Comments by "" (@Green__one) on "The Electric Vehicle Charging Problem" video.
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While the overall theme is right, so many of the details are so far out to lunch as to make me wonder if any research went into this video at all.
1) Chevy Bolt, not Volt. The Volt was a plugin hybrid vehicle that has long since been discontinued. The Bolt is the EV.
2) Nobody who has had any experience with EVs at all has ever advocated needing as many charging stations as there are gas stations. That's just not how people charge. the vast majority of charging is done at home overnight. Sure, there needs to be some accommodation for apartment dwellers and others who can't charge at home, but it's a small fraction of the total EV miles that need to be charged at DC fast chargers. Yes, there need to be a lot more DC fast chargers than there are, but nowhere near as many locations as there are gas stations now. Basically it's the highways outside of towns that need them, very few stations are needed in cities.
3) J1772 is not DC fast charging, it's a slow charger, so in the small town example, it's a non-sequitur. There are only 3 DC fast charge standards in that town.
4) Europe mandated that the physical plugs fit, but that doesn't mean that any car can charge on any charger. Tesla won't allow non-Tesla vehicles to use it's stations, even though they could physically plug in, they still won't get any charge. The end result is exactly the same in practice as the USA. All cars except Tesla can charge on one charger (CCS in europe, CCS/chademo in the USA (all fast charge stations have both in the USA) and Teslas all charge on a different one (Supercharger).
5) When converting AC-DC you don't use an inverter, that does the opposite. You could call it a converter.
That said, The video is spot on in that subsidies for ownership are the absolute wrong method of making the cars attractive. I've never met anyone who's decision to buy was made based on the incentive, but I know a ton of people who have been dissuaded based on charging infrastructure. If the government has a fixed pot of money to throw at encouraging EV ownership, it would be far better spent on the charging infrastructure side, rather than the vehicle purchase side.
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Depends who you ask. The Tesla plug design is sleeker, easier to plug in and unplug, and takes up less space on the vehicle. It also allows both DC and AC with the same plug. So from that standpoint it's "better". That said, CCS can in theory handle more current due to larger conductors, and is an actual official standard usable by anyone who wants to (For all Tesla's talk, they would not likely allow anyone else to use their charging connector or infrastructure without some significant money changing hands)
The EU was really choosing between chademo and CCS as the Tesla one is a non-starter as nobody other than Tesla could use it. Beyond that, in Europe CCS was already in use by far more manufacturers than chademo, making that choice far less disruptive than choosing chademo (Japan is a different matter as chademo outnumber CCS there). CCS is a newer standard though. That said, in North America, with the exception of Tesla, nearly all DC fast chargers have both CCS and chademo plugs available.
Wordwide it appears that CCS is winning the format war though, the Japanese manufacturers are starting to switch to CCS, at least for their foreign market vehicles, and we'll likely see all DC fast chargers eventually go that way. The question will be weather Tesla sticks to their own proprietary standard forever, or eventually see the light and join the rest of the world. It's not good for anyone to have infrastructure fragmentation where each brand of car have their own chargers and can't use the others.
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