DC fast charging: J1772 CCS vs CHAdeMO vs Supercharger, etc.

[cwerdna]

FWIW, I test drove the BMW i3 2x at CES in Vegas. BMW had brought along multiple ABB J1772 CCS DC FCs. I forgot the count but there were at least 4 and they were for charging their test drive vehicles. IIRC, I heard there were 45 vehicles for test drive.

They had only 20 kW max output (I'll have to take a look at my pics later). They were not permanently installed and IIRC, they were all gone when I walked by the parking lot hours after the show ended for the year.

 

[psykokid]

I'm going to post the couple SAE Combo charger locations that I've found other than the Fashion Valley San Diego location that eVgo has..

Irvine:

Woodbury Town Center : http://api.plugshare.com/view/location/38327
Quail Hill Shopping Center : http://api.plugshare.com/view/location/20757

both are near restaurants and they charge $5 bucks for a quick charge..

 

[NomadMac]

There's a new charging station in Pt. Reyes Station in west Marin County. It has J1772 and CHAdeMO.
Greenlots informs me the owner will be putting in CCS in the future in a nearby location.

 

[TonyWilliams]

I'm going to post the couple SAE Combo charger locations that I've found other than the Fashion Valley San Diego location that eVgo has..

Irvine:

Woodbury Town Center : http://api.plugshare.com/view/location/38327
Quail Hill Shopping Center : http://api.plugshare.com/view/location/20757

both are near restaurants and they charge $5 bucks for a quick charge..

There are also one or two between Phoenix and Tucson. Without exception, all 5 known Frankenplug locations also have a CHAdeMO charger sitting right next to it.

Hopefully, some enterprising person will start a Google Map page with just the Frankenplug stations?

 

[NomadMac]

Plug Share is working on a filter.

 

[NomadMac]

In reference to my earlier post regarding the new charging station in Pt. Reyes, west Marin county, I was pleasantly surprised to get an email from the CEO of Sunspeed regarding my inquiry and future CCS capability.
(I was surprised as most companies can't be bothered to even pick up the phone. I've called Blink twice in the last week to let them know that their local station was down, while showing a Microsoft Windows error on the display. They didn't seem very appreciative at all, to say the least.)

FYI, Sunspeed wants to implement a series of charge stations on Highway 1 from Eureka to SoCal.

Richard's response:

Lin at Greenlots forwarded your message to me regarding the time frame for upgrading the SunTrail DC fast charger at Point Reyes Station to the SAE Combo (CCS) connector.
The short answer is between 3-6 months. The plan is to upgrade to an ABB Terra-53 unit with CCS and CHAdeMO connectors and 50KW capacity. ABB is telling me that the earliest the new unit will be available is April. I hope to have the upgrade completed before June, so it is available for summer use. That said, county permits and PG&E upgrades are involved, so there may be unexpected delays.

Sincerely,

Richard Sachen, Jr.
CEO/Founder
Sunspeed Enterprises Inc.

 

[psykokid]

Hopefully some of the Chevrolet Dealers in the LA area will invest in the quick charger, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. When the BMW i3 comes out middle of this summer hopefully the BMW dealerships will install quick chargers with the SAE combo plug. Fortunately there are a few BMW dealerships pretty close, not sure how they will feel about someone in a Chevrolet bellying up next to an i3 to grab a quick charge :lol:

 

[Nashco]

So, did you pick it up yet?

Yes.

 

[cwerdna]

Hopefully some of the Chevrolet Dealers in the LA area will invest in the quick charger, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. When the BMW i3 comes out middle of this summer hopefully the BMW dealerships will install quick chargers with the SAE combo plug. Fortunately there are a few BMW dealerships pretty close, not sure how they will feel about someone in a Chevrolet bellying up next to an i3 to grab a quick charge :lol:

Heck, there are even some Nissan dealers who don't like Leafs coming to charge. :roll:

Some have policies where they frown upon or refuse to let Leafs charge there (esp. to use their CHAdeMO DC FC) unless they bought/leased from that dealer. Problem w/that is that you likely bought/leased from a dealer close to you and wouldn't need to charge there anyway.

 

[MysteriousJ]

Plug Share is working on a filter.

The SAE Combo filter is there, now it's up to the users to go in and update their previous posts (and any future ones) to include it. If you enable the filter it shows 0.

 

[psykokid]

Plug Share is working on a filter.

The SAE Combo filter is there, now it's up to the users to go in and update their previous posts (and any future ones) to include it. If you enable the filter it shows 0.

Yes.. saw that too.. I think a good addition would be to have the two quick charge connectors differentiated Maybe something like SAE Combo QC and CHAdeMO QC. While i do think that most new ones that go in will have both plugs, i think it makes sense to differentiate them.

 

[NomadMac]

A check of Bay Area dealers shows that suddenly, there are quite few Sparks with fast charging available.

 

[psykokid]

A check of Bay Area dealers shows that suddenly, there are quite few Sparks with fast charging available.

Learned tonight that just because it's on the dealers website does not mean it's available for pickup. Apparently when a dealer has ordered the car and they are in transit to said dealer the info is pushed to the dealers inventory listing. So yes they have it listed, but they may or may not physically have one on hand. Make sure you call first and have someone verify that they physically have the car there..

 

[NomadMac]

A check of Bay Area dealers shows that suddenly, there are quite few Sparks with fast charging available.

Learned tonight that just because it's on the dealers website does not mean it's available for pickup. Apparently when a dealer has ordered the car and they are in transit to said dealer the info is pushed to the dealers inventory listing. So yes they have it listed, but they may or may not physically have one on hand. Make sure you call first and have someone verify that they physically have the car there..

