TonyWilliams
Active Member
Fundamentally, Nissan did every EV owner a huge disservice in the U.S. by emphasizing CHAdeMO DCFC at this stage with their Nissan Leaf at the expense of higher amperage L2 charging.
I completely disagree. Virtually no home in Japan, and few in Europe can handle a 100 amp circuit just to power a car. Even older houses in the US might only have 100 amps TOTAL.
Low power that can charge a car in 4-8 hours is all that's needed for overnight charging. The 16 to 30 amps of the existing LEAF does that just fine for a 24kWh battery. Since the Roadster was an extreme limited production car, and the Model S just a dream then, Nissan was building a WORLD car, and that's exactly what they've done. The CHAdeMO standard is the ONLY one that is the same everywhere in the world. Not even Tesla can meet that standard.
Sidebar: it will happen, sooner than later. Somebody will import a US built Tesla to Europe, or vice versa.... SURPRISE !!!! No place to charge.
The charging future of BEV's depends on two things: high speed charging for long distance travel and widespread destination charging. 50 kW CHAdeMO accomplishes neither and costs way too much. At $50k+ installed, it is too slow to really facilitate long distance travel and too costly for widespread destination charging. It is basically a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
It doesn't get cheaper to install a 480kW charger (what Tesla does with 8 stalls). The brand name of the charging protocol has nothing to do with installation costs. ZERO... NADA.
There is no technical reason that CHAdeMO can't be 100kW, or even 120 - 135kW, just like Tesla.
For cheap OVERNIGHT destination charging (that pretty much means a hotel or grandma's house), slow AC charging is fine (80 amps and below).
Further, by installing slow J1772's in the Leaf, we ended up with lots of very slow L2 charging. If they had put in an 80A J1772 in the Leaf at the start
This might shock you, but the SAE J1772 standard worldwide was 30 amps. It was only after Tesla petitioned 80 amps that it changed in the US. The rest of the world still considers it a 30 amp outlet.
then it is likely that we would have had much faster J1772's installed all over the place instead of the 24A and 30A varieties. At 80A, a J1772 charger is only half the speed of most Leaf's charging off CHAdeMO. This would have been gentler on the Leaf's initial pack design and it would have lowered the install costs dramatically.
If you need a charge in the middle of the day, a trickle from any AC onboard charger (except Renault Chameleon at 44kW) is a joke. Nobody would voluntarily drip gasoline in their car. If you need the power, it should get pumped in and move on.
Even now, it makes more sense for Nissan to divert subsidies from impractical 50-60kW CHAdeMO into retrofitting Leafs with 80A J1772 in the U.S.
With virtually no place to plug this 80 amp cars in, I don't think it will help much. Plus, you recognize that there are 120,000 LEAF's in the world, adding about 6000 per month? Do the math on that upgrade with no place to gain any value from it. No thanks.
For hotels, CHAdeMO makes even less sense. Most patrons are likely to be there for at least 6 hours, if not 8-10 hours. Does it really make a difference for Leaf to be charged in 30 minutes or 2 hours or 4 hours in that case? Further, given the small size and poor chemistry of the initial Nissan Leaf battery pack design, CHAdeMO EVSE's are often installed at the wrong places to facilitate long distance travel.
Well, you have to qualify the hotel charging duty. If it's private and only there for overnight guests (because only overnight guests should be served, not dinner guests, or conference guests, or anybody else... just overnight, SURE, get those 16-80 amp slow chargers in. Throw in some 15 amp / 120 volt NEMA 5-15 normal wall sockets, too, for the teeny battery crowd.
But, Gawd forbid, a transient, or dinner customer, conference, meeting, toilet break, etc, well you're slow 16 - 80 amp charge just takes up parking space, becasue it's close to worthless.
Also, some sleeping customers with "day use" of the hotel are not there long enough for that full overnight charge. I've actually been at hotels many times mid-day, usually to work all night.
My bigger point is that most of the "my way is the best and only way" thinking for EV infrastructure is from home owning, city / suburban dwellers who own their car and who work a 9am - 5pm Monday through Friday job, and that's the only world that needs to be served.
Fast forward to 2018. Nissan will likely to have shipped an Infiniti BEV with NMC chemistry, and is likely to ship a Leaf with the same NMC chemistry. It is likely the battery pack capacity increases significantly. At that point, each and every existing CHAdeMO EVSE is obsolete, an anachronism of Nissan's early foray into electric vehicles. They'll be looking to install 100+ kW EVSE's into places that actually make sense to support long distance travel. The spacing would be different, the number of plugs per station would be different, and so forth. It would have to be a replica of the Tesla Supercharger network.
Obviously, the existing infrastructure doesn't have to be obsolete, but who would argue against a Nissan Supercharger network? Git 'er done!
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