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That's clearly a very reasonably result. As crazy as the EU (or any govenment) might be, Balkanizing the charging systems, especially without any clear single standard sounds a stretch.
For Level 2, they're effectively using adapters anyway. They carry around cables with Type-2 (Mennekes) on one end whatever your car needs on the other end.
They are obviously talking in their own direction, since they will sell the additional features to the EVSE infrastructue
I also think there is no value in 1-phase 16A charging (Europe!!), every car should at least charge with 11kW (3x16A) to gain any significant range in a short period of time.
it's not... remember that the ZOE includes 43kW in a 'mass market' EV so I think that demonstrates what's possible :smile:
Yes - in the case of a ground up design that is fully integrated into the car's other electronics. But in that very thread you linked to they talk about $1 per Watt, maybe $0.50 best for an aftermarket charger to integrate into the LEAF.
It still seems to me that for a car like the Tesla, there's not a lot of difference between 10kw charging and 40 kw charging. The rate has to be at least Supercharger 90kw or faster to really make a difference for most trips for most people. The below list of scenarios assumes a Tesla-like car with a range of around 250 mi at normal driving speeds. IMHO that is a very different vehicle than one having a range less than 100 mi.
I realize that people currently do long trips stopping for a few hours at KOA etc. during the day, but doubt that most non-enthusiasts are willing to do that.
It seems to me that for normal use, for a Tesla-like car, medium level charging isn't particularly useful.
- For normal daily trips, charging is at home overnight so 10 kw is fine.
- For an overnight visit to friends or other non-public charging station location within 250 mi, if there is access to something like a dryer socket, 10 kw is all you can get anyway.
- For a relaxed road trip of 300 to 400 mi/day, driving 5 to 7 hours with no or minimal recharging overnight, 40 kw means over 2 hours for a recharge. That's much too long for most people. An hour is probably OK if it's somewhere to get lunch, but anything longer would be a hard sell to most people for normal trips I'd think.
- For a relaxed overnight at a parking garage or hotel with a public charger, 10 kw should be fine.
- On a long distance trip doing 600 - 800 mi/day, 10 to 12 hours of driving requiring more than one stop, the 40 kw 2 hour charging would be completely unacceptable. Even spending an hour at the second and/or third stop would be a big problem for most people on such a trip. If overnight charging were available, the 10 kw charger would be fine, but I don't think current EV's are what most people would want on such a trip.
- A relaxed trip just beyond the range with overnight charging at the end, say 350 mi total, seems like one of the few normal trips where 40 kw charging would be useful. With 40 kw charging a 50% charge would take around an hour which would be OK for lunch. With 10 kw it's 4 hours which sounds unacceptable to me.
I realize that people currently do long trips stopping for a few hours at KOA etc. during the day, but doubt that most non-enthusiasts are willing to do that.
It seems to me that for normal use, for a Tesla-like car, medium level charging isn't particularly useful.
@RDoc: from here to NYC is 215 miles. Easy enough for the 85kWh battery. Tomorrow I'm going down for lunch and then to give a presentation in the afternoon, finishing up around 5pm, so say 6 hours of charging time. At 10kWh, my battery's not yet full; at 40kWh, it is. Just one example.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
That's true, but even with the 10 kwh charger, you'd probably just make it. Leaving NYC at 5 PM is likely to be an exercise in stop and go traffic until you get well out of the city, so your range would likely be more than 250 mi. if you stay around the speed limit the rest of the way back. Obviously though, more charge would be better.
I'm not saying that there are no trips where it wouldn't be useful, just that such trips are not common.
I don't think most people do many trips where they drive 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours, stay for a few hours, then drive back. That's a pretty long day with a lot of driving, particularly through NYC rush hour traffic. I, for one, would avoid making such a trip. Provincetown (150 mi) for the afternoon and back in one day is about as far as I like without an overnight.
