> Thank you Tesla for helping bring about a better standard here!
You should probably thank the government, too. When the feds decided they were going to put billions in subsidies to a national charging network, the original regulations basically required CCS, because that was really the only cross-platform game in town - Tesla was proprietary and not open to other automakers. In a brilliant bit of chutzpah, in response Tesla renamed their charging system the "North American Charging Standard" and started coaxing other auto companies to get on board, which most other companies were OK with because Tesla has by far the best fast charging network. But it was really the government subsidies, and the threat that Tesla would be left behind if everyone else went with CCS, that sparked the opening up of NACS in the first place.
A large number of standards are what one company did on their own and then made available to everybody via the likes of ANSI/ECMA/ISO. There are a number of reasons a company would want to do this.
This is basically how USB C became a thing. A group of engineers at Google created the connector design and then gave it to the USB standards body to use as the next gen.
Go look at the number of engineers that were on USB-C. Apple, not Google, contributed 18 of 79 named engineers listed on the connector certification project, or under 23%.
Intel had the most, as well as the editor position.
I think those 79 engineers should have paid more attention to compatibility and longevity. The cable should have been tested in a dirt tumbler. There is no way a cable should have 32 pins without some kind of built in self test of connectivity on all the pins every time you plug it in. Pins should be reassignable so that when 6 of the 32 pins are dirty/broken the cable still works at a slightly reduced speed.
All the Comms should have been done via an OFDM-like scheme rather than just a binary sequence over a twisted pair, giving far more throughput and allowing for compensating for conductive dirt in the plug causing crosstalk.
Overall, I believe such a design would have reduced costs, since there is no longer a need for such precision on cable and plug manufacture, which more than compensates for a tiny OFDM 'modem' inside the USB phy.
Citation, please. More bluntly: I simply don't believe you.
Google has absolutely none of the expertise required to put such a connector together. It requires a very specific set of skills in chip design, signal integrity, and connector design which Google has none of.
I have no idea if Google had anything to do with USB C but "design" doesn't mean "build schematics for". It could be that they just had a few specs they liked and thought would make a good connector and did a rough proposal of form factor and specs.
That's not useful. Here's my diagram for a new connector -> .
Connector design like this is a delicate balance between signal integrity (wants biggger) and mechanical integrity (wants bigger) and size (always smaller).
As for signal integrity: A lot of the signal integrity was papered over by having complex interface chips. This is why there is so much training and negotiation in USB-C.
As for mechanicals: The whole point of USB-C was to take failure-mode data from the previous generations and design a connector that avoided those. USB-C, in spite of how many people bitch about it, was designed so that the the most probable failure modes (which they learned from prior things like mini and micro USB) occur in the cable--ie the replaceable part.
I've posted about this before, but the reason EA is such a horror show is due to their history. EA was created basically as government-mandated punishment against Volkswagen for dieselgate. So it's not that surprising that they didn't feel incentivized to deliver a great product.
Compare that to the Supercharger network, where providing a great experience is a huge selling point for Teslas.
I might despise Musk, and I'm not a fan of Tesla lately, but you do really have to hand it to them: they were prescient and put in all the hard work of building out the best fast charging network, so good for them for reaping the benefits.
> EA was created basically as government-mandated punishment against Volkswagen
I didn't know that. Do you have some documentation about that. Would be fun reading material for the holidays
> I might despise Musk, and I'm not a fan of Tesla lately, but you do really have to hand it to them: they were prescient and put in all the hard work of building out the best fast charging network, so good for them for reaping the benefits.
The Wikipedia pages for EA and the VW emissions scandal give a good overview with linked sources. As part of the consent decree, VW had to put $2 billion into EA.
> I might despise Musk, and I'm not a fan of Tesla lately
I’m getting sick of this tiptoeing in every thread that mentions Tesla. No ones going to come to your house and beat you if you say something positive, un-hedged, about Tesla
That's not the reason I mention it. So often with any discussion about Tesla's fortunes you get ardent fanboys and detractors, who appear to be arguing much more from a tribal perspective than from an unbiased consideration of the facts. Thus, the reason I mention it is to emphasize that I'm not a Tesla fanboy, yet, from solely an objective perspective, I think their work here is deserving of praise.
You should probably thank the government, too. When the feds decided they were going to put billions in subsidies to a national charging network, the original regulations basically required CCS, because that was really the only cross-platform game in town - Tesla was proprietary and not open to other automakers. In a brilliant bit of chutzpah, in response Tesla renamed their charging system the "North American Charging Standard" and started coaxing other auto companies to get on board, which most other companies were OK with because Tesla has by far the best fast charging network. But it was really the government subsidies, and the threat that Tesla would be left behind if everyone else went with CCS, that sparked the opening up of NACS in the first place.