10 ms·

We're Charging Our Cars Wrong

157 points by jnord 2y ago

medhir 2y ago
If only we could set up subsidies for this infrastructure in the same way we subsidize ag and oil…
- tomrod 2y ago
  Heck, no need to subsidize oil or ag, they are doing fine.
  - edoceo 2y ago
    How would they do w/o the current subsidies?
    - reaperman 2y ago
      Oil would be pretty much the same. Ag would be a chaotic disaster. The subsidies for ag were written in blood based on the need to smooth the natural forces of extreme cyclic market fluctuations that affect all inelastic commodities. But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient. I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        the big division we need to kill is ethanol in fuel. it's 30% less efficient than gas, much more expensive, produces more CO2 and gums up and destroys engines if you let it sit for a few weeks.
        Vecr 2y ago
        You need some. Otherwise you would need to re-engineer for a different anti-knock. Tetraethyllead is unusable in modern cars.
        fingerlocks 2y ago
        There are many premium gas stations that sell unleaded ethanol free gasoline
- jdminhbg 2y ago
  We passed legislation spending a few billion on charging stations and totally failed to get any built.
  - loeg 2y ago
    We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
    - jdminhbg 2y ago
      Ok. It's the failure to build that's the issue more than the spending.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        A lot of projects were planned to start this year. It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits.
        derektank 2y ago
        >It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits. Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
        loeg 2y ago
        Feds could/should be reforming NEPA.
        2y ago
- rexpop 2y ago
  For context, US agriculture subsidies come principally in the form of Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). These programs pay subsidies to farmers based on price or revenue losses for covered commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Farmers choose between PLC, which pays based on national average prices, and ARC, which pays based on county or individual farm revenue. ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy? > Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0] 0. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda-budget-summary.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda...
loeg 2y ago
tl;dr existing galvanic isolation in fast chargers is very costly (~60% of capital cost) and delaying deployment of unsubsidized EV charging infrastructure; the authors think it can be replaced safely and cost-effectively with a second ground wire and some logic to detect/verify grounding.
- bangaladore 2y ago
  > ~60% of capital cost As far as I can tell there is no source provided for the number. Nor is there are source for the stall cost. Tesla almost certainly has the lowest stall cost on the market, while consistently providing higher uptime and reliability. I want to see numbers based on them. It is no secret that the other charging stall manufacturers are incompetent (terribly reliability and uptime), so it wouldn't surprise me if their hardware was designed poorly AND terribly high in cost. According to a bid in Texas, Tesla's cost per stall was about 20% of competing companies. So is the cost a problem when the charger is designed correctly, or only when not?
- rswail 2y ago
  It also didn't compare the capital costs to the costs of building an ICE refuelling station. What is the cost of the tanks, fuel pumps, calibration, etc? Including the costs of rehabilitation of the ground from fuel contamination over the lifetime of the infrastructure as well? That's what needs to be compared, not the current capital costs of infrastructure that is only just been sufficiently standardized and regulated to be able to be rolled out for all EVs, not just one brand or another.
  - loeg 2y ago
    How is that useful for this analysis? I agree it might be interesting in the abstract, and probably interesting for an investor choosing how to deploy capital. But I don't think it has any impact on the argument. Clearly there is a high cost to