I'm flying, actually, because (a) I agree that it's stupid-crazy to drive that much in a day and (b) I'm going on to DC.
tomsax
Member
For the Roadster, 10 kW is about 35 ideal miles per hour of charging (IMPH), 16.8 kW is 60 IMPH. For Model S, 10 kW is about 31 rated miles per hour of charging and 20 kW is 61 RMPH. That's a big difference for medium range trips.
For example, Seattle to Coeur d'Alene, ID, is about 300 miles, definitely beyond the single charge range of the Roadster. To make the drive, we stop in Ellensburg to get a leisurely lunch while we charge at the Tesla HPC (16.8 kW). In 60 to 90 minutes, we have enough charge to make it to Coeur d'Alene. Before we got the HPC there, it required three hours of charging and several owners got impatient with the wait and had close calls making it.
Seattle to Portland is 180 miles on I-5, which makes it just beyond the range of the Roadster at 70 mph. At 55 to 60 mph, it's easy to make the drive on one charge, but that's a horrible drive. Most of I-5 on that stretch is two lanes in each direction with a 70 mph speed limit. The left lane has cars going 70 to 75 mph and the right lane has big trucks going 60 to 65 mph. So sitting in the right lane keeping it at 60 or under, forcing the big trucks to pass, is not fun. In 2010, several of us in the community worked with the Burgerville chain of eco-friendly burger joints to get an HPC installed at their Centralia location, about halfway between Portland and Seattle. Now, we can drive 70 to 75, stop for a break and snack for 20 minutes and pick up enough charge to make it the rest of the way with no concern about speed or range. If there were only a 10 kW station (or worse, one of the anemic 7 kW J stations), that stopover would be a much bigger disruption than it is.
I like having a 20-minute break on a 3-hour drive and an hour break on a 5-6 hour drive (although two 30-45 minute breaks would be better).
Every EV owner thinks their maximum charge rate is the bare minimum required for extended driving, however there's a gigantic difference between 20 kW and 90 kW charging. To get 90 kW charging, you have to wait for Tesla to do it. It's incredibly difficult: expensive to install, complex to get permitted, with considerable demands on the host site. On the other hand, we have proven that a few motivated owners can get 16.8 to 19.2 kW charging installed strategically, inexpensively, and in a timeframe of months not years.
20 kW charging can open up big chunks of the country to EV travel, places that won't see Supercharger (or even CHAdeMO) support for many years.
@tomsax: But with the S, the range at 70 mph is about 220 mi, so it could keep up with traffic and make the 180 mi run easily.
The 300 mi trip is my case 6 where faster charging is useful. However, for most people, an hour and a half stop on what normally would be a 5 hour trip in an ICE car would be quite unwelcome. It's better than a 3 hour stop, but neither sounds very appealing.
The 300 mi trip is my case 6 where faster charging is useful. However, for most people, an hour and a half stop on what normally would be a 5 hour trip in an ICE car would be quite unwelcome. It's better than a 3 hour stop, but neither sounds very appealing.
tomsax
Member
RDoc: You're missing the point. Level 2 charging can make trips at or a little beyond the single charge range doable, even reasonable, and the faster the Level 2, the better the result.
If we could click our heels and get Superchargers everywhere overnight, then talking about Level 2 would be silly, but that's not where we are. It's a mistake to dismiss Level 2 charging when it can be very helpful getting to areas that won't be covered by Superchargers for many years.
I'm sure it doesn't apply to everyone, but when a lot of EV owners get used to the pleasures of driving electric, they'll choose to drive electric even if it means a change to their driving habits.
I didn't start out as an EV fanatic. My wife bought our first EV as an experiment in 2008, a used 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV. We weren't sure how well it would work out. We hoped it would handle about 50% of our local driving. With a 100-mile range, it handled all of our local driving, except when we had to be different places at the same time. We sold our Nissan Pathfinder a month or two after getting the RAV. In 2009, we got the Roadster and six weeks later we sold our Acura NSX-T. We held onto our Honda Insight "just in case" until we realized we were never driving it. We sold the Insight, our last gas burner, in mid-2010.
I drive the Roadster far more than I drove the NSX, and I absolutely hate driving gas cars.
This didn't happen because of some genetic or political disposition. Cathy and I would have been perfectly happy with one EV doing half of our local driving. It happened because EVs offer a vastly superior driving experience. I'm perfectly happy to trade a relaxing stop in a six-hour drive for the smooth, instant acceleration of an EV, for the quite ride, for cheap fuel, and for the general satisfaction of driving electric.
I'll rent a gas car when an EV isn't convenient, but that hasn't happened once in the last four years, except for when we're on vacation and we're forced to rent a gas burner.
It's OK if you haven't spent enough time driving electric to understand what I'm talking about. It's even OK if you never get totally hooked on driving electric. But don't dismiss the value of charging below 90 kW for the rest of us.
If we could click our heels and get Superchargers everywhere overnight, then talking about Level 2 would be silly, but that's not where we are. It's a mistake to dismiss Level 2 charging when it can be very helpful getting to areas that won't be covered by Superchargers for many years.
I'm sure it doesn't apply to everyone, but when a lot of EV owners get used to the pleasures of driving electric, they'll choose to drive electric even if it means a change to their driving habits.
I didn't start out as an EV fanatic. My wife bought our first EV as an experiment in 2008, a used 2002 Toyota RAV4-EV. We weren't sure how well it would work out. We hoped it would handle about 50% of our local driving. With a 100-mile range, it handled all of our local driving, except when we had to be different places at the same time. We sold our Nissan Pathfinder a month or two after getting the RAV. In 2009, we got the Roadster and six weeks later we sold our Acura NSX-T. We held onto our Honda Insight "just in case" until we realized we were never driving it. We sold the Insight, our last gas burner, in mid-2010.
I drive the Roadster far more than I drove the NSX, and I absolutely hate driving gas cars.
This didn't happen because of some genetic or political disposition. Cathy and I would have been perfectly happy with one EV doing half of our local driving. It happened because EVs offer a vastly superior driving experience. I'm perfectly happy to trade a relaxing stop in a six-hour drive for the smooth, instant acceleration of an EV, for the quite ride, for cheap fuel, and for the general satisfaction of driving electric.
I'll rent a gas car when an EV isn't convenient, but that hasn't happened once in the last four years, except for when we're on vacation and we're forced to rent a gas burner.
It's OK if you haven't spent enough time driving electric to understand what I'm talking about. It's even OK if you never get totally hooked on driving electric. But don't dismiss the value of charging below 90 kW for the rest of us.
I call this "destination charging".
I regularly take a trip in the Roadster, a 400km round-trip to Amsterdam which involves a lot of highway speeds, so I need to charge in Amsterdam.
With the Roadster on 16A it is doable, but not perfect, I'd rather have the 3x16A (11kW) charging with the Model S.
Most of the time I'm at my destination for a couple of hours before going to the next one.
Why would I stop at a supercharger for 45 minutes while my car can charge outside on Level 2 with 10 ~ 20kW while I'm doing my work?
Quick/Supercharging will co-exist with Level 2 charging.
Kipernicus
Model S Res#P1440
I think both RDoc and tomsax (and wido too) have valid points. There is no one solution, as different scenarios have different optimal solutions, especially when you consider the costs involved. Of course faster is better, but at what cost? While the infrastructure is in its infancy I'll take what I can get, which is why I opted to spring for the twin chargers. Even here in CA there are routes I want to take that don't yet have SC, but do have 70-80A level 2, so having 20kW capacity means less time that the wife and family are annoyed with me and my car :smile:
In the "real world", Supercharging is likely only to exist along major artery highways. I have no doubt that there will be plenty of need for Level 2 (hopefully higher power Level 2) along secondary highways and at destinations.
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