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by rektide 1790 days ago
Wandering off topic (what an epic start, TIL, thanks Norway!), but I gotta say it feels very weird to me having AC charging be the standard. It feels a lot more elegant to me to put a lot of the complexity on the charging station rather than in the vehicle.

And if you have, for example, a solar powered charge station, now your charge station needs a big inverter to make AC, which the car then goes about turning back into DC.
2 comments
bratcomplex 1790 days ago
ac charging “infrastructure” is merely a plug + a fancy breaker switch. It’s cheap and simple. ac is abundant, so adding a plug is easy. Dc on the other hand requires lots of hardware.
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cptskippy 1790 days ago
This. Cheap infrastructure spurs adoption more than the added cost to the EV. It also adds tremendous flexibility to the EV itself allowing it to charge off existing infrastructure not intended for EVs.
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martin_bech 1790 days ago
But you can easily do DC charging now.

CCS is made for DC charging, but can fallback to Type 2 AC.

All EVs in Europe are CCS

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cbm-vic-20 1790 days ago
The Nissan Leaf does not use CCS DC fast charging, it uses CHAdeMO, like they do in the US. But it's pretty much the only EV that uses it in the US.

https://www.nissan.fr/vehicules/neufs/leaf.html

"Le temps de recharge rapide indiqué nécessite l’utilisation d’une borne de recharge rapide équipée d’un câble de recharge CHAdeMO."

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cptskippy 1790 days ago
Also consider that only a fraction of US Leafs can do CHAdeMO. It was not a standard option.

IMO Nissan did a lot to spur the adoption of EVs with their glorified golf cart but they've really squandered any mind share or goodwill they gained.

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