf Forum View topic - EV Oasis DC Charging Network
Since various suppliers have chargers that do they dual or triple fast charging options it does not seem like we should care about chademo vs CCS combo. If you buy a BMW or a LEAF you can charge there. I don't get why this is still an argument between chademo and CCS combo. Seems like a waste of energy.
Exactly. For example - how much more appealing do you think the SparkEV, FocusEV, Fiat500e and FitEV would be if they all supported CHAdeMO? I can tell you right now (as someone who is advising another who is in the market for one of those EVs or similar) that the LEAF is more appealing than those vehicles because of it's CHAdeMO plug and the numerous CHAdeMO stations here in California. The other main contender is the SparkEV, but the lack of CHAdeMO and the questions surrounding SAE combo rollout introduces uncertainty (for sure only 3.3 kW L2 charging doesn't help, either!).
The cost is not nominal for a station to support multiple standards. DCQC plugs and cables are not cheap and neither is the engineering that goes into the charger to accommodate both. Expensive hardware presents a major impediment to QC station rollouts, that is why there are so many more J1772 stations available in comparison - every single plug-in supports J1772.
While Nissan may be pushing CHAdeMO behind the scenes, it is not Nissan directly funding CHAdeMO stations worldwide. It is government funding that has helped to get most CHAdeMO stations installed (outside of Japan and Nissan dealerships, anyway).
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The i3 is a pretty significant non-compliance car (and by non-compliance I mean it's not solely being built for compliance, but is planned for national launch).
Despite being in the "CCS camp" I support dual chargers too. All I care is the cars being able to charge on CCS, doesn't matter if there's another connector on the station (in Europe there's also an AC connector too). I think Tony's view is it's a waste of money and he would rather see CCS die off (which doesn't look likely to happen) and have all cars forced to use CHAdeMO.
Relative to the cost of installing the whole charger, it IS nominal. I remember it maxes out at a couple thousand (it was mentioned somewhere in this thread, but too lazy to dig), but installing a charger costs tens of thousands, so it's only a fraction of the cost. Even CHAdeMO and Nissan supports dual standard chargers as the way forward.
Nissan is offering free money toward charger installs and also gave many free chargers to dealers. A large majority of the 550 CHAdeMO stations in the US were at least partially funded by Nissan (before Nissan's push for dealer chargers, there were only 100 or so government funded ones). If you take out Nissan, CHAdeMO would not have anywhere near its current market share. And Nissan's vehicles also make up a large majority of CHAdeMO capable vehicles. The only other comparable player is Mitsubishi.
As Tony says - a CHAdeMO QC station can be had for $10-15k.
Chademo is living on borrowed time until and unless someone puts out an EV with a 200+ mile range that can fast-charge with Chademo at rates comparable to supercharging. And people buy it
Chademo is currently (ar ar) limited to ~50-60KW charging rates. That's a huge problem. I think you need ~100 KW rates to be viable. SAE CCS can do this. Chademo could do this in theory but hasn't yet. So while Chademo may work ok for Japanese driving patterns for most of the rest of the world, it's not practical for long-distance trips.
My prediction: if the SAE car makers get their act together and put out a 200+ mile range EV with a few hundred SAE 100KW CCS charging stations relatively soon, Chademo will fade away except in Japan and a few other densely populated areas.
I hate to break it to you, but ANY similar product that is inferior to other products they build kind of tells the story here. No manufacturer builds inferior products because they want to.
We already knew that would happen, CHAdeMO has been applying to be an IEC standard since last year. That doesn't mean minimum support as the document you link still refers to "type 2" and "type 2 Combo" (type 1 and type 3 is still excluded from the minimum spec, even though it's also IEC).
Inferior is in the eye of the beholder. In many ways the Leaf is inferior to Nissan's ICE cars (range, cargo room, styling), but that doesn't mean it's only "compliance car" or that Nissan is not serious. The REx is designed to get CARB credits, but it's not any worse than other "serious" EVs in this regard (the Leaf, iMIEV, and many other EVs were designed with 100 UDDS range also to fit with CARB regulation, even Tesla did battery swapping to fit into CARB's fast refueling credit bonus).
So you are saying a QC station with the same specs from the same manufacturer will cost $35-40k more when you option it with a SAE Combo connector? If the manufacturer for a $10-15k station added a SAE Combo connector to it, I think any sane estimate would put that option well under $10k (couple thousand is a good guess). And you are forgetting installation fees too. So in the context of the industry of as a whole, adding a connector only has a nominal cost.
Actually if you look at charger spec sheets, the ABB CCS chargers installed in California actually does have a higher current carrying capacity than CHAdeMO:
