Why is CCS so absolutely enormous and so technically limited? What's the story behind how it got so bad? There must be some kind of trade-off Tesla took that CCS didn't?
TLDR CCS wanted to be backwards compatible, while Tesla planned fast charging to be first class with their standard. At the time, no one was doing fast charging at Supercharger currents (150kw). CCS was bolted on to J1772.
Considering how early that decision was made in the timeline of electric vehicles (how early we still even are) — getting saddled with a backwards compatibility kludge kind of sucks.
That's true for the US, but the EU mandates that all vehicle charging stations support CCS Combo 2.[1] They'd have to undo their mandate to allow better chargers, and I don't think that'll happen any time soon.
Why keep the J1772 connector? Only the data pins are used. I'm sure there's a way to make a connector that's just the CCS part and fudge the data pins into it.
Then supporting the old cars just happens with a dongle.
At least in theory, it should be possible to make it mechanically stronger than a smaller connector.
I've heard of charge station cable connectors failing do repeated bending stress, and my car has multiple warning stickers saying not to plug into a charging cable that is under tension.
2500 amps? I don't think liquid cooling is enough to allow for that.
You are probably thinking of the megawatt charger for the semi, which is different.
A regular V3 supercharger caps out at 250kW. There are rumors that the V4 might get closer to 400kW, but as far as I know those remain rumors. There's also a rumor of an upgrade of V3 superchargers to about 325kW, which would at least be getting close to CCS1.
Only going on what the article says "the Tesla charging connector is the most proven in North America, offering AC charging and up to 1 MW DC charging in one slim package".
TLDR CCS wanted to be backwards compatible, while Tesla planned fast charging to be first class with their standard. At the time, no one was doing fast charging at Supercharger currents (150kw). CCS was bolted on to J1772.