> The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.
That's a disingenuous take. ICE fueling takes significantly less time. So it's not an advantage that you can take a 20-30 minute break away from your car when you can just gas up your car in a few minutes (attended) and be on the road again.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve just quickly filled the gas tank and kept driving. I know all people are different but I suspect not people are closer to me. I know many people who never do long road trips at all.
What I have experienced is having to take 10-15 minutes to find a gas station somewhere around my destination to fill up for the next day. I’ve also had plenty of stops where I’ve stopped for food or drinks and not filled gasoline because there wasn’t any gas station right there.
What’s remarkable with EVs is that on road trips I never find myself going somewhere I wouldn’t be going anyway. Instead of driving to a gas station at my destination, I just park at the hotel/resort I’m staying and charge right there over night.
In Norway almost every road side McDonalds have some fast chargers. As a father that’s where we tend to stop, and where we probably would have taken the kids for a break anyway. If we filled gasoline, even if there was a gas station right next by, that’d be an annoying distraction from what we want to be doing.
As a father with an EV I don’t recognise the situation in the article at all. Maybe Norway and even Denmark (where we took our road trip last year.. they’re a bit behind Norway) is ahead of USA in infrastructure. But it’s not that much ahead. 5 years at most.
Family road trips in EVs is fantastic because you’re encouraged to take breaks at places with playgrounds where kids can burn off some physical energy. And since the car is charging at the same time it doesn’t feel like a waste and you don’t feel any mental pressure to keep driving to get to the destination as fast as possible.
It is an advantage when you were going to take a break away from your car anyway. Fueling up, and then parking, and then getting coffee / food / break means you spend just as much time stopped with an ICE during a road trip as you do with an EV.
Hyundai/Kia do have great maximum charge rates...but the rub is finding a charger that supports those speeds, is not broken, and is not occupied. Is this trivial in Europe? It sure isn't here in the US (even in CA, which has relatively higher adoption rates of EVs).
Telsa's proposed, future v4 standard is still only capable of 250kW and meanwhile CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW, with 700kW chargers being demonstrated.
It's an outdated, proprietary standard in both form and function, even if Tesla claims it's a public standard; they exert total business control over the plug and their charger network. There's no way they'll allow a random car to plug into a supercharger ('safety' and such), no way they'll allow any other payment methods on their network. There's no way they'll support configuring your Tesla to work with third party NACS chargers and payment systems.
The only chargers that exist with NACS connectors are in one country and controlled by Tesla. The only cars with NACS plugs are (at the moment) Teslas and the only proposed additional users are companies that have signed agreements with Tesla.
This is why it's so infuriating that Ford, GM, and Tesla did what they did. They just effectively killed CCS, and thus dealt a major blow to EV adoption in the US for the sake of a market share grab. 800v architecture meant EVs finally could lay claim to being practical for long distance charging. Plug in at a rest stop, everyone hits the bathrooms, maybe a snack, stretch their legs, and the car is nearly full again. A lot of errands and such fit into the 18-20 minute window a nearly-full-charge takes. "NACS" can't offer anywhere near a 18 minute 10-to-80 charge.
The US version of CCS is far from perfect; the weight of the cable causes connection issues due to the poor mechanical design of the socket, and we never should have had a unique CCS connector from Europe to begin with. But Tesla's "North American Charging Standard" is outdated and their supercharger network in addition to being outdated has been woefully underfunded and undersized for a while; with Ford and Chevy piling onto the network, that's going to get even worse.
What's even more infuriating is that in Europe, there is no such thing as "Superchargers", because the EU forced Tesla to use CCS2. And meanwhile, congress hasn't even noticed that Tesla just effectively captured the US EV charging market.
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong giving the world's richest man - an unhinged narcissist to boot - exclusive control over how electric vehicles are charged in the US?
This is incorrect. I’m not sure where you’re finding 250kW as the max for a V4 Supercharger but they’ve been shown to charge at more power in the wild.
"CCS stations have been deployed for years now that can do 400kW"
There is no reliable CCS network in existence in the US. Can you show me a video of someone using these mythical chargers at 400kw to take a long road trip?
Ask yourself this: what could possibly go wrong depending on Electrify America who only exist due to court ordered action and have no incentive to actually do a good job?
CCS1 has no advantages over the Tesla plug. If we're not going to use CCS2, we should use NACS.
You're wrong about the limits. v3 is 250kW, and the limiting factor is the vehicle voltage. Take it up to 800 volts and that's already 400kW. Pushing the amps above 500 is possible for both connectors, with similar levels of difficulty.
My impression was that Hyundai/Kia EVs can take much more than 150kW — more like 350kW. Since 350kW chargers aren't yet common, I don't consider that an advantage when thinking about purchasing. There are plenty of EVs that charge in the neighborhood of 150kW, and a lot more chargers that are able to provide that throughput.
They peak at ~245kW. Charging from a 150kW charger isn't too bad either, because they can sustain that speed most of the time (unlike cars advertising 150kW max where it is only a peak of the curve, and the average is less).
For road trips charging speed is IMHO even more important than the range. My breaks take 20-25 min typically anyway, but a 45-minute car would keep me waiting.
The important difference from ICE refuelling is that you don't have to be by the car when it charges.
I've taken road trips across Europe, and it's been fine. 20min is about as much as I need for a bathroom break and to get a coffee.