Here's a more reassuring timeline for that proposed
standardized plug for electric vehicles. The SAE J1772 Task Force-developed charging system, based on an initial design by supplier Yazaki, is now at Underwriters Labs for certification. That's scheduled to be done by the end of May and, if all things go according to plan, it can be adopted for use in the next few months. Speaking to
Autoblog Green, General Motors' Gery Kissel listed his company, Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Tesla among those participating or supporting the standard. He also said the
we-swear-it's-coming-this-year Chevy Volt should be equipped with the new plug, and Tesla's reportedly pledged to adopt it for current plans and retrofit its older models. Things are starting to look up for the EV industry.
posted Apr 21st 2009 9:38PM
Now with Fiber Optics !
+1 for the USB hub charging idea. Id open up my own car charging station thru my window!
-1 for the unnecessary fruit comment..
Verizon FiOS will charge cars one of these days.
Wow, who would have thought the auto industry could move fast with something? :)
They're fast to standardize it, but that doesn't mean they'll be fast to use it. =)
"What?? I thought USB had this all wrapped up!
So much for charging my car off my 17inch MBP..."
Maybe if it ran off of peoples sense of self satisfaction for buying a mac.
Smug Alert!
EDIT : Replied to MK, not Quant.Phys.
+1 for the USB hub charging idea. Id open up my own car charging station thru my window!
-1 for the unnecessary fruit comment..
What?? I thought USB had this all wrapped up!
So much for charging my car off my 17inch MBP...
Just plug it into your neighbors place. That's what I do.
FACK YOU MONSTER CABLES!!!!!..
Oh wait, this is GM speaking?
FACK YOU GM!
Because it'd be so preferable if GM rejected the proposed standard and made up its own plug?
Or is this just hating GM on general principle?
Because GM never gave 2 SHITES about electric cars until now when they are tanking...
Think he'll stroke if Monster Cable and General Motors partner up for mass production of electric cars/cables?
schweppes, you frankly an idiot...which is why i downvoted both your comments. GM has been in serious dire straits since the recession started what...18 months ago? Considering the car's concept first debuted about 27 months ago, and it takes least a year or more in the automotive industry to go from "on paper" concept to a real autoshow concept...something tells me they've been working on this for quite some time.
seeing that this idea was hatched a good year and a half before the largest % increase of crude oil prices in history, and well before the likes of fisker karma, telsa, mitsu's mivev (whatever its called), the eletric mini and others were on the market, i think they were ahead of the curve, not behind it like you're assuming.
+1 for anyone hating on GM
@Schweppes
How can you say GM never cared about electric cars, they are the ones who started the EV1 program. The problem came when they made a stupid decisions, as we are used to seeing from them, to cancel the program. The program also made a EV1 hybrid which was a massive mistake to stop research on.
STFU noobs...
GM is a bad joke... time for them to be wiped out...
The only reason they do anything is because they are ordered to by the Gov.
You actually think they made a Geo metro for profit? its to say they had a car that god good mileage... POS...
You think they make Electric car for profit? when they were making Hummers and Envoys?
Heck... they made all sorts of shit product... THey had a Buick GN engine,.. why bother make anything else? Why make shitty V6> just slap the GN in every car... But no because they cannot sell corvettes and shit SS cars...
GM is shit and the workers are shit. DIE MOTHER FACKERS! get in line for a new job
AHAHAH!!!!!!
I actually agree with you Schweppes. For too long GM has made mistakes and drove itself into the ground with their Hummers and Yukon Denalis. Why is the government using tax payers money to bail out a private company that has continued to see profits decrease since the 60's when Japanese cars took over? I'm sorry but North America has to realize that GM cannot compete with Japan anymore. There is a reason that Toyota is number one right now, even though GM has 13 brand names!
How old are, 12? The internet is for grown ups. You might want to check out the Hannah Montana website instead - might be more appropriate for you.
monster cable right now is prepping a gold lined cable that will make your car charge faster for $4823987.99
i mean they gotta pay for their homo-rageous lawsuits somehow
+1 LOL for giving me the term "homo-rageous"
When are we gonna see a gender neutral plug.....
