Society of Automotive Engineers Is Standardizing Tesla's EV Charging Plug (theverge.com) 76
The Society of Automotive Engineers, a U.S.-based standards organization known as SAE International, announced plans to support Tesla's EV "North American Charging Standard" or NACS port. "SAE's adoption will make it easier for electric vehicle charging station manufacturers and operators to implement the port while also making charging for EV owners more consistent and reliable," reports The Verge. From the report: Tesla's formerly proprietary charging port was opened up last year in a bid to become the de facto EV standard in the US. The US Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has worked with Tesla and the SAE in an effort to expedite the Tesla plug as a standard to improve the country's charging infrastructure.
SAE is also working with the ChargeX consortium, which was put together by the Biden administration so the Department of Energy's National Labs can help EV manufacturers create consistent tech across vehicles and chargers for items like universal error codes. SAE is lending its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology to make charging more secure against cyber attacks. Also today, ChargePoint announced that customers setting up charging stations with its equipment could add Tesla's port standard to new orders of several commercial AC stations and DC fast chargers, as well as home AC charging systems later this year (via Electrek).
ChargePoint joins a handful of similar electric vehicle charging station companies that have announced support for Tesla's charging port. The standard has been gaining momentum since major legacy automakers Ford, GM, and Rivian all announced commitments to add Tesla's plug to their future vehicles. [...] Now, with SAE supporting NACS, larger EV charging company holdouts like the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America may have an easier time making the jump.
SAE is also working with the ChargeX consortium, which was put together by the Biden administration so the Department of Energy's National Labs can help EV manufacturers create consistent tech across vehicles and chargers for items like universal error codes. SAE is lending its Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology to make charging more secure against cyber attacks. Also today, ChargePoint announced that customers setting up charging stations with its equipment could add Tesla's port standard to new orders of several commercial AC stations and DC fast chargers, as well as home AC charging systems later this year (via Electrek).
ChargePoint joins a handful of similar electric vehicle charging station companies that have announced support for Tesla's charging port. The standard has been gaining momentum since major legacy automakers Ford, GM, and Rivian all announced commitments to add Tesla's plug to their future vehicles. [...] Now, with SAE supporting NACS, larger EV charging company holdouts like the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America may have an easier time making the jump.
Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a common standard for the EV charging plug should help to facilitate deployment of charging stations.
Prospective charging station deployments do not have to agonize over which physical charging interface they will use due to SAE standardization.
The rest of the EV charging complexities can be hidden in the charging station and the vehicle itself...and that keeps things simple for the customer.
Re:Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a standard connector! SAE J1772 [wikipedia.org]. Every electric vehicle in North America used it... Except Tesla.
I can't understand why everyone's suddenly falling all over themselves to switch over.
Re: (Score:3)
Tesla also previously wanted to license their standard.
Re:Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they didn't. They wanted the public image of claiming to want that, but privately they made licensing unacceptable.
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But no, they give away the IP for free. Why? Because now every EV from every company pays Tesla to charge at their stations. You want to make it free to sign up, so you get that sweet sweet recurring revenue charge money.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
"Because 80% of the EVs on the road use the Tesla standard"
Nonsense. Only one manufacturer use the connector today, and only in the North America. If we go by what we have today, why even bother at all?
The industry is best served by one standard, not two. Tesla's best interest is served by getting their deliberate, proprietary connected retroactively declared standard so that they can get government money.
Majority of electric vehicles use Tesla charger (Score:5, Informative)
"Because 80% of the EVs on the road use the Tesla standard"
Nonsense. Only one manufacturer use the connector today, and only in the North America.
Uh, you do know that this "one manufacturer" sells more than three times as many of their electric vehicles in the U.S. as all the other makes of electric vehicles combined, right?
2022 sales can be found here (scroll down); https://8billiontrees.com/carb... [8billiontrees.com]
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Not for long!
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That's not how standards are decided though. There was a time when there was more WiMAX service than LTE.
