GM proposes standardized plug for electric vehicles
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 17th 2009 8:11AM
posted Apr 17th 2009 8:11AM
Say what you will about General Motors (okay, so maybe you should say it under your breath), but there's no denying the brilliance of this idea. On the company's FastLane blog, one Gery Kissel explains that engineers and suits will be meeting up next week to discuss the standardization of common components that will hopefully be installed in forthcoming electric vehicles. Notably, the SAE J1772 Task Force will be responsible for designing a plug that links each plug-in vehicle to an "ecosystem," ensuring that drivers can pull into any charging station from Key West to Neah Bay and see a socket that fits their ride. Specifically, the group is being charged with defining a "common electric vehicle conductive charging system architecture for all major automakers in North America," but it remains to be seen if said standard can be hammered out before the Volt's not-to-be-missed 2010 introduction.
Actually a great idea. Now if the gadget makers of the world could also agree I could empty out that drawer of orphaned power adapters in my office!
At least most phones are switching to microUSB. But yea, switching to bluetooth/wireless charging would be best.
How about an existing standard - like the kind used on desktop PSUs, monitors, TVs, some laptop chargers, some external peripherals, etc.
Wait - does that mean that there is already a standard and GM is just doing this for marketing as a last-ditch effort to remain afloat? Nah, that couldn't be it - they're still going strong
I couldve sworn everyone was still switching to microUSB!
Funny... GM proposed a standard almost 10 years ago. It was called Inductive Charging and a major feature of the GM-EV1. They even got other major automakers to buy-off on the standard including the US big 3 and the Japanese big 3.
Since CARB decided that inductive charging was evil back in 2002, I guess we're re-inventing the wheel all over again 10 years later at taxpayer expense.
@RoboDan
I would like to see the cable used to power a desktop PSU, much less charge a laptop carry the amperage needed to *quickly* charge the batteries of an EV.
You know, I hope they take advantage of this to innovate. For example, I'd make charging require some sort of authorisation service, meaning that stolen vehicles can be refused power. Or integrate data in the power cable, giving easier access to onboard devices when it's plugged in to your home. You could use that same cable to upload GPS data to a secure police server, which could be used to track stolen vehicles as an alternative to the authorisation service.
This would limit the incentive for thieves and people who buy stolen cars from them, as vehicles will be easier to track or unable to be recharged from a roadside station. It would also allow manufacturers to properly integrate media playback devices in cars with home computers where music is typically stored. People could plot a route from their home computer and use the fact that the car is on the network to upload the data to their GPS device, or route data could be collected and uploaded to a local council server to help city planning to ease congestion. Building in data functionality really gives manufacturers room to innovate.
Of course, this would have to be done in a standards compliant manner, as we all know how car manufacturers love to tie people in to proprietary technologies. To allow for expansion, it should use something similar to Bluetooth's profiles, which eliminate the need for drivers (pun intended) and ensure compatibility, whilst giving manufacturers room to innovate. Of course, services such as GPS tracking for the police and town planning using GPS route data require security and responsible use on the part of those services. Given that access to the data is properly controlled (for example, only being authorised to track cars that have been reported stolen), the automotive industry could really take a leap forward with this.
Here's the deal: I can't live with having to stop every 40 miles to charge up. When they get fully electric cars to go 250+ miles on a single charge, give me a call. Until then, it won't matter because I won't buy one. Green or not, nobody will be travelling very far in these things until they go a long, long way on said charge.
KarlW, your ideas sound rather Orwellian. No thanks. I don't want a car that tracks where I have been and uploads it to the police. That information is nobody else's business. A simple "call home" feature would be better, ala Lo Jack.
well your in luck Slappy Wag. Tesla has over 250 miles per charge, the volt will have 300 miles (with gasoline recharge), and a few others have that capability. so go one join in the future we all call now.
This idea isn't brilliant. It's painfully obvious that this needs to be done. I can't believe that they hadn't been talking about this for at least a few years.
@Slappy Wag - the Volt doesn't need to be recharged every 40 miles. That's just the range of it's battery. There's still that little thing called a gasoline engine in it.
Non-standardized components hasn't been a difficulty for computer manufacturers (DELL!!!), just consumers and the repairman. I imagine the same would be similar for electric cars.
but do you trust G.M with this??? they are very tricky.
Not at all GM should have gone out of business long ago.
*sigh* it will be many many years before we see electric vehicles become the norm. Whos going to pay to convert every fuel station into a powering station?
Thats billions if not trillions of dollars worldwide.
It's called the Free Market. If gas stations want to last into the electric age, they'll convert.
And who said only gas stations could do this? This definitely opens up a new market for other providers.
Not to mention the power has to come from somewhere, electric companies will need to upgrade their infrastructure.
