Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 653 posts

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#391

Post by freeAgent »

SEJeff wrote: post #33
clouddrover wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people aren't aware of what's happening. That's a consequence of lazy reporting. Tesla's charging standard is being dropped and CCS will be used by everyone. It's a shame North America still has years of plug incompatibilities and adapter fiddling to look forward to. Europe really got EV charging standardization right. The European EV infrastructure is much further advanced than the North American infrastructure…

> It's a shame North America still has years of plug incompatibilities and adapter fiddling Not really, Tesla has over 24k charging stalls in the US. The second biggest is Electrify America, and they have only 3,800 charging stalls. There really aren't a lot of EV chargers that are non-tesla in the US, unlike the EU.

It sounds like you’re talking about DCFC. AC chargers are much more common and they are predominantly using the J1772 connector today.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#392

Post by ska »

akouri wrote: post #362
why_at wrote: post #224

Earlier 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?

Tap & Pay with a ccard still requires you to fiddle with a station and slows you down. If you are plugging in at home (which is our target market), the fewer interactions needed the better. Imagine every time you get home you need to take your wallet out, tap the machine, wait for some 3rd party api to talk to the charger in the dimly lit basement, and then and only then you can leave. This is like 30 seconds of your…

That makes sense that the use case in a shared home lot is different than out and about, but still doesn't obviously suggest payment routing over the charger - wouldn't monthly billing be better from the consumers point of view? You'd only need a car identifier for that.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#393

Post by iwontberude »

akouri wrote: post #195

I 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…

Using sine-qua-non was a classy way to obfuscate your meaning. I liked it and I don’t know why exactly. I had to read a definition to understand something that was so simple.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#394

Post by akouri »

namdnay wrote: post #382
akouri wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tap & Pay with a ccard still requires you to fiddle with a station and slows you down. If you are plugging in at home (which is our target market), the fewer interactions needed the better. Imagine every time you get home you need to take your wallet out, tap the machine, wait for some 3rd party api to talk to the charger in the dimly lit basement, and then and only then you can leave. This is like 30 seconds of your…

If it’s a multi-family home system, why not just use contactless badges/fobs to identify each family? When you move in you sign the contract, give your bank details and get a fob. Then just badge with the fob to charge

Not a bad idea. Will look into it!

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#395

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

spaceywilly wrote: post #319
jakewins wrote: post #237

Earlier 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…

If I may ask what seems like an obvious question… why can’t they just use credit card terminals like gas stations have been using for many decades?

RV charging has much smaller installations than gas. Instead of gas stations, the most common SV charging will eventually be thick poles on the footpath so you can charge wherever you park, or small one or two bay charging facilities at various businesses. That's the sort of charging infrastructure you want and seamless payment solutions is an enabling tech.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#396

Post by akouri »

iwontberude wrote: post #393
akouri wrote: post #195

I 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…

Using sine-qua-non was a classy way to obfuscate your meaning. I liked it and I don’t know why exactly. I had to read a definition to understand something that was so simple.

Glad my high school Latin classes came in useful for something.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#397

Post by fexatious »

l72 wrote: post #250

While this sounds good, why are we so focused on charging stations? It seems to me, it would make much more sense to have a series of batteries that can quickly be removed, and have battery exchanges. Then, if you need a charge, you pull over to a battery exchange, swap out batteries in a few seconds, and go on your way. I have seen this in China with electric scooters, and it seems like it could scale well for cars…

I think scooters are about where it stops working well at a consumer level.

Battery swapping exists in the forklift industry but it is complicated and dangerous. Forklift batteries are about a thousand pounds (less than car batteries) and often open cell lead acid (which has additional challenges that lithium doesn't like spills, watering, and gas discharge). In the type of forklifts I occasionally see, the batteries sit on rollers with a side access door and lockout. the tunnel the battery lives in is a little wider than the battery, has a gate that must be reinstalled, and the battery slides around a little during operation. Battery is connected to the system with a flexible connector.

Despite the electric forklift battery swapping industry being a lot smaller than the car charging industry it seems to be a reasonably dangerous affair. there are significant OSHA regulations, and a nonzero number of yearly injuries.

If you were going to operate a car battery swapping lot, you would probably need: powered battery swapping trucks manned by professional operators, a very flat well maintained driving surface, an indoor charging room, a standardized car battery placement, access system, tie down system, and battery size. you would need to worry about things getting caught in the battery doors, the battery - car cable getting severed, making sure you were perfectly lined up with the access door, and about doing some sort of tie down routine.

It's doable but it would be a LOT of work to get right. Batteries aren't as fungible as tanks of gas so you'd probably only use such a system for corporate vehicle fleets or special lease pools.

Second link isn't great and is selling batteries but it seems to cite useful figures

https://www.osha.gov/etools/powered-industrial-trucks/types-...

https://www.onecharge.biz/blog/lithium-batteries-get-the-top...!

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#398

Post by gruez »

zackmorris wrote: post #200

This 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…

>* Level 2 J1772 chargers have a resistor that tells the EV how much wattage to draw. But that just passes the buck to the user, who now must ensure that the outlet can provide that wattage. A better system would have a smart power manager that senses current saturation or voltage drop near the point where the circuit breaker trips. We also need smart breakers that add noise/harmonics/phase as they approach their limit, which EVs would detect to self-regulate. And we need breakers that trip for a nominal time like 1 second or shorter, or however long power supplies can continue to operate uninterrupted, so that a tripped breaker isn't a showstopper.

wouldn't it be way less work for the homeowner to figure out how much current their wiring is rated for, and use an adapter that reports a static current? Why introduce complexity by making current negotiation dynamic?

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#399

Post by akouri »

jakewins wrote: post #237
why_at wrote: post #224

Earlier 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?

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…

This is exactly it. My dad almost missed some of my sister's wedding fiddling with the same type of crappy UX on a no-name charger.

Re: Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi say they will use Tesla's EV charging plug

#400

Post by AmericanChopper »

why_at wrote: post #224
akouri wrote: post #195

I 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…

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?

Because according to the parent commenter, any company that doesn’t let them take control of their payments is a walled garden. I mean, how is their startup going to make any money if these charging companies don’t give it to them?
Post reply on HN