Good point. I drove by Novato Chevrolet and there was a white 1 in stock with no mention of it on their website. They do note, though, of other cars in transit.

 

[gra]

Plug Share is working on a filter.

The SAE Combo filter is there, now it's up to the users to go in and update their previous posts (and any future ones) to include it. If you enable the filter it shows 0.

So how do you edit the charger type? Clicking on 'Edit' just brings up the station location and description info.

 

[psykokid]

SAE Combo filter isnt on the app yet, will probably come out next time they push an update to the app/play store.

Anyhow. I ended up picking up my spark from City Chevrolet in San Diego. Part of the plan to make it back home was to stop and use one of the SAE quick chargers that i had found in Irvine as it was just inside the maximum range of the car with a little safety margin. I make it to the first charger off the 405 and sand canyon, pull up, swipe my card, plug it in hit start and... nothing.. Charger cannot communicate with car. Hrmm.. I plugged into the regular level 2 charger and went into Starbucks and decided to read the manual to make sure i wasn't missing anything. No such luck.. So I decide to head up the street and check out the other SAE quick charger. I get up there and its the same routine, connect charger and cannot communicate with the car.. Rats.. By this point i've got 22 miles of range and 46 miles to go home. So i connect to one of the other level two chargers and recline the seat and take a nap. At this point it was wishing the Spark had a higher capacity on board charger like the Fiat and Focus. As it was it took about 4 hours to get the battery up to 66 miles on the range. Hrmph.

In hindsight I should have jotted down the QC numbers and called the operator to see wth was going on with the SAE combo plug. Might have been that it wasn't configured correctly and since no one with an SAE quick charger has tried it no one knows about it not working right since the CHAdeMO plug was good to go for the other users... the brand on the stations were EVPUMP, but i couldn't find out any more info from some Google searches earlier today. Dunno, as there aren't any more quick chargers with the SAE Combo Plutg that are close to me to test so I cant say whether its a car problem or a charger problem..

 

[cwerdna]

The paltry sales of installed chargers and compatible electric vehicles from the 8 Frankenplug Cast Members is fact.


Protocol .......... US Deployed . World Deployed .... US Cars .... Worldwide Cars
Frankenplug ........ 3 ......................... 0 ..................... 0 ............. 0 ... (moribund)
CHAdeMO ......... 350 ................... 4,000 .............. 40,000 .... 110,000 (growing fast)
Supercharger .... 300 ...................... 325 .............. 16,000 ..... 20,000 (extreme growth)

To finish this off, from http://insideevs.com/december-2013-plug-in-electric-vehicle-sales-report-card/, 76 Spark EVs were sold in December 2013, making for a total of 539 for the months it was sold in 2013.

Seems like 450 month is still a dream... If we toss the 1st month (of 27 units in June) as an aberration, incomplete month or whatever, for the rest, the average has been 85.3 units/month.

Meanwhile, 22.6K Leafs were sold in the US in 2013 (and ~12.7K units for July thru December or ~2128 units/month for those months) and likely ~17K Tesla Model S.

To follow up on this, there's this story from 1/19/14.
Nissan Sells 100,000 LEAFs, Captures 48% Of Worldwide Market To Date:
http://insideevs.com/nissan-sells-100000-leafs-captures-48-of-worldwide-market-to-date/

And from stories like the below:
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-15/tesla-rises-as-model-s-sales-top-13-target-to-finish-strong-3
http://insideevs.com/tesla-model-s-sales-exceeded-22000-units-globally-in-2013/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-14/tesla-delivered-6-900-cars-in-fourth-quarter-executive-says.html

There are now more than 25K Tesla Model S on the road worldwide. I don't have exact US numbers off the top of my head.

 

[cwerdna]

So i connect to one of the other level two chargers and recline the seat and take a nap. At this point it was wishing the Spark had a higher capacity on board charger like the Fiat and Focus. As it was it took about 4 hours to get the battery up to 66 miles on the range. Hrmph.

At this point, off the top of my head, about the only currently sold (as new) mass-market highway legal BEVs w/only a ~3.3 kW OBC are the Spark EV and the Leaf S trim (lowest trim) w/o the "charge" package (which would add a 6 kW OBC + CHAdeMO port). '13+ Leaf SV and SL trims and just about everyone else has a 6+ kW OBC now.

Focus Electric, Fit EV and even the defunct Coda have had a ~6 kW OBC all along, before the Leaf got it in the '13 model year...

 

[TonyWilliams]

Anyhow. I ended up picking up my spark from City Chevrolet in San Diego.

Perhaps the next time that you're down in San Diego, you can try the Frankenplug at Fashion Valley shopping mall?

This is exactly where we were with CHAdeMO in 2010... unproven technology.

 

[psykokid]

Anyhow. I ended up picking up my spark from City Chevrolet in San Diego.

Perhaps the next time that you're down in San Diego, you can try the Frankenplug at Fashion Valley shopping mall?

This is exactly where we were with CHAdeMO in 2010... unproven technology.

Perhaps. I had a full charge leaving the dealer so had no reason to go check it out. I initially was going to spend some time with my cousin who lives in SD but it took so long at the dealer we decided it would have to be some other time. If I had seen him I was going to hit up the SAE charger in fashion valley but alas had no need to.

I heard from one of the people involved with the charging stations on plug share after I posted that the SAE combo charger wasn't working that it wasn't currently working and would be functional in the next 30 days. Thanks for the notice but a bit late. It would have been nice if they had put in the comments section of the pages for the charge locations that the SAE plug wasn't functional. A sign on the charger itself would have been a good idea as well since at that point I didn't know if the problem was with my car or with the chargers. Looks like it was the latter.