Its such a big leap, and no one is willing to make the first move it seems, thus the lack of real progress....
It seems a hell of a lot easier to provide an electrical outlet than digging a huge hole for a tank full of toxic stuff that also can create a huge fire and explode, electrical outlet you only need a big powercable and some space for the cars to stand.
"Free Market"
The only thing Free about the GM market is the TAX MONIES THEY ARE GETTING FROM TAX PAYERS... even people who dont even use a car..
FACK YOU GM! STFU and close your word hole you wont be around to sell 1 of your crappy electric cars...
You had a chance and you killed it off..
DIE GM DIE
@bondsbw: I agree with the idea that this opens up all kinds of new venues for charging. If I owned a large parking garage downtown in a major city, I'd be sticking some solar panels and/or wind turbines on the top and putting in charging stations at every space. When a driver pulls in, they swipe their credit card and plug their car in. Car charges while they work / shop / go to the ball game / whatever, I charge the credit card for the electricity they use and I help keep my electricity costs low with the solar / wind power on the roof. If there are less cars charging that what's being produced by my solar / wind generators, I can sell it back to the electric utility. I can still produce income, even with an empty parking lot!
Win, win!
@Wwhat: Not to mention that many gas stations closed when they raised the standards for the underground gas tanks a few years back. It was too expensive for some stations to dig up and replace they leaky storage tanks they had. Seems like an upgrade to electric would be a lot easier.
Where do you suppose you get the money to fit out your parking garage?
Thats half the problem, everyone has all these great ideas on how electric cars should be and what have you, but no one has the cash to put those ideas into action.
Plus i dont think ExxonMobile aka BP Shell etc would be too happy.
@Adderz:
Yea, the oil companies might frown upon you, but the ConEds, PECOs, Excelons, whatever power companies will probably give you a nice pat on the back.
@wjousts:
I'm not sure what kind of wind turbine/solar technology your privy to, but if that garage of yours is any bigger than one spot, you might have a problem meeting your energy demands.
@Adderz: Same place all start up business' get money. Venture capital, banks, investors, etc. Ok, so maybe it's not so easy right now, but a good business plan shouldn't have a problem finding money. You need to spend money to make money.
Plus, who gives a fuck what the oil companies thinks of the idea? AFAIK, they don't own parking garages.
@elBravo: Solar and/or wind is just to supplement the electricity you get from the grid. As I said in my first post, it's to reduce your electricity costs, not to completely replace the electric utility. Plus, at least some of the time, you'd be generating more than your using and you can sell it back.
Here's a solution -- you buy electricity off the grid at 8 cents per kwhr, and you sell it at your EV "filling station" at a price slightly less that the mileage equivalent for gasoline. Fill up the battery in your Tesla roadster? Sure bud, that'll be $18 please (for about $4 worth of juice).
Outrageous profit you say? Maybe, but what else is the driver going to do when the only socket for his "standard plug" is at the government approved and licensed charging station?
Of the $14 gross profit, the station will probably get to keep $2, $10 will go to the feds for taxes and license fees, and fat ass Al Gore will get the last $2 for carbon offsets.
Schweppes:
I'd like to see you say that to the faces of the millions of people working in General Motors factories around the world, and their families.
Regardless of their corporate overlords, working at a GM factory has been some people's life jobs. And it's not gonna be easy for them to find jobs if ALL the GM factories in the world close at once.
I actually didn't mind the look of the old electric charger design. Wonder what was wrong with it.
Right. What's wrong with the old three prong design?
Three prong US? Three prong European? (or do they have 4?)...
There's not even a global standard on Electricity yet.
I do hope they come up with a standard motor mount as well. It would be nice to have competitors in every field trying to produce more efficient motors as well as batteries instead of being tied into your car and the motor that came with it.
I don't care as long as I can buy an $2 adapter from monoprice.
monoprice is right up there with internet porn....one of the greatest things ever
So who will be there to carry on the standard when this turd is bankrupt and gone.
SAE
Seems like this would be common sense, its the only way electric can make it in the usa, we have to standard plugins
I hope Sony never develops an electric car.
LOL, if Sony does it is sure to use a proprietary charger. :-)
We need wireless charging. That would be epic, never having to refuel your car again. evur.
then you park close to your neighbour every night...
wireless charging would be kinda dangerous for hybrid (petrol + electric) cars... unless it's charged by some kinda electromagnetic field with a specific frequency :P or whatever.
... and charging a car battery takes how long ???
I'd prefer the battery swap idea I've read somewhere the other day.
That is the model being used by Better Place
http://www.betterplace.com/
Drive in like you are going to one of those Laser Wash car wash thingies and a robot arm will lift out your depleted battery and put in a fresh one in under 5 minutes.
