New Standards for National Electric Vehicle Charging Network | Hacker News Reader

New Standards for National Electric Vehicle Charging Network

whitehouse.gov

24 pointsjonbaer8 comments

Glad to see the proposed minimum charging capability of 150kW or higher. Too many "fast DC" chargers are only 50kW, well below the maximum that most current EVs can take. And there are some innovative charging platforms out there that incorporate batteries to get the charge rate up even when the local electric infrastructure is weak.

TLDR, the federal government:

* will provide funding to states to build out a national network of 500,000 EV chargers, and

* will propose national standards to make charging work for all EVs from all manufacturers.

This is great news for everyone except Tesla, who stands to lose its relative lead in charging infrastructure over other EV manufacturers.

People who own Tesla EVs, however, will benefit as much as everyone else from more charging infrastructure.

Unfortunately, it’ll take years for those chargers to get built out, and it’s likely the only automakers left after the EV transition are Tesla, Ford, and possibly Rivian [1](lots of potential and the R1T is a solid platform but currently in production hell). In the meantime, Tesla continues to ramp mercilessly, and deploys tens of Superchargers per month [2]. Legacy automakers also carry an immense debt load ($1.1T collectively) [3] making pivoting to EV manufacturing a Herculean effort, especially in a rising interest rate environment.

As usual, you can always count on America to do the right thing after exhausting all other options. The time for this was years ago.

[1] https://youtu.be/yPhpntKlPFI

[2] https://supercharge.info/charts

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-car-industrys-1-1-trillion-...

It could take a few years, but it could also be done a lot faster than you'd expect, because federal and state governments already own and control a lot of land next to all major highways. Think existing rest areas.

Legacy vehicle manufacturers still have plenty of time to catch up, because Tesla forecasts it will take ~5 years to grow its global EV manufacturing capacity to be able to fulfill around 10% of global annual vehicle demand, which is around 100 million consumer+commercial vehicles/year.

https://afdc.energy.gov/stations/#/find/nearest?fuel=ELEC&ev...

5,591 results for DC Fast CCS charging stations.

1,540 results for DC Fast Tesla charging stations.

46,705 results for Level 2 J1772 charging stations.

5,226 results for Level 2 Tesla charging stations.

On the routes I'm likely to take, there are more CCS charging stations than Tesla charging stations. There are definitely more J1772 charging stations around me than Tesla charging stations. We're already past the point where there's more non-Tesla chargers than Tesla chargers.

Of course, theoretically you can use adapters for Teslas (decent but expensive CCS adapters coming soon to US) but then theoretically Tesla superchargers are supposed to soon support CCS, so the count of charging stations is soon to be moot either way.

> and it’s likely the only automakers left after the EV transition are Tesla, Ford, and possibly Rivian

That isn't remotely likely. The European EV market is 3 times the size of the North American EV market at the moment. Here's what that looks like:

https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Y...

https://eu-evs.com/bestSellers/ALL/Groups/Year/2022

Have a look at Norway's sales for 2022. 4 of the top 10 vehicles are Volkswagens (VW ID.4, Audi Q4 e-tron, Skoda Enyaq, Audi e-tron):

https://elbilstatistikk.no/

> and deploys tens of Superchargers per month

So you mean people will have more places to charge their BMWs or Audis or Toyotas or Hyundais, etc? So what:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y33AArvMUQ

As a Tesla owner I actually wish that our gov would force Tesla to support CCS, like in the EU.

The standards already exist.

It can be on top of the Tesla connector, but should be required. That will open up a whole bunch of Tesla people to be able to fast charge with other providers.

Tesla has a CCS1 adapter they’ll be shipping, it’s not GA because supply chain issues would prevent them from retrofitting existing vehicles without CCS1 comms support via chipset to support it. We purchased one from South Korea and it charges our 2021 Y at CCS Volta and Electrify America stations without issue (although the UX is not great compared to Supercharging imo).

You can check if your vehicle supports the adapter using the following steps:

On the touchscreen:

Tap the car icon at the bottom left, then Software, then tap “Additional vehicle information”

Whether your car is CCS adapter capable or not should show up.

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