A gender neutral plug? That's impossible!
rcarm,
not really.
find something with rotational symmetry.
like a circle where there's an socket on one side and a prong (tine?) on the other side.
Look up anderson power connectors, they are gender neutral connectors. Good stuff too if you need to dump a ton or current into anything.
Anderson power connectors are not gender neutral at all when I google-image search.
i'm glad to hear this, and i'm glad to see honda, toyota, and telsa joining in too...because i didn't see them listed when the spec was first announced a few days ago. this is the one thing that will ease the "electric anxiety" that so many people have. the volt does it because it still has that onboard generator...but to make electric vehicles successful you have to have charging stations EVERYWHERE. malls, grocery stores, restaurants, colleges, etc. once a smart charging grid is in place, along w/ a way to pay for it (prepaid credits, or you swipe your credit/debit card and it bills for as long as you're charging until you're done eating or w/e) i think the electric anxiety will be completely eliminated.
I am disappointed they did not add communication capabilities via the charging cable. It seems to be a dummy power plug, just supplying power to the car. If they added some communication lines the charging station could talk to the car computer, read the battery level, in car diagnostics, the charger could tell the car to pull less power if you are charging during peak usage hours and you will not need the car immediately, and lots other possible features.
CORRECTION, It does have basic communication abilities, opps
"The round 43 mm diameter connector has five pins and will support communication over power lines, to identify the vehicle and control charging."
http://www.autobloggreen.com/tag/sae+j1772/
Hrmpf, the identifying is probably mandated by the government so they can track cars even more, not just to ID the model for charging.
"Considering the car's concept first debuted about 27 months ago, and it takes least a year or more in the automotive industry to go from "on paper" concept to a real autoshow concept...something tells me they've been working on this for quite some time."
Something tells me they already built one, and manufactured it. They recalled all leases and took the vehicles off to the dessert to be crushed. Now they have the nerve to act like they are breaking ground that was already broken. The cars could charge in a home just fine years ago.
I think some people need to go rent Death of the Electric car.
Then maybe you would get on board with the group of people like myself who see GM is a axeworthy corporation pumping out crap cars and purposely ruining the only good innovative thing they have done in 40 years.
So ya GM can get crushed and buried in the same grave they put the EV so many years ago. Serves them right!
I read that this plug is limited to 240 V and 70 A max. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, this thing needs to be scalable to when electric cars are more prevalent. The system should not be limited by the plug. If the building has 480 volt, the plug should support it. Also, the 70 Amp max is ridiculous. Battery technology is constantly evolving and batteries will be able to charge very fast in the future. The system should be able to auto-negotiate to the highest voltage and amperage supported by the building and the car. Talk about planning for FAIL.
Certainly seems like a fancy oven plug to me.
Do you have any idea how outrageously high 70 amps is? Very few houses have 70 amps of current FOR THE ENTIRE HOUSE. Most battery chargers put out something on the order of .5 amp, with expensive fast chargers getting up to 2 amps. 70 amps is already outrageous, and quite dangerous. Thats probably the most it could support without making the plug to large to be convenient, which would hurt its chances of being adopted (you have to make the wires significantly thicker to support more current, it doesnt just come out of nowhere).
Limiting things this way is the exact reason why we need things like IPv6 now. This plug needs to be at least a little overkill. 240 V 70 A is normal for electric cars NOW. What about 15 years from now?
I take it you have no idea how high an Amp of current really is. 240 V * 70 A = 16,800 Watts. The battery is going to be 16 kilowatt hours (personally I think the kWh is a horrible unit... hey engineers we already have an unit for energy, it is called the joule), which means that this plug can charge the car a little less than one hour.
But wait, there is more... the Volt can't actually use all of it's battery capacity, because to save battery lifetime (remember the volt needs to be able to go more that 100,000 miles before the batter goes caput) it is stuck at an 80-20 battery cycle. This means you never actually fully deplete or fully charge the battery. Instead you stay in the middle 60% of capacity. So we get (16 kWh)*.6/ (16.8kW), which is of course, 0.59 hours. That is, at peak charging power you can charge your volt in 35 minutes.
Now to anyone wondering if 35 minutes is still too long to charge for long journeys, I think you are forgetting the point of the Volt. The idea is you charge overnight for your city commute, and use the gas engine on long trips.