Didn't they just develop a new battery that could charge in 10 minutes? That'd be workable, I think..
Good idea; gas stations have a standard nozzle size, why not electrics, too?
Hopefully, companies will create converters for those electrics that don't meet the standard...assuming that's even possible,
I can see myself driving around with a bag full of electrical plug adapters.
Its the only thing can do GM, to get out their crisis?
Please be Mini usb
PLEASE BE MINI USB!!!!
Charge a freaking electric car via mini-usb? Sure but it'll take about a year or 3 to charge it and the connector will have to be replaced every week.
Of course GM proposes a "standard" plug, everyone will propose a "standard" plug... look at it this way, do you think that they will allow *anyone* to put that into their own product without a royalty? NOT. I'll bet they will "offer" their plug to all manufacturers for the "low, low" price of $x.xx based on the purchase of x thousand units.
Actually yes I expect it to be royalty free and in a group effort by various car manufacturers.
If it's good enough for phones... can you get 30A through a microUSB plug?
haha, it's called a 'single use spot welder' but sure.
@Wwhat: Awesome :)
Looks like this place needs a "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" tag. :D
and they are pushing electric cars already without a standard connector?! WTF
Chicken, egg, ah who cares as long as we get there in the end.
I'll be developing the first dual-headed cable designed for vehicle-to-vehicle power transfers, to help stranded electric car drivers who tried to see how far below "E" they could run their cars.
Either that, or for siphoning off the jiggawatts from other vehicles...
Jigga what?
Jigga who? (rap reference)
Unless battery technology improves dramatically this is useless. Who's going to stand around at a charging station while their car charges. I can't even stand some gas pumps that are slow...I rather go to another gas station and vow never to come back to that gas station if it's slow.
How about the Palm Touchstone?
Yeah and even better, make the roads out of touchstones so it charges while I drive and I never have to stop!
What ever happened to their standard "paddle" that they developed for the EV1 and then "standardised"? I thought that was a nice idea - perhaps a little big, but very user friendly.
Check out: http://ev1-club.power.net/newchg.htm
Why can't the auto makers just use the standard marine / rv "shore power" type outlet and receptacle? There are various versions rated up to 100 amps, they're safety-locking, weather proof and proven reliable from almost 100 years of usage. Only reason to reinvent the wheel would be so some group can charge "licensing rights" and "certification fees", and then have the government force everyone to use the special plug.
You have a good point there... are those marine plugs patented?
I don't believe they are - seeing as one can be had for about £3-5 here it would suggest not. Blindingly obvious suggestion when you point it out. Bit had to connect and disconnect when they corrode but having found one sat in a pool of water in a boat several times and having no issues suggests that they are rather hardy and ubiquitous.
But no, lets have a consortium to design some kind of glow in the dark gps traceable cat5 encapsulating umbilical, with magnetic connection of course so some member of the fairer sex doesn't drive away with it still plugged in.
What's wrong with the standard 3-prong household plugs that fit into just about every wall outlet in the US? There already is a standard, at least in this country. Other countries can use their standards, and there's already adapters being sold to adapt all countries' plugs to all others.
I was thinking the same thing but I assume the new standard has some means of data transmission as well as just power, for smarter charging.
And those plugs run very little amps, so if you want to charge in a few days thats cool. But if you want to use the thing in a few hours your gonna need to push alittle more energy. Dryer plug maybe, or range.
What about a parking spot you drive over and can inductively charge. Maybe not feasible for public spaces, since debris can cover parts up, but for a garage it would be nice.
Its the same idea as the cars we already have. I havent seen a car that has anything vastly different in the gas entry point. You put the thing in the hole and pull the trigger (Alittle dirty but its a phallic world) the same idea should go for electric. However the people that supply the stuff that goes in your gastank dont want this and will most likely try their best to block its passage. So expect the sale of universal car adapters to begin.....
This is a great idea...until a new battery technology emerges. I've thought a lot about this, a new battery tech would change near every aspect of the world, and it would be GREEEEAT!
Free Market...ahhh no such thing. Only the SLOW market.
I haven't read all the comments, so I don't know if all of what I'm about to say has been said before, but I just have a few thoughts. The first thing that needs to be pointed out (and I know this has already been said here) is that we currently don't have the infrastructure to support an all- or majority-electric vehicle nation. Now, I'm sure we could get everything up and running fairly quickly, but another issue arises. While the cost of running an EV is incredibly low at the moment, once we have a large number of these cars on the road, the cost of electricity will go up. Why? Two reasons: dramatically increased demand; and the fact that the power companies will realize that they can charge more and people will pay it, because they need the power to drive. Now, someone (I believe it was wjousts) mentioned a theoretical parking garage with generators (solar panels, wind turbines, etc) on top. People would pull in, swipe their credit card, and charge up their car while they worked/shopped/played. While this is a fantastic idea, it raises a host of security issues. Having that many credit card readers just sitting in a parking garage, it would be hard to secure everything. What if someone hacked a reader and stole dozens of numbers? Your insurance against happenings like that would be incredibly expensive.
