The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) approved a revised standard last week that will let electrified vehicles charge their batteries much quicker -- in as little as 10 minutes for plug-in hybrids or 20 minutes for battery-electric cars. The standard brings new technology to public charging stations and parking garages, but not to homes.
"Before, it was a matter of hours to charge an electric vehicle battery," Andrew Smart, director of SAE International, told us. "Now it will be a matter of minutes."
The J1772 standard calls for so-called DC fast charging, using voltages ranging from 200V to 500V and currents of up to 200A. Earlier versions described methods using voltages of 120V or 240V and currents of 15A or 80A. Using the new technology, plug-in hybrids will be able to go from 0 percent to 80 percent charge in 10 minutes; battery-electrics could go from 20 percent to 80 percent in 20 minutes.
GM's Spark EV could be the first to employ the new DC fast charging standard. (Source: GM)
The standard calls for connectors and electrical interfaces with two extra pins on board. Electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids already on the road, such as the Chevy Volt, will not be able to use the new technology immediately, since they don't have the new hardware and software. However, Kevin Kelly, a spokesman for General Motors, told us its forthcoming Spark battery-electric vehicle will have the new connector, interface, and software. "It's less important to do this on the Chevy Volt, because the Volt already has extended range on board," he said. "But it makes a lot of sense for the Spark EV."
The J1772 standard was created in 1996. It was revised in 2001 for use with a paddle-type connector and again in 2010 with a continued focus on AC charging. The new version is the first to address DC fast charging and the first to describe voltages as high as 500V and currents as much as 200A.
The standard reflects a consensus of 190 global experts representing makers of automobiles and charging equipment, as well as utilities, national labs, and municipalities. The experts had to consider the effects of temperature, humidity, and moisture, as well as mechanical aspects.
"You have people who are constantly plugging and unplugging it," Smart said. "You need to know everything, including the fatigue levels of the wires, connectors, and plastics. You also need to get input from people on the infrastructure side -- you've got people who write building codes, and you've got municipalities. It's not just the automakers."
Automakers say the technology could have a profound effect on the sale of pure electric vehicles, many of which require eight or more hours of charging. "This is a standard that everyone was waiting for," Smart said. "Everyone wanted it to be done quickly. But when it comes to developing a consensus between 190 technical specialists, it takes time."
I agree with you Charles. My guess is that there will be a combination of improved charging times and an improvement in batteries. We're still at the very beginning of this technology.
I agree the ebuggy, while neat, has its own set of challenges. And that fast charging for 30 minutes or less is more practical than battery swapping. Could they even work that to less than 30 minutes? That could change, but so will battery chemistries.
Billvon, Every one of your reasons why battery swapping won't work has merit. Your comment lays out why this concept will likely not work. Quick charging seems to be the likely solution to letting EVs off the leash.
Thanks for the link, Charles. I wonder if something like the e-buggy could catch on. Seems that it would require quite a bit of infrastructure to make it work.
At a conference last week, I spoke with a design engineer from Lear. He is involved in crafting drive chains. He said the standard does not affect how the car is designed. It only affects how the car gets charged up.
I guess the lesson in all this, is that progress moves in fits in starts - but it has to start somewhere. The market will ultimately decide what is a "livable" solution, once the standards wars have died down.
Battery swaping is a stupid dream for all of the reasons already given, and also because of the skill needed to do it. Not only the electrical connections, but also the mechanical attachments will certainly stump a whole large segment of the population, with a lot of failures resulting.
And, once again, there has been no real consideration of the battery side of the much higher recharge rate. Could you even drive away in a car whose battery was already at the upper temperature limit, or even higher? How much battery life would be lost in such a charge? What about connector melt-down"? In the industrial world, where reliability matters a bit, the high current connectors used are fairly expensive, and they require a bit of skill to use and replace. There is the very real chance that a damaged fast charge connector would continue to be used and damage the connectors on the next few vehicles being charged.
As for the connector standards, and then the commuynication standards, we are probably likely to see a situation more like we have with computers, where the goal seems to be that each application uses a connector unlike any other in existance. This is done to assure a captive market for replacements.
So the result will probably be that charging stations will need to deal with many different interfaces, even if some allegedly universal standard is created. The resulting confusion will probably do more to damage the reputation of electric vehicles than any other problems would. It will be interesting indeed to see if there is any way that it could be made to work. The one way that I can see is for the charger to be part of the vehicle and the connector be for the AC power input, which would utilize current industrial standards for connectors and the actual connections.
Keep in mind that this is not a battery pack design, or a battery pack controller - it is just the charger side of things. The battery pack is responsible for its own thermal management. The battery pack can request as much (or as little) power as it wants, so no risk of having a high power charger damage a small/low power battery.
A standards war is almost inevitable at this point. On one side we have CHAdeMO (up to 500VDC at up to 125A), which uses its own (large) connector and signalling is done using CANbus. On the other side we have the new J1772-DC standard (200-450VDC at up to 200A), which employs one of the most hideous connectors I've ever seen, and uses homeplug power line carrier for signalling. (The original J1772 scheme, which the new one also supports, did its signalling by varying the duty cycle of a 1 Khz square wave.) And then there's Tesla, which has their own fast DC charging scheme, using a much smaller very sleek connector employing who-knows-what type of signalling.
A fair number of cars already have CHAdeMO support. And the State of California is reportedly in the process of installing around 200 CHAdeMO chargers. Tesla is rolling out superchargers in various places.
It may be possible to build adaptors - the Tesla Model S comes with a J1772 adaptor that works reasonably well in my limited (1 month) experience. But building an adator that handles 90Kw isn't exactly trivial even if you're able to run the DC through it directly, which is by no means certain to be possible in all cases.
Speaking as a veteran of the IETF/ITU standards war, I can't say I'm looking forward to another one.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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