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

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431–440 of 653 posts

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

#431
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla is opening their network to other brands. By implementing CCS. How do you think it works in Europe right now? They all use CCS, both cars and chargers. Tesla included.

NACS is protocol agnostic. Cars in Europe have different plugs. Tesla will use their protocol and support CCS on chargers. What Tesla offers to other brands in North America is much more advanced. New cars will be able to see on the map how many stalls are available etc. Payments integration etc. It's a far more deeper integration and I guess that's the real big deal that needs to be standardized. Tesla got the best-…

> NACS is protocol agnostic.

Yes, it's just a plug on the end of a CCS charger.

> What Tesla offers to other brands in North America is much more advanced.

They're offering CCS. It's how it works whether you like it or not.

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

#432

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…

IMO that would be better solved by mandating tap and pay payment at EV charging spots. Integrating payments into the charging standard feels like a wild overcomplication by comparison.

Okay, hear me out here. What's stopping us from just having payments be out of band, like with petrol?

Is being able to ask your car to make a long drive across long distances on its own actually something people want to do? Or is it a solution in search of a problem?

(Disclaimer, I live in the UK and not the US. It's possible there are cultural reasons I've missed.)

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

#433
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single EV car that is sold right now in North America except Tesla will need a retrofit. No, they won't need a new ECU because they are already CCS cars. They'll need a dumb adapter if they can't get a new inlet installed.

I expect a degree of intelligence to be important in the adapter. Specifically, unless the adapter is rated for the highest possible current and voltage that the physical form factor can support (1kV, 600A? Is there even a pre-ordained limit? Tesla reports that they’ve tested NACS up to quite impressive voltages and currents.), then the adapter needs to tell the car and/or charger to limit voltage and current. Otherw…

> I expect a degree of intelligence to be important in the adapter.

No, that's done by the car. The adapter just changes the shape of the plug.

The car controls the charge curve.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cable weight corresponds to charging power rating and choice of materials, not plug choice. A combined CCS2 plug is chunkier and might be a bit heavier, but not compared to, say, using a fuel pump.

Just go try them both. CCS2 Has separate AC and DC conductors, and the plug is huge owing to having 2 pair of charging pins and backward compatibility. They are more awkward and heavier than a fuel pump, and significantly heavier than the Tesla plugs. It's terrible.

CCS1 has separate AC and DC pins in the connector, but no cable has conductors for both. I've looked, since I was trying to make a passthrough testing device! Is CCS2 different?

If you get the DC cable, you have conductors on the pilot pins and the DC pins, and the AC pin positions are just empty.

If you get the AC cable, you have conductors on the pilot pins and the AC pins, and the DC part of the connector isn't there at all.

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

#436
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For apartments it would make more sense to have it read the same key fob you use to open the gates or whatever. Then just add it on your monthly building bill

Not a bad idea. We are looking into this. One issue is that the vendors for these keyfobs are super fragmented -- even more so than Plug & Charge adoption.

Worth being aware that, as well as keyfobs being super fragmented, many are woefully insecure. Think "they just say their ID number when you put them in a reader field".

That means you can trivially clone them. Not hugely exciting for access to a (common) hallway in a large building. If cloning someone else's fob gets you free car charging, the incentive is there to clone them. Also, not all buildings will use unique fobs per "unit" (and you'd likely need to support per-resident/tenant fob uniqueness... And something for guests!) -- sometimes it's a single hardcoded value for the whole block or door zone that the fob opens...

You can, of course, build something proper using NFC (and a smartcard running a smartcard applet), which is effectively like your own custom mini "chip and PIN" EMV system -- you would have to design and implement the wire protocol to authenticate the card etc etc, and all the security design around that, but it could be done. That would at least let you have something more than simply shouting your tag ID number into the air like a super basic NFC tag (or RFID keyfob).

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

#437
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The only EVs I've used are the hire-from-the-street ones available in some cities in Europe. There's generally a small credit (free minutes) if you leave them charging at the end of a trip. There are RFID tags in the car to activate the charger — I assume it's essentially equivalent to a company credit card used to buy petrol, or when you hire an ICE car with fuel included and there's a special credit card in the glovebox to use to pay for the petrol.

E.g. https://www.greenmobility.com/dk/en/faq/

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

#438
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation, please. More bluntly: I simply don't believe you. Google has absolutely none of the expertise required to put such a connector together. It requires a very specific set of skills in chip design, signal integrity, and connector design which Google has none of.

I have no idea if Google had anything to do with USB C but "design" doesn't mean "build schematics for". It could be that they just had a few specs they liked and thought would make a good connector and did a rough proposal of form factor and specs.

That's not useful. Here's my diagram for a new connector -> .

Connector design like this is a delicate balance between signal integrity (wants biggger) and mechanical integrity (wants bigger) and size (always smaller).

As for signal integrity: A lot of the signal integrity was papered over by having complex interface chips. This is why there is so much training and negotiation in USB-C.

As for mechanicals: The whole point of USB-C was to take failure-mode data from the previous generations and design a connector that avoided those. USB-C, in spite of how many people bitch about it, was designed so that the the most probable failure modes (which they learned from prior things like mini and micro USB) occur in the cable--ie the replaceable part.

None of this design expertise is inside Google.

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tap-and-pay RF people need to get their act together. The average number of tries needed to get a good read is > 1. For Veriphone units, > 2. Please make it clear where, exactly, the near-field antenna is. Behind the screen? Behind the logo that looks like WiFi? Somewhere inside a separate hockey-puck device? And indicate when the reader is active, too. Light up something. One place I visit regularly had a POS sy…

For what it's worth, contactless is ubiquitous in the UK – the experience is almost always seamless. The only exception being the odd reader with the antenna in a stupid place (these have gotten less common over time) or when your bank decides to force a pin check.

I want to echo this. When contactless is ubiquitous there are pretty much no problems.

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

#440
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation, please. More bluntly: I simply don't believe you. Google has absolutely none of the expertise required to put such a connector together. It requires a very specific set of skills in chip design, signal integrity, and connector design which Google has none of.

There was a similar rumor making the rounds about Apple, spurred by Gruber. But 9to5 Mac did some sleuthing and it seems that, in the case of Apple, it’s not entirely truthful: https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/ Google also doesn’t seem to have fulfilled a bigger role than Apple did.

Apple is, at least, far more plausible as they did design a connector in the same timeframe.
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