Now, I'm super-psyched for this oncoming electric revolution, but we need to think about these issues before we rush headlong into this, blind with excitement.
If they do it right, Chevy that is. They can move forward with thier standard while making the receptacle on thier cars modular. It is just an electric plug after all. So if some competing standard wins, or if they need to change later, it does not take much to swap out the modular receptacle on thier cars to meet the new plug types of the future.
Although I agree that all cars should use the same plug. WTF is wrong with a standard 20amp 3 prong plug for fast charges and a 15amp 110v option which isn't as fast but nice to have. Is San Fran afraid that people will put clothes dryers in the back of trucks and just dry their laundry in an electric vehicle parking spot?
Better Place (betterplace.com) has promoted standardizing not only the charging interface, but the battery interface and the software used to intelligently time the charging sequence to minimize cost and spread out the grid load. This has all been in the context of ensuring that concerns over proprietary systems that lock out competition would have an inhibiting effect on governments/municipalities agreeing to and helping to fund the deployment of the extensive infrastructure. I'm glad that a more visible company such as GM is now showing similar vision.
What, nobody else just.. FIGURED this would happen? I mean, petrol (gasoline) fueling equipment is pretty standardized already; why wouldn't you expect the same for any real electric infrastructure? Maybe what cars need is a bank of ultracaps AND batteries, and they can use infrastructure to QUICKLY power up the caps, which would then trickle-charge the batteries after you already left the fuel station?
Also all cars should communicate while on the road. In some way that's not DDoSable.
Micro USB please !
Then, twelve hours later, they'll be able to drive away from the station.
What is so sad is that it took this long for the idea to be suggested. Seriously. Can you imagine how awkward it would have been for gas stations to each have different type of nozzles when autos were just starting out?
I'm quite confident they will screw this up. Most notably they will probably neglect to allow for power to go the OTHER way - from the car to the grid. An electric car's giant battery bank and/or a hybrid or series hybrid's generator should be a very important part of your home's energy system, and maybe, in large volumes the grid as a whole.
Sure, this makes sense but I hope that the design does not come from GM, they don't even have an electric car. How about they choose one of the designs from a company that is shipping EV's and not one that is announcing EV's and then changing them to Hybrids a bit more every day.
I don't see what's wrong with the standard NEMA connectors we've already got.. RV style 220-50amp is pretty much weather and idiot proof to begin with. Although, ideally, I would prefer wireless inductive charging so that no cords are involved. Just park and the car starts taking a charge. I also like the Better Place battery swap stations.
As for GM.. I wish they would just go ahead and die. The EV1 could have competed with the Prius, but they killed it 13 years ago. Although.. I still would like to know if there were external influences (*cough*, *cough*, big petrol companies) that contributed to that decision..
This will never fly, the germans will make something better and we will be stuck in the '00s failing. Besides the future is hydrogen!!! Honda Clarity WILL seriously challenge today's internal combustion engines.
This would be a better idea if they hadn't already done it and then scrapped it to make some money.
In related news:
Belkin has just issued this statement via press release:
"We are deeply saddened that any industry involving electronics would try to restrict the rights of all Americans by forcing the use of a single common outlet architecture. We plan to litigate this issue to the fullest extent allowable by law in an effort to provide no fewer than ten thousand different connector options to our customers. We feel that choice, not mandates, are the way to providing a positive customer experience - why just look at our happy laptop and phone adapter consumers!"
As long as it's not called "i" anything...I'm good...lol
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Heres another idea for them: standardized batteries that can be swapped in 5 minutes or less. That way gas stations could offer battery swapping services to increase the range of EV's.
The GM Volt will never make it to market because the oil industry will never allow it, and as all off us know, the oil industry controls the world and everything in it
This has aleady existed for over a decade. The plug is typically called a Large Paddle Induction plug, and works without metal contact, so there's no danger of some idiot killing himself by shorting the plug, and having his family file a gigantic lawsuit.
It was originally designed and made by a company called Hughes. The EV-1, and most other Zero-emissions mandate EVs of the time used it as well. Most EV charging stations that are put in(at least in the bay area) already have these plugs. I've used them before, work quite well.
GM already made this once, and even sold Toyota on the idea, called it Mange Charge.
Way to go reinvent (your own) wheel, GM.
Lookie, links! http://www.madkatz.com/ev/chargestation.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magne_Charge
Why not a normal outlet with a adapter and regulator?
Let's just hope they get the plug right and that it does not have HDMI or 1394a type problems.