GM proposes standardized plug for electric vehicles
By Darren Murph 
posted April 17th 2009 8:11AM
posted April 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.
@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.