It's great that Tesla finally figured out what actually releasing a standard is 11 years after they first talked about it but you know they could have saved us a whole lotta time if they had maybe talked to a lawyer about it in the past decade.
Re: Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:2)
Funny that I was right but you responded with nonsense anyway. Pathetic.
Re:Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:5, Informative)
According to this article [insideevs.com] chargers are available as follows (chargers / ports):
CCS: 5,240 / 10,471
NACS: 1,803 / 19,463
CHAdeMO: 4,790 / 6,993
So, while there are more CCS "gas" stations, there are more Tesla "pumps". CHAdeMO is Nissan Leaf, and Nissan is eventually phasing those out [greencarreports.com] outside Japan, with their new Ariya having a CCS port.
To answer your question specifically, it is because Tesla maintains their chargers much better [forbes.com]. Tesla drivers rarely have to worry about a charger not working, whereas that seems to be a real concern with the mish-mash of CCS charging stations.
The NACS charging cable is also smaller and lighter, making it easier to handle than CCS.
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"The NACS charging cable is also smaller and lighter, making it easier to handle than CCS."
It is smaller and lighter, but it does not make anything easier to handle. The cable dominates, and the difference is trivial.
Also, CCS supports 800V charging. NACS does not help the industry.
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The difference is NOT TRIVIAL. I own a Tesla, and have the CCS adapter. Try picking up a CCS cable, and then go try picking up a Tesla one. Major difference in weight, maneuverability (especially when cold), and ease of "bending" around to plug it into your car.
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whereas that seems to be a real concern with the mish-mash of CCS charging stations.
That's a concern worth addressing. Nah, in America we just throw all weight behind one previously proprietary standard rather than use something that for some reason the rest of the world has no problem with.
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There isn't anything stopping Electrify America, EVGO, or any of the other CCS charging providers from fixing the problem. As there aren't really competitive alternative CCS charging networks, they haven't exactly been aggressive at fixing the issue. There are stories of some CCS chargers being broken for MONTHS.
Being able to use Tesla's NACS network AND CCS with an adapter, brings the needed competition to the market, which should provide the incentive to fix the damn CCS quality issues.
Re:Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:4)
Tesla chargers are a mixed bag. On the one hand, when they work you can just roll up and plug in. The connector is smaller than the other DC charge ones, and thus a little easier to handle.
On the other hand, you need to register with them before using a charger. There is no payment terminal on the charger itself. They only offer 400V. Tesla claims to have 1000V working in their lab, but it's not publicly deployed anywhere.
In Europe we have 400kW CCS2 chargers now. Some of them don't even use water cooled cables, so can only sustain 400kW for a while, but many cars can only sustain it for a short time too. Tesla's maximum charge rate is only 250kW, which is decent for cars but not great for large commercial vehicles.
The danger is that Tesla's promise to support higher voltage charging turns out to be empty, just like the promise to release Full Self Driving, robotaxis, Cybertruck, and Roadster 2 were.
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Today:
As far as I am aware, 400kW CCS2 do not exist in the wild. While the Tesla network is currently in a state where you can just plot in a destination in the opposite end of Europe the software, and it will tell you where to stop at working chargers without significant coverage gaps
Just accept that CCS1 just like CHADEMO was a bad standard.
The far uncertain future:
?????
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Here's a video of someone using a 400kW charger: https://youtu.be/VDUw_VouMNQ [youtu.be]
CHAdeMO also supports 400kW with some deployments in China (they use a slightly different connector but the communication is CHAdeMO and standardized with Japan).
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't understand why everyone's suddenly falling all over themselves to switch over.
Just reading through your link and taking a glance at the page for NACS provides a few ideas, such as...
- J1772 only supplies AC power, externalizing the cost of the DC conversion to the car itself
- J1772 is merely one among the four plugs specified in the J1227-2017 standard, which guaranteed market fragmentation right from the get-go
- NACS is far smaller, making it easier for people to handle
- CCS had to add two more pins to J1772 to get its fast charging to a reasonable point
I'm not an expert. I haven't
Re:Say What You Will About Tesla (Score:4, Interesting)
You sure aren't an expert.
CCS1 is better because it supports J1772 directly. NACS requires an adapter.
CCS1 is better because it supports 800V and higher charging rates.
CCS! is better because it is actually standardized.
J1772 does NOT guarantee market fragmentation, NACS does.
NACS is NOT easier to handle.
CCS adds two more pins, so what? NACS overloads pins on the connector to break compatibility with 1772 and potentially increase costs in the car.
The advantage seem obvious, just not to you.
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The two of you arguing reminds me of arguments for Cisco-developed features, early industry standards, and changes to those industry standards.
There are some clear cases where Cisco as a network vendor developed something early, had it fairly widely adopted within their own private ecosystem, and eventually Cisco had to start supporting what the rest of industry came up with and standardized on, eventually phasing out what they developed in favor of what everyone else was using.
There are other cases where C
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That's why we need a standards body like SAE to figure it out. I can tell you NACS once standardized will likely require updates.
In other words, combine on NACS - but make it possible to adapt as necessary.
So add 800V support to NACS. If that means needing to modify the connector, now's the time to do it. Existing customers can use a simple adapter.
Adopt both NACS and CCS1 signalling for DCFC communications. NACS and CCS1 DCFC use different signalling protocols - adopt both methods at the charger so you can
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You sure aren't an expert.
CCS1...CCS1...CCS!...
You seem to have completely misread what I wrote. Nothing I said was an argument against CCS. To the contrary, I pointed out an advantage that CCS1 has over J1772...which you for some reason misunderstood as a sleight against CCS. It wasn’t. Just because I also pointed out advantages that NACS has over J1772 doesn’t mean I’m staking a claim in the fight between NACS and CCS. Like I said, I’m not an expert and I haven’t read up on this, but it seems clear that NACS and CCS have
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"CCS1 is better because it supports J1772 directly"
Most AC charging is done at home, so people can install a charger with the plug they use and only use an adapter at public stations that they occasionally visit. We already have a mix of J1772 and Tesla chargers at hotels and other public locations, though J1772 is the vast majority right now. So not a big deal.
"CCS1 is better because it supports 800V and higher charging rates."
False. NACS supports that, too. There just aren't any deployed chargers impl
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So, design by committee. Tesla wins for the same reason we network with IP, and not OSI.
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There was a standard connector! SAE J1772 [wikipedia.org]. Every electric vehicle in North America used it... except Tesla.
You mean, except for the majority of electric vehicles on the road.
I can't understand why everyone's suddenly falling all over themselves to switch over.
Maybe because the majority of fast chargers are Tesla chargers and the majority of electric cars on the road are Teslas and it makes sense to standardize on the most used charger, not the less-used charger?
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Majority [Re:Say What You Will About Tesla] (Score:2)
You mean, except for the majority of electric vehicles on the road.
Not a majority, just a plurality.
Nope. Majority.
The best-selling Tesla model, Model Y, outsells all the other (non-Tesla) electric cars combined in the US.
(and in past years the disparity was even greater).
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Well, you can either count brands - 20 different brands each selling a couple hundred EV's a year, in which case Tesla is 5% of the market.
Or you can count EVs built a year - in which case Tesla is 60% of the market, which is certainly a majority in my book.
Or you can count EVs actually on the road - which in 2 minutes of looking I couldn't find a good reference for, but let's call it 80%. Umm, yeah.
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They want to switch over because that SAE standard is bizarrely bulky and cumbersome when they added the DC charging leads to it. The Tesla charger is compact, elegant, and easy to maneuver and supports DC charging without all that extra bulk.
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If you'd bothered to read the Wikipedia article you referenced you'd have seen that J1772 is Low Power Single Phase AC and completely unsuitable for DC Fast Charging.
