I thought CCS has/was a standardized protocol to avoid communication issues between different chargers/vehicles?
You would think so, but for some reason human beings like to implement standards in non-standard ways.
Tom mentioned that his car is only 3 weeks old. Can it be that there is some difference between old and new cars?
Sorry, I disagree. The adapter will only fit Tesla cars, so that limits their use case. There are only a half-dozen manufacturers of CCS fast chargers that have the lion's share of the market in the US, so that limits their use case even more. They flat out didn't do their diligence before selling here, and now they want one of our members to run software on his laptop while at the charging stations and capture logs, etc. That should have been step #1 for them to do when developing their product for the US market, and they didn't do it...If they would have given away 5-10 adapters to drivers in the US for this purpose, they'd probably had plenty of takers to help them. But they sold it as a working solution for a fairly premium price, and that's where I take exception...
I'd say there are a bit more than half-dozen. Electrify America Talks Charging Network Problems, Has Solutions lists ABB, BTC, Signet, and Efacec as ones they use. I can tell you that all 4 of those vendors have numerous different models of chargers with CCS. PlugShare - Find Electric Vehicle Charging Locations Near You is an old Signet one that you'll probably never see EA use. EVgo has a lot of these BTC FatBoy units: PlugShare - Find Electric Vehicle Charging Locations Near You. I've never seen EA deploy these. In my area, the EA BTC Power units look nothing like that. They look like BTCPower. Beyond that, Tritium has some that are usually branded ChargePoint (as the CPE200 at the ChargePoint link further down) but sometimes have other branding like this Greenots one: PlugShare - Find Electric Vehicle Charging Locations Near You. ChargePoint has their own ChargePoint Express 250 | ChargePoint but they also had their CPE100 (found at Everything You Need to Know About ChargePoint Stations | ChargePoint) which isn't even made by them but rather by IES (Electric vehicle charging station - IES-Synergy). I actually just used one of these this afternoon at ChargePoint HQ w/my Bolt. The IES units also have had other branding (e.g. BMW, Bosch (Bosch & BMW Announce 24 kW DC Charger For North America At $9,995) and Harley Davidson). But Bosch also has EV2000 Series | Bosch EV which aren't made by them are actually rebadged units from Products - EV Charging - Delta Group. Some Chevy dealers have these while some have the IES units. I tend to agree w/the rest of your post.
You're complaining that an A to B adapter only works in A to B scenarios? Bleeding edge technology is shipped all the time with beta firmware and expected to be updated in the field to production release. Take full self driving for example... Anyways, I'd be willing to bet that this adapter is working on >85% of networked chargers by the end of January, unless Tesla or EA deliberately tries to prevent them from working.
Either that or Tesla accelerates plans to launch an official one. It can’t be good for them to have Tesla owners using a third-party adapter they have no control over - it could cause unexpected problems which could potentially lead to bad publicity. Overall I think it’s great - I feel like Tesla has been dragging their feet on this, and if there’s enough adoption of the Setec adapter this could force their hand.
Unlikely, since at this point they said that they can't bring an engineer here because of COVID-19. It didn't seem like they were going to do remote development.
This is a software problem and putting a thousand adapters into the hands of everyday users and asking them to submit logs when something doesn't work is an effective way of finding all the bugs. Microsoft does this all the time with Windows updates and nobody bats an eye unless they bluescreen a million computers.
you don’t need to be present to perform integration and testing. We have launched a lot of payloads this year that required payload to spacecraft and spacecraft to launch vehicle integration without having the normal amount of engineers present. Does it take longer and require more planning, sure, but it can be done. What seems to be missing is the desire on the part of the charging manufacturers to support this effort (if they were ever really asked). That’s why they have to rely on customers.
Today, I contacted with SETEC engineer. It's because the adapter didn't work properly on DC Combo charger what I use. I sent the log files 3~4 times at the engineer's request, and the problem was solved in 3hours. So it works very well, now. (50 kWh DC Combo charger / Tesla receive up to 45 kWh)
Certainly good news and thank you for your report. . But I gather you are in Korea. I’m looking forward to seeing better results from North American users.
I agree that this would be helpful. Especially to keep track of which charging station make and model works or not. Adding adapter firmware level would be good so improvements or fixes could be tracked.
So did they send you new firmware to load in to the adapter? If so, I wonder if those changes would help people here too.
That is true, but I am also hopeful that whatever issue affected the adapter in Korea in this instance would also indirectly fix the issues here in NA (or at least some of them). Hopefully they can push out a firmware update that others here in N. America can try to use.
They just sent me v124 to update.. Have not had a chance to test yet. That said, what did they send you?
Tom, your M3 is relatively new, my MS is 2015. Am wondering if issues are variances model-to-model and year-to-year
Ok, that's interesting. Are they going to send a firmware update to all their customers I wonder? Is it an installer program loadable onto Windows 10?