I work in the Volkswagen Group and will only add that Audi and Porsche have to go along just because of synergy effects, apart from the fact that they also belong to the Volkswagen Group and do what their mother wants.
Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
301–310 of 653 posts
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you explain why you feel plug-and-charge is so important? I have used chargers with and without it and while it is slightly more convenient to just plug in and go, it doesn't feel like such a huge improvement that I absolutely need it. I agree that having a different app for every brand of charging station would be annoying, but what about just accepting a credit card the way we do with gas stations now?
Yep. Regular petrol stations figured out pay at the pump decades ago. Why is this such a problem for EV charging?
EV are brand new and give us a chance to think of new and interesting solutions for problems that were solved decades ago. The average baby is about 75% water so do you really want to go through the trouble of separating it from the bath water? /s
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You need... I submit a counterexample of the huge network of Tesla superchargers that can do the job quite well with the NACS connector. maximum power output of 600 kW and a maximum current of 615A at 1,000V https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1269/tesla-v4-supercharger... The practical limits are based on the cars and their batteries, not the charge port.
Supercharging, yeah. But you (or rather "everyone") won't constantly be supercharging. You'll mostly do it at home or at your office. 7kW :)
Places where you don't need a fast charge? Overnight at home. From arrival to lunch at work. After lunch to quitting time. And even those times assume you drive more than 50 miles/day, which most folks don't.
What was the problem again?
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
If ICE cars were invented today, every manufacturer would try to lock you in with their own shape of fuel tank opening. Have a toyota? Use the round fuel pumps. Ford? You need to find a pump with a notch on the end of the end so it's compatible with your tank. BMW? Two notches--find a different fuel station! Jeep? Square shaped pump! Or you need to keep a set of $100 dongle adapters in your trunk at all times. $400 f…
If cars were invented today, they'd never let us have them. "It's like a horse and buggy, but much faster and heavier." "But it'll know somehow how to avoid other vehicles and pedestrians and trees and houses and such?" "No, the driver has to pay continuous attention or it'll veer wildly and hit whatever's in front of it." "Shouldn't it run on rails? Or between protective barriers?" "Painted lines."
That's a good and hilarious point.
In today's safety obsessed world, cars are a terribly unsafe anachronism. Somehow tech people are more afraid to run an non-sandboxed tab in a browser than drive a 3-ton vehicle 1 painted line away from similar vehicles going the other way with a speed differential of 100 miles per hour.
That fair, I guess, since physics aren't part of a JS-bootcamp.
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have done multiple 10+ hour (although no multi day) road trips in an ev. It was fine. I had problems exactly one time and i was able to just go to a different charger a mile away. All of the chargers I've used had apps, but they also allowed using a credit card, which seems like it would have solved your problem just as well. And that's already a solved problem, even if not every charging network uses it.
Now go abroad where charging app is not available in your country or requires local phone number to register, uses local language, or even wants local address or local payment method. Just give me website god damn it.
My story of charging in Germany one time a year ago:
The charger requires an app, ok fine. Downloaded the app, had to setup the whole account with my address(UK address was allowed as my address), verify my email, verify my phone number(UK one was accepted), fine, done.
Went to add my payment card - nope, the billing address has a pre-filled country field set to Germany, can't change it. It says ring this number in case of any problems. I ring the number just to hear:
"Sorry, our customer service operators are not available on Sunday. Call back on Monday after 9am".
Imagine if filling up with petrol was such a lottery.
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#306This makes me sad in a way that's a little hard to articulate. But I'll try! I plug my $9000 2013 Nissan Leaf into an ordinary 120V extension cord each night so I can commute to a neighboring city for work, and the electricity costs me $20/mo. I also have a 1986 Toyota pickup like on Back to the Future that I had to gas up every other week, using 30 gallons of gas per month and costing over $100. So the operating cos…
The reality is that particularly in winter and outside, most recent EV cars will barely gain any charge from a 120V standard power outlet - keeping the battery conditioned eats up all of that power.
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you done any road tripping in an EV? my experience of the app-based charging landscape has been complete horror; apps don’t work, chargers don’t start, payments don’t through.. Just last month was a new app at McDonalds in Sweden, that one asks me to, in the freezing cold, scan a dirty QR code sticker, which takes me to a website I’ve never heard of that wants me to manually enter credit card info, like a phishi…
Yeah I agree having a different app for each station sucks, but I don't really understand how plug-and-charge would solve this. For anything that does support plug-and-charge, don't you still need to register the payment method somewhere in advance? Unless we have some universal payment processor which all the charging networks agree to use I will still need register through an app or something when I encounter a new…
> It seems like the real solution is a law which requires the stations to accept a more universal payment system like credit cards.
No shit, Sherlock? In the UK a lot of fuel pumps have credit/debit card readers built in, and if not cards are accepted everywhere for payment already. But yes electric charging companies here are still wierd about accepting such standardised payments, and we did just introduce a new law about it [0] promising "most" but not all chargers will accept cards.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-laws-to-make-charging...
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#308I am the founder of Starlight Charging[1]. We are working on crazy-low-cost L2 chargers for multifamily apartments. Plug-and-charge is a sine-qua-non for us. One still major unsolved problem is the lack of agreement on a standard for payment/powerline communication from the EVSE to the vehicle. OCPP 2.0.1 and ISO 15118 is supposed to bring "Plug and Charge" capabilities -- this, in theory, would allow drivers to simp…
That’s where governmental regulation should kick in and require compatibility, so you aren’t forced to change charger because you either change car or power company. I expect EU to get there at some point.
It's interesting that governments are more interested in telling you what kind of stove you can buy and seem to have zero interests in telling EV makers what kind of plug they have to use.
It took them the better part of a decade just to bring Apple to the table on USB. I don't have the same faith you do they're going to be able to even partially repeat this success in a much more diverse ecosystem like vehicles.
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only that, how do you even propose to do it? If you just send the payment info via the charging plug, now you have to worry about the payment info being stored in the car and potentially stolen if the car has any security vulnerabilities, including in the charging port. If you use some kind of tokenization or similar then you're inserting third party payment processors into the system and they'll be wanting a cut…
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This is something you add support for as an optional convenience feature because you can do it entirely in software, not something you require people to use. You still need a card reader on the charger.
This is the fundamental problem with all of this stuff -- nobody wants your app. If you can't make it better than sticking a card in the machine, go away. If you can, prove it, by making it an alternative to sticking a card in the machine instead of the only option.
Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug
#310I think people are missing the big story here. This is Tesla winning the charging network battle (it wasn't close before this). Any EV car (which will eventually be all cars) will immediately be available for Tesla's supercharger network. This gives Tesla a massive revenue stream and scale to grow that network even bigger. Anyone who wants their superchargers has to also support all Teslas.
To be clear, this is only in the US. In the EU for example, Tesla were required to adopt the common standard instead, and Superchargers will already charge every EV on the market, as will every other charger.
(No specific comment on the quality of each of the charging standards.)