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Standards have value not just because everyone is on the same platform, but that there's a platform to plug into. In a way they're like a marketplace; they're valuable only insomuch as there are both buyers and sellers, but the marketplace is worthless if there's only sellers and no buyers.
People are falling over themselves for Tesla's standard because he spent a ton of money to build charging stations everywhere
One day more like gas stations (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
only someone who's never owned an EV would say that. EVs today, now, are easier and more convenient than gas cars. Ask anyone who owns one. EV charging stations are everywhere. Gas car drivers don't realize this, because EV chargers take up a tiny fraction of the space as a big dumb gross gas station.
Also, they're not used nearly as often by EV owners, because most of us do almost all of our charging at home. I use the Supercharger network twice a year. The rest of the time, I have my full 400 miles o
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EVs today, now, are easier and more convenient than gas cars.
Modern gas cars are already very low on the inconvenience scale. Diminishing returns here perhaps.
Charging stations are really barely play a role in EV ownership. Gas car owners have a hard time wrapping their heads around that.
They may not play a role in your ownership and that is all you know, but that's also why the vast majority of new cars are not EVs.
Re:One day more like gas stations (Score:4, Insightful)
"They may not play a role in your ownership and that is all you know, but that's also why the vast majority of new cars are not EVs."
Exactly, his opinion of EVs is formed by his wealth and where he lives. Charging stations are NOT everywhere and the substantial majority of potential EV drivers cannot charge realistically, both because of lack of public chargers and the fact that they don't have garages. Let them eat cake.
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Charging stations are really barely play a role in EV ownership.
Highway side fast charging stations barely play a role. But technically charging stations and their locations play a huge role for EV ownership as soon as you get out of the suburbs where not everyone has a 2 car garage.
It is worth not ignoring or you're going to get a situation where only American suburbia has EVs. In many countries in Europe they are addressing the fact that not everyone has the ability to charge at home directly. E.g. in the Netherlands there's a plan for no person to ever have to walk m
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This. Since we bought our EV, we have *never* used a charging station. The range has always been sufficient that we can be home to charge.
Also, consider the cost of fuel. Given solar on the roof, the charging is essentially free, or feels that way. We use about 17kwh/100km, which is equivalent to 1.9 liters/100km (123mpg). We could sell our electricity for about 7 cents/kwh. So our effective cost is about $1.20 to drive 100km (or $1.90 for 100 miles).
I just wish the integration of solar and car were bet
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NACS gets us further away from gas stations. Tesla requires an app and login and introduces an incompatible connector.
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Of course, NACS is what breaks this. There is a common standard, it's CCS1.
"Prospective charging station deployments do not have to agonize over which physical charging interface they will use due to SAE standardization."
No, they now have to agonize over which physical charging interface they will use due to SAE standardization.
Do you know anything about the current state of EV charging?
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Well Musk pulled it off (Score:5, Interesting)
BUT. I'll eat my own dog food on this one. While he didn't found Tesla, he turned it into what it is and even charted a course to what it's now becoming and that he deserves credit. Tesla is not really an EV company. They have good tech and yes they make cars. But he's always said they're not really a car company and this move (started by other companies using his charging network) shows what Tesla really is: an energy company.
Take McDonalds. People think their business is burgers, but it's not. What they do is make cheap and fast burgers. What they sell is french fries and drinks (the margins are 99% on those up-sells whereas burgers it's around 50%). But their business? Real estate. McDonalds franchises it's locations, owns over 70% of the land and around 50% of teh buildings that McDonalds are in, and their franchisees pay rent AND profit share on burgers sold. That rent is the majority of McDonald's income; they not only are one of the largest landlords in the world, they create their own tenants.
Tesla is similar. They make EVs, and they spurred a revolution. But their true target? Oil companies. By becoming the standard charging platform (which given how many they've rolled out it makes perfect sense), they now are the primary source of energy for every EV. Now by being an EV champion and every other car company jumping on the bandwagon, EVs need to charge at Tesla charging stations at Tesla rates. They compete with gas stations and gas refiners.
That's an enormously difficult strategy to pull off, but he did it. The momentum is there, and there are very few people who could have pulled off that insane strategy like him.
Might want to (Score:2)
discuss in a civilized manner
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That was NOT the plan! It might become the plan or is currently the plan now but they didn't put in the effort to become the standard like they would have if that was the plan when the timing was right. It wasn't opened up, freely available, and promoted when it should have been.
What they did do is place charging stations all over and in some cases buy up land near them to rent out which shows some long term thinking was going on... opening your charging network isn't becoming the new oil company; but own
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> It wasn't opened up, freely available, and promoted when it should have been
They tried. The existing standards idiots said "no thanks" and did J1772 which came after the tesla connector.
Wifi wasn't opened up until it was a standard. It was a bunch of slightly different proprietary wireless systems
USB wasn't opened up until it was a standard. PCs has a plethora of competing interconnect schemes.
The list goes on.
The SAE is playing catch up now. But standardizing around a de-facto standard is not new. It
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Eh not quite, from MotorTrend;
Back in 2014, all current and future patents that Tesla relied on for building their electric vehicles were opened up to the world. The idea was to help manufacturers accelerate their entry into the EV market. The catch, however, was that anyone using them in good faith couldn't sue Tesla, sue anyone else using their patents, didn't sue them over patents in the past, didn't sue anyone else over patent related to EVs and their components, weren't using the patents to create a co
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It's a failure of regulation. The EU got in early and standardized on CCS2 and CHAdeMO. Now Europe has 400kW CCS chargers and all new cars are CCS2. Even Tesla was required to go CCS2, and retrofitted all their chargers.
The US left it to industry and now has a mess on its hands, with limited charging speeds and slow progress installing charging infrastructure as everyone waits to see who wins the format war.
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Yes. The biggest failure is the US government not mandating a common charging standard.
The SAE also failed when they came up with J1772 and came up with a bad design relative to the dominant plug at the time. So there was no US standards based option for the government to pick as a charging standard even if they were motivated to do so.
The Japanese engineered themselves a good base protocol, but the connector isn't great. It reflects their rather direct experience with natural disasters.
Tesla doesn't publis
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My experience with CHAdeMO is that the early connectors were difficult to handle, but later revisions were much easier.
I'm not sure about the comms side. On the one hand it's nice that CHAdeMO had CANBUS, certainly better than the crappy modulated PWM that CCS uses. It also supported Vehicle 2 Grid from the start.
But it was DC only. You had a separate AC connector, which used PWM to communicate the current limit. I'm okay with PWM for that, it allows AC chargers to be very cheap and simple. Just a shame tha
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Yes. I have a Leaf and a Tesla. The leaf has two ports. Chademo and J1772.
AFAIK, only tesla put AC and DC on the same pins.
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Yeah, I'm not keen on AC and DC on the same pins either.
CCS2 is fine. The extra DC pins aren't needed for just AC. One port. 400kW charging already deployed in Europe.
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>either.
I wasn't suggesting it's a bad idea. It's a great idea. One fat relay replaces two large connectors each with its own signaling protocol. It makes the connector smaller and more reliable. It's a good thing as far as I can tell.
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The problem is that you need big chonky contacts for high power DC. So either your everyday AC connector is chonky, or your connector can't handle very high power.
I have a strong suspicion that the reason Tesla is stuck at 250kW is that the connector just isn't up to carrying any more.
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To put 250kW through a pin, it requires more-or-less the same chonky contact whether it's AC or DC.
>>> So either your everyday AC connector is chonky, or your connector can't handle very high power.
I'd hardly call Tesla's everyday AC connector "chonky", especially compared with CCS1/CCS2. Have you ever actually touched one?
I have a strong suspicion that the reason Tesla is stuck at 250 kW is that present-day battery packs simply can't effectively make use of higher power. Have you ever charged a
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Have you seen how CCS2 handles this? It allows for a smaller AC only connector that is similar to a Tesla one, and a larger DC one with a couple of extra chonky pins.
Your everyday AC charger only needs to have the lightweight AC part.
There are cars on the market that pull over 300kW for a while. Not many, and they all use 800V systems. I gather that it's more common with commercial vehicles, but I haven't really looked.
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By becoming the standard charging platform (which given how many they've rolled out it makes perfect sense), they now are the primary source of energy for every EV.
That's fleeting. You missed the point of this story. The connector is now going to be a standard. That means everyone's going to be making and installing chargers. Tesla branded chargers will soon be in the minority. And he had to give away the patents, so Musk isn't going to make any money when someone makes one, either.
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Uh-huh. How's those TSLA shorts working for you? They'll come around one day! aaaany day now! aaany day!
You just told on yourself, thanks for telling us what kind of things you do.
I own no stock, and hold no short positions in any stock.
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What charging network exactly is going to compete with the Tesla charging network? Oh right, the fictional one that someone dreamed up. Turns out Tesla can deploy super charging stations at one fifth of anyone else [electrek.co]
. Also, Tesla currently has 1,728 supercharging stations [scrapehero.com] at an estimated cost of $60,000 to $350,000 each [appinventiv.com]. So to just catch up to Tesla you're talking a range of $104M to billions of dollars
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What charging network exactly is going to compete with the Tesla charging network?
Tell us you are totally unaware without telling us, thanks.
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But their true target? Oil companies. By becoming the standard charging platform (which given how many they've rolled out it makes perfect sense), they now are the primary source of energy for every EV.
Ehh no, not really. Actually not at all. By turning this into a standard they opened it up to implementation by anyone. Oil companies, once America gets serious about EV adoption, will simply install NACS charging spots. Like they already do in Europe with CCS, not just at their service stations, but at individual charging points in the street. Or heck, some oil companies want to sit in your garage. Recognise this brand? https://electricroad.co.uk/202... [electricroad.co.uk] they aren't unique in this.
What Tesla did achieve her
Solar City (Score:2)
In this context, the idea behind Solar City was great.
However, the execution... ((And, probably, the acquisition was a scam.)
Re: (Score:1)
and the real genius behind SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell, not Musk.
Musk is the bigger genius I think. He's not the chief engineer at SpaceX for nothing. He pushed a skeptical team to use stainless steel for Starship, and convinced them in the end. He also convinced [youtu.be] former SpaceX chief rocket engine specialist to get rid of multiple valves in the engine. I quote: "And now we have the lowest-cost, most reliable engines in the world. And it was basically because of that decision, to go to do that. So that’s one of the examples of Elon just really pushing— he alw
Tesla offered it free of charge to public domain (Score:3)
Tesla's formerly proprietary charging port
I find this quote puzzling. Tesla had offered their charging port design and license free of charge years ago but it was rejected for, well, reasons .
Re:Tesla offered it free of charge to public domai (Score:5, Informative)
Tesla had offered their charging port design and license free of charge
No. The offer was you could use it if you gave Tesla free access to all of your patents. It wasn't a good deal. It's no surprise no one was interested.
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I posted that comment to learn the real reason the standards body didn't accept Tesla's offer.
Thank you!
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No, the offer was a patent non-aggression agreement - you don't sue me for my use of your patents, and I won't sue you for your use of my patents. Everybody deemed it a bad choice.
IIRC, there was a second clause - you had to be willing to pony up your share of the cost of building out the Supercharger network. At that point, I think all the legacy automakers were of the opinion that "We don't build gas stations, why should we build EV charging stations".
And so here we are today - Tesla eating everybody el
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you don't sue me for my use of your patents
Yes, free access to all their patents. You're repeating what I have said.
So, what's the point of ChargeX? (Score:2)