Of course, is we think of a pure electric car, suppose the same car as the volt but with a 320 mile range, (8 times the volt's 40 mile range, ie 128kWh) it would take eight times as long to charge. So you get 4 hours and 45 minutes to charge your full electric vehicle. For comparison, the current Tesla has a 53 kWh battery and takes three and a half hours to charge using the optional high capacity charger.
I know we would all like a car that is the price of a Prius, charges in 35 minutes and has a range of 300 miles. However, like many things in life we can only choose one of the three. A plug-in Prius would have an electric only range of 5 miles (at a low speed) and would cost probably a couple thousand more than a normal Prius. The battery pack of a Tesla alone costs $35,000 and the car takes three hours to change; but it does have a good range of 240 miles. The Volt would give you a 35 minute charging time and a 300 mile range, but with the disadvantage of being more expensive than Prius and using gasoline for 260 of those miles. Pick your poison. If there were a magic solution we'd be driving it now.
That is why they are establishing a standard. You aren't going to be able to plug your car anywhere, they'll be designated "parking spots" with these Plugs set up for cars. Plus, most companies aren't going to have you milking their electricity to fuel your car back up, more than likely these plugs will be installed in government installations and housing sectors. But I can't see myself shelling out 50K for the car, 5K for Plug Installation, and then another 1.5K for a service upgrade to my house.
Plus 240volt and 70 amps is plenty, plus the plug itself will probably run on 208 as well, which means if the building does have 480v, chances are there is also 120/208 or 120/240 available for things like standard receptacles. There haven't been many buildings that have had 480 that didn't have a step down transformer to provide the other for convince outlets.
Your argument is now null and void. carry on.
Ok, I understand your arguments and concede most of my point, but I think the connector itself (not including the cable) should be able to handle higher voltages and higher amperages just in case there is a car that will use some type of battery technology like this ( http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/12/mits-quick-charging-batteries-could-revolutionize-the-world-ma/ ) , so that it could use the standard cable to charge "slowly" at 240 V 70 A or use a different cable with the same connector to charge faster. The reason why I make this point is because one of the limiting factors of the popularization of EVs is the charge time. People are used to going to the gas station and filling up their tank in 5 minutes.
"hey engineers we already have an unit for energy, it is called the joule"
The watt was first accepted in 1889, whereas the joule was in 1948.
Both were accepted as SI in 1960 though, still your statement 'we already have a unit' would be supporting the watt rather than the joule.
desert ;)
It's things like this that make me smile and give me hope for the world.
All we need now is one company to step in, sue everyone because "they came up with the plug design first", and ruin it.
I thought GM was the company that "killed the electric car". Is really such a good Idea to use their electric car standard?
Could not have said it better myself Giroro! With what they had going with the EV they could have had a nation-wide electric production vehicle way before now!
Too little too late GM. You had your chance and you failed royaly getting too big, with too may brands, and not giving the customer what they wanted. You loose, plug be dammed!
Not sure if you guys actually read articles or not; this isn't just a GM venture, but rather, an effort by several manufacturers to create a standardized plug. Your arguments are as baseless as saying that IBM should not participate in a unified effort to draw up a new networking standard because they made some bad products at one time, or maybe your experience with them was bad.
YAY!
Since the company I work for build EV cables and plugs, I'm all for this standardized plug.
Are those naked electrical contacts sticking out in that plug? Even if they are recessed within that shroud, it still doesn't look very safe (read: idiot-proof). They're going to have to re-do the whole kit and kaboodle once people start getting electrocuted.
Surely electric plugs should have some sort of data connection too so that the charging device knows what vehicle it is currently charging - i don't want to find out that my neighbor has been pinching my cable (uh-em) and charging his tesla up at night whilst i've been asleep.
My bad - just followed the read link and they're using communication over power lines to identify the vehicle and control charging
I wish they could plug in to an ordinary outlet. I know the idea is to charge faster; but I'd like to be able to, say, charge up while I'm at a friend's house, instead of only at special outlets. Maybe there'll be an adapter of some sort?
By "friend" you mean you unaware neighbour at during the middle of the night?