Standard For Electric Car Charging Announced 212
SchrodingerZ writes "The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), an international syndicate, has unveiled what is to become the standard for electric car charging. In today's market there are hundreds of different methods and plugs to charge a variety of different cars, now a single multi use plug is announced as the world standard. Called the J1772 , it 'has two charging plugs incorporated into a single design and is said to reduce charging times from as long as eight hours to as little as 20 minutes.' The cumulative work of over 190 'global experts,' the plug can cater to both AC and DC currents for charging. The plug also sets a new standard on safety regulations, including 'its ability to be safely used in all weather conditions, and the fact that its connections are never live unless commanded by the car during charging.' The J1772 beat out its Japanese competitor the CHAdeMO, used as an option on the Nissan Leaf."
Re:Can the car control the cable if the battery di (Score:5, Interesting)
Electric cars have at least two batteries: One main battery for motion (the traction battery) which is the one everyone focuses on, and a traditional 12-volt lead-acid car battery that operates all the normal 12-volt lights and accessories that modern cars are fitted with. If the main traction battery is completely dead - which would be an extreme failure case but let's say it did - the charger controls are all fed from the 12V system so at worst you'd need a quick zap from a set of jumper cables to get things going.
=Smidge=
Re:Hundreds? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have 300 amp service at home. Figure a typical commercial car charging circuit is 200Amps at 240 volts that is 200AH or 48,000Watts charging per hour. the nissan Leaf is a 24Kwh battery pack. BUT you never discharge past 50% so it's in reality a 12KWh battery pack.
So their proposed 200Amp charging station will charge a Nissan Leaf in 15 minutes. the more typical 100Amp charger will charge it in 30 minutes.
no private substation needed. And its currently available.
Although most home installs are the smaller 40 Amp charging station which charge the car from empty in 1 hour 30 minutes. Very few people go for the 100 amp charging station as it requires being raped by a commercial electrician pretty hard. While the 40 amp unit can be installed by a residential electrician for less than $5500.00
Re:GM had a better design (Score:4, Interesting)
the EV1 had a charging paddle that was an inductive connection. safe to use under water.
Instead we get a version that means a 100% dead car = a trip tot he mechanic as it cant "command" the connection to start charging.
I don't think any of the EVs currently shipping will let their charge get that low, but even if that happened you just have to jump the 12v system -- like any other car with a dead battery. (Even modern standards, generally, can't be push-started anymore because the alternator can't generate enough power to get the ECU booted)
GM's volt, for example, won't let the vehicle discharge the 12v system enough to keep the charger from working.
Re:Hundreds? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'd need a *lot* more volts and amps. I have a van, which has an 80 litre tank that takes roughly two minutes to fill. On that 80 litres I get around 950km range, or to translate into American units around 30mpg. Now, I'm hauling around roughly 800kWh of energy in that tank. Let's assume that the vehicle actually turns only 30% of that into motion - that gives us 320kWh worth of actual movement.
So if we assume that an electric car is 100% efficient, it would need 320kWh of batteries to travel 950km - and these would take a correspondingly large amount of power to charge. If you charge for ten hours, you'd need to be feeding in 32kW continuously. If you wanted to recharge as quickly as filling the diesel tank, you'd need 576kW available.
I for one do not welcome our .5MW charging connector overlords.