superchargers

A plug for all cars

January 23, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Different brands of electric cars have required different charging connections. There has been no standard connector for charging. But now, as the transition to electric vehicles is accelerating, there is the North American Charging Standard, which within in the next couple of years, will be common to pretty much any new electric vehicle on the road.

There have been several different charging connector systems in use by auto manufacturers and each charging station offered only a particular one of them. The largest charging network in the US has been Tesla’s Supercharger Network, which uses a proprietary standard it put in place in 2012. Tesla offered to open up their charging technology to other cars but auto manufacturers declined to take them up on the offer for a number of years. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021, provided federal subsidies for building out fast charging networks, provided a common charging standard was adopted. That has broken the log-jam.

The Tesla Charging Standard has been renamed the North American Charging Standard and Tesla opened its technology to other manufacturers in November 2022.

Automakers who have signed on to the standard include BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar Land Rover, Lucid, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Rivian, Subaru, Toyota, and Volvo. In December, the Volkswagen Group – which includes Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi – announced that they are also implementing it for future vehicles in North America, starting in 2025. (The only significant holdout is Stellantis, parent of Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep).

It will be a year or two before cars from all these companies will have the NACS connector and be able to charge at the same stations, but it will happen.

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Volkswagen, Audi, And Porsche Finally Commit To Using Tesla’s NACS Plug

Photo, posted July 8, 2023, courtesy of Michael Swan via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Lighting Up Batteries

December 24, 2019 By EarthWise 2 Comments

One of the things that hampers the adoption of electric vehicles is range anxiety. Drivers worry that they will run out of charge before they get to the closest charging station. Range anxiety has lessened considerably in recent years as electric cars have incorporated larger and larger battery packs yielding driving ranges well over two hundred and even over three hundred miles.

With these extended driving ranges, drivers then turn their attention to how long it takes to charge. Tesla’s Superchargers have gotten to the point where a car can add 75 miles of charge in 5 minutes and 200 miles in less than half an hour. Fast charging systems are improving the charge times for other electric models as well.

Nevertheless, drivers would ideally like to reduce charging times to as little as possible in order to provide the convenience experienced in gasoline cars.

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have reported a mechanism for speeding up the charging of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. By exposing the battery cathode to a beam of concentrated light, the charging time can be reduced by a factor of two or more. If this could be commercialized, it could be a real game changer for electric vehicles.

The research used specially crafted lithium-ion cells with transparent quartz windows. Shining white light into the windows caused a semiconductor material known as LMO to change its charge state and drive the charging reaction more quickly in the lithium ions of the battery.

Using this photo-assisted technology in vehicle batteries would require substantial redesign that would allow concentrated light to illuminate battery electrodes during charging. How practical that is remains to be seen, but the payoff would be substantial.

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Web Links

Shedding new light on the charging of lithium-ion batteries

Photo, posted June 30, 2018, courtesy of Open Grid Scheduler via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Affordable Electric Cars

May 1, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The main reasons that electric cars haven’t taken over are that they didn’t drive far enough on a charge, it took too long to charge them, and, most of all, they cost too much.

In recent years, the problem with driving range has steadily been disappearing as electric cars that can go over two hundred and even over three hundred miles on a charge have entered the market. Charging time has also become less of a problem. Tesla’s network of Superchargers can provide 200 miles worth of charge in half an hour and their next generation of chargers, which are just starting to appear, can cut that time much further.

As for cost, a new report by transportation analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that electric vehicles will be cost-competitive with combustion-engine cars by 2022.

The main reason is that the cost of EV batteries has been plummeting. In 2015, batteries made up 57% of the total cost of an electric vehicle. Today, that number is down to 33% and is expected to drop to 20% by 2025. In addition, the cost of electric powertrain systems is also dropping. The Bloomberg report predicts that over the next decade, costs for motors, inverters, and power electronics could be 25 to 30% cheaper than today.

The cost of electric vehicles has been dropping faster than predicted. Bloomberg’s report on the subject in 2017 predicted cost parity in 2026. Last year, they changed it to 2024. And now, they are saying 2022.

Given that electric cars are much cheaper to drive than gasoline cars, finding reasons not to drive them is getting harder to do.

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