I spoke with a friend of mine who used to run the program for all the charging stations at one of the major utilities and their efforts to do this for the last 18 years. He is now the Managing Director of one of the new charging companies and was involved in the J1772 standard, etc.

He confirmed that they really do mean "single phase" and that it's going to be AC. I asked him why we'd do something this stupid and require every car to have the charger on board for AC when we could feed it DC and he said that the early fears of not being able to use the standard plugs at home (as yet another impediment to EVs) drove this and "that ship had already sailed".

He says it will be the third generation before we even try to go with standardized DC instead of AC for the charging stations. A real shame to add that cost of the charger/converter to every car instead of the electric charging unit itself.

However, he told me the numbers right now are still inverted.....in other words, there are more charging points than there are EVs on the road whereas with ICE, there is something like 2000 vehicles for every gas pump. It will take some volume in EVs before these economics kick in and it's more cost effective to add features/cost to the charging station than to the cars themselves.

I still think this is short sighted as hell, but apparently it is what it is for now.

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Thing 1: Different battery packs would need different voltages, so a single DC charging setup would only satisfy a small fraction of cars.

Thing 2: Any car with an AC motor (which is basically all of them, beyond some home conversions), already has the capacity to convert AC into DC on board. That functionality is required to implement regenerative braking.

So rather than AC charging being an added cost to the cars, I would argue that DC charging is an added cost, since you have to duplicate the power electronics hardware by putting one copy in the car (the AC motor controller) and a second copy in your garage.

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While it's true that it's possible to use your inverter to charge your vehicle as though the vehicle were regen braking (so-called "reductive" charging), AFAIK, most are using a separate charger. AC Propulsion has the patents on it, so all of the AC-150 based vehicles (Tesla, Mini, E-Box) support it, of course.

That said, right now, and for a long time, one of the big impediments to EV adoption under CARB was that the vehicles all required special chargers to be installed in peoples' homes at a cost of thousands of dollars each. And given the ubiquity of NEMA 5-15s, it seems pretty dumb to make a car that can't support at least 5-15 sockets. Talk about making your car inconvenient to charge! And that's only, what, an extra 10 pounds or so even if you *don't* use reductive charging? And I'd argue that 14-30 or 14-50 should be really seen as a minimum, since those sockets are pretty common, too (dryer sockets, range sockets, RV sockets, etc).

While a pure DC system may be fine if we were designing our nation's entire electrical infrastructure from scratch, we live in an AC world, with AC sockets everywhere, and EVs need to support that. And since they support that, it only makes sense for Level 1 charging to be the same sort of power you get from a 5-15.

Now, for very high power charging, that's obviously going to be DC. It makes no sense for force cars to carry around very high power AC/DC converters when very high power AC sockets are so rare. So-called "Level 3" charging, however, is not yet standardized. I hope we get a standard sooner rather than later.

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Thats funny. How much do you think gas pumps go for? A buck and quarter?

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