Good points about the importance of low weight and improved CD, Lawrence. If the Tesla Model 3 can be more efficient than the Model S, that would help get the price down from Model S levels while still maintaining their desired range. Carrying fewer batteries would help further with the weight side of the equation. It will be interesting to see what they can accomplish.
Ben, on the subject of L1 chargers being good enough for nearly everybody and L2 being overkill, I would ask "based on what data"?
I can tell you that the 6.6kW L2 charging ability _at home_ is what makes our 2013 LEAF practical for our use.
There are days when we charge several times, from home. Even 3.3kW L2 would make the LEAF much less useful. Relying on slow L1 would make it necessary to drive another car much of the time.
Once there's a 160+ miles/charge LEAF with a larger battery pack, L1 would be even less practical since it would take days to charge from empty.
Finally, L3 is what makes our LEAF practical for trips to nearby towns, where we can charge quickly near the destination in order to make the return trip. Having just L1 would eliminate the LEAF from that use case entirely, and even 6.6kW L2 would generally be too slow.
For longer road trips the supercharging approach works for the Model S, and it could work even better for more people given higher efficiency, lower cost vehicles in the future. The Model S is high performance but low efficiency.
Cheers, -Jamie On 5/13/15 11:58 AM, Ben Goren via EV wrote:
On May 13, 2015, at 8:37 AM, Lawrence Rhodes via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote: Most EV charging can and should reasonably be expected to be done while the vehicle is parked, especially overnight at home. L1 chargers are today and always will be good enough for that for nearly everybody, and L2 is pretty much guaranteed overkill for nearly all the rest.
...but...unless the per-charge mileage is in the four-digit range, there will be situations where people will want to charge, wherever they happen to be, and they're not going to be happy if it takes more than ten or fifteen minutes. And 15 kWh / 15 minutes is 60 kilowatts...not quite the level of insanity of a megawatt, but still in a range far beyond what you'd ever see in a residential setting. The *real* problem is that I don't think that there's an overlap between what rapid charging is likely to cost and what people are likely to be willing to pay, especially when they're used to paying on the order of $0.10 / kWh at home. And with low demand, the prices would have to be even higher since they won't be spread out over as many customers, driving down demand even further. But without the option for rapid charging, a small but significant minority of the miles people unthinkingly drive today simply can't be done in an electric vehicle, creating a chicken-and-egg problem. That's part of Tesla's marketing brilliance with their own rapid charger network, but I don't know that it's something that can realistically be made universal. Perhaps our best real-world hope is for Tesla to offer universal adapters to their superchargers for about the same price as they charge to upgrade their vehicles to supercharger capability. (Same price because Tesla's price includes their capital and operating expenses for the network, not just whatever is done to the car itself.) Done right, that would allow the minority who need to make road trips in non-Tesla vehicles to do so...and it even opens up the possibility for renting the adapters for rare road trips. b& _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
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