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Comment by martin_bech | Hacker News Reader

And the “Tesla Connector” is not the Tesla connector in Europe, but Type 2 connection modified. Fully compatible with Type 2 charging.

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It's compatible one way - the cars (MS/MX) use a Type2 connector for AC charging (conforming to the widely spread standard) and DC charging ("DC-Mid" "standard", what's used on old V1/V2 Superchargers). This allows the cars to use Type2 to charge on any AC charger. But the DC-Mid solution is not found on any other EV, so while the connector is mechanically standardized, no other car except Teslas can charge on non-CCS-retrofitted Superchargers. Thankfully, there are only very few of those left in all of Europe - exactly one in Germany (Wiesbaden), iirc 2-3 more elsewhere, all others are either CCS-retrofitted or CCS-only V3s.

Wandering off topic (what an epic start, TIL, thanks Norway!), but I gotta say it feels very weird to me having AC charging be the standard. It feels a lot more elegant to me to put a lot of the complexity on the charging station rather than in the vehicle.

And if you have, for example, a solar powered charge station, now your charge station needs a big inverter to make AC, which the car then goes about turning back into DC.

ac charging “infrastructure” is merely a plug + a fancy breaker switch. It’s cheap and simple. ac is abundant, so adding a plug is easy. Dc on the other hand requires lots of hardware.

This. Cheap infrastructure spurs adoption more than the added cost to the EV. It also adds tremendous flexibility to the EV itself allowing it to charge off existing infrastructure not intended for EVs.

But you can easily do DC charging now.

CCS is made for DC charging, but can fallback to Type 2 AC.

All EVs in Europe are CCS

The Nissan Leaf does not use CCS DC fast charging, it uses CHAdeMO, like they do in the US. But it's pretty much the only EV that uses it in the US.

https://www.nissan.fr/vehicules/neufs/leaf.html

"Le temps de recharge rapide indiqué nécessite l’utilisation d’une borne de recharge rapide équipée d’un câble de recharge CHAdeMO."

Also consider that only a fraction of US Leafs can do CHAdeMO. It was not a standard option.

IMO Nissan did a lot to spur the adoption of EVs with their glorified golf cart but they've really squandered any mind share or goodwill they gained.

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