Tesla opens its EV charge connector in hope of making it new standard | Hacker News Reader

Tesla opens its EV charge connector in hope of making it new standard

electrek.co

16 pointsmfiguiere25 comments

This seems like too little too late. The momentum for J1772/CCS is there with basically every other EV maker.

It’s not as good as Tesla’s system but I feel like the cat is out of the bag and it’s just too late for Tesla’s connector to gain traction. We finally got rid of ChaDeMo. It was settled. I don’t think anyone wants to open that box back up and spend the money to retrofit all charging stations with a new new connector.

You know what will really help EV sales? Telling everyone who has started to buy them in the last 2 years as non-Tesla brands have taken off “Ha, just kidding, you’re screwed. Use an adapter forever or pay $3k to retrofit your vehicle. Sorry.”

Why didn’t they do this 5+ years ago? If Tesla’s mission was to push electric cars it would make sense, like Volvo giving away some of their safety patents.

I don’t have a Tesla, but I would have preferred their connector. But their weird previous offer made it a no-go and I just can’t see it happening now. So unless Tesla stops using it it seems multiple connectors will live in forever.

This. Tesla needed to create it's own standard to make EVs possible. It then held onto it as it's golden-goose; milked the network lockin/advantage.

Regulators going around them to open the network after-the-fact means a different standard makes it through; 'better' being irrelevant.

As an (now older) Tesla owner - I do wish the Tesla charger had become standard; but the adapter isn't bad - it came with the car and just sits in the glovebox. It is OneMoreThing to lose though.

And they could have let everyone use the connector but keep Superchargers locked with authentication. That would give them best of both worlds.

> This seems like too little too late

Aptera has been screaming about this for years, so I imagine they are pretty happy about it

I've read a few technical specifications for automotive stuff... And this spec seems severely lacking.

There are plenty of things here that need specifying before this is a standard that everyone could use.

For example, is it the connector or the socket which should be measuring the temperature of the pins? In case of an unacceptable temperature rise (for example due to corrosion), how fast should current be stopped? Is there a minimal thermal mass for a pin to limit how fast the temperature can rise? Remember that if you dump just 1% of the rated 900kW charging energy into a 10 gram bit of copper, it starts melting plastic in just 16 milliseconds... Will your temperature sensor respond that fast? Will there be voltage monitoring on both sides of the link to detect voltage drop across a corroded connector? How will that be communicated?

Without all this stuff decided ahead of time, each engineering team will make their own solutions to these problems, and you'll end up with certain combinations of car and plug that won't work (his temperature sensor isn't fast enough to prevent damage to my port, so I refuse to charge). Or other combinations that melt (his dirty connector generated too much heat, and by the time I detected that and powered off, parts of his plug were at 1000C and welded themself onto me)

And before you reply that it should be designed to not corrode ... Well the spec requires unplated copper... Which corrodes given time and humidity, something you won't manage to keep out of a connector.

For the unplated copper, doesn’t the low resistance come from sacrificing a bit of the material each insertion? I know this is the case for most other high powered plugs.

Also, much of your concerns are addressed in the charging system. There are sanity checks in place, with initial and continuous resistance measurement. It’s not just a relay flipping. So, welding together in 16ms is impossible. Maybe a bit longer than that. ;) Plastic melting together definitely is though.

> much of your concerns are addressed in the charging system.

Unless I missed it... That doesn't appear in the spec.

The control protocol spec wouldn't be part of the physical connector spec, other than setting some minimum requirements so the connector meets the control protocols assumptions. The control protocol is, necessarily as your concerns point out, made so that things like resistance, water, dirt, and bad connections, all things that are expected states of connectors, don't pose a significant safety hazard.

> NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined.

In the US and Canada there are 17,169 Tesla DC fast charge ports and 11,293 CCS ports. If Tesla plug cars outnumber CCS cars two-to-one then the port to car ratio is better on CCS:

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/an...

Tesla previously claimed that their plug design was already "open", but now apparently the claim is it's "open for real this time". The only reason for them to do this now is to qualify for US government subsidies without building open infrastructure on a common plug standard.

Tesla should simply put a CCS port on their North American cars and be done with it. The European Teslas are better cars purely because they have a CCS port and can charge on all CCS networks without having to carry around adapters and dongles.

Yep, this is too little too late. In my opinion it's like Apple making lightning open. Sure the form might be slightly more attractive, but there's limitations that just can't be overcome.

>Tesla should simply put a CCS port on their North American cars and be done with it.

and pay Qualcomm tax?

No, to be compatible with open, multi-brand infrastructure on a common standard with no need for adapters and dongles. If Tesla truly wants to "accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy" then they will switch to CCS in North America.

Wireless charging is the future in my opinion. [1] It has more uses, less moving parts to go bad such as corroded contacts, has uses outside of EV, is safer and does not require people fumbling with cables in the rain or snow. Pull into a spot and you are already charging. Rest areas could use these for both EV's and non EV, such as keeping an electric heater going and the vehicle battery charged in cold weather areas. The wireless chargers could even one day extend communications devices and internet. RV parks could use wireless pads to start phasing out the 120/240 terminal posts and also provide internet.

With some improvements there could even be charging pads on roads that are often congested during rush hour and that commonly turn into 2 hour slow moving parking lots, potentially powered in part by solar freeway medians. This may require changes to the existing pads to operate more along the line of longer inductive rails.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8EF7ZGORS0

Another wireless charging demo at 55 kW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq7SP18sPKw

Isn't wireless charging inherently worse for the battery because of the heat and less efficient?

One would think so but there is no heat and the modern wireless chargers are very efficient. It may be worth watching the video I linked as efficiency methods and differences from typical low power devices are explained. From the video wireless charging is 99% efficient and can scale to hundreds of kilowatts.

99% is still not that amazing in my opinion if you're charging something with as much energy as a car.

1% * 50KWH is 0.5 KWH, so the same as running a 1KW heater for half an hour.

According to this website, boiling 1L of water from room temperature is about 0.1KWH, so you could boil 5 litres of water : https://seesustainability.co.uk/blog/f/boiling-water---how-m....

99% is the same as the plug-in chargers.

Wireless EV charging achieves similar efficiency to wired charging:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmIIe9N_aI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE1gaNO9nj0

Only checked the first link quickly but he both makes then asumption havin the car in sentry mode spend 0 energy and also realizes it spends enough energy to making charging your car slower less efficient than fast charging.

The second one is interesting, but I don't find it very convincing since thel say themselves they don't understand the results.

They're doing their best, but their testing is just not exactly greatly scientific. They're testing it outside with a whole real car running without controlling for anything like battery temp.

I am surprised companies haven’t a done more with wireless EV charging. Wireless charging almost seems like a necessity for full autonomy, since the car can’t plug and unplug itself, but it could easily be programmed to drive over a charging pad when not in use.

As you mention, it is quite efficient. One thing people may not realize is current wired charging requires quite a bit of complex circuitry in the car to convert line voltages to the levels needed to charge the battery. With wireless charging, this transformation can happen at the interface between the two charging pads, so the efficiency is actually quite similar to a wired connection.

I wouldn’t be surprised if wireless charging eventually becomes commonplace, but my understanding is the current technology isn’t quite ready yet. It requires the car to be parked precisely over the pad, and isn’t able to charge as fast as current wired charging tech.

Wireless charging is great ... for a toothbrush, but not when you are throwing away tens of kilowatt-hours per day.

The EV charging pads are 99% efficient. These are not at all the same tech as your toothbrush or cell phone.

Only if you are aligned correctly. Otherwise it will fall down to 0% with few centimeters misalignment

Quick. Announce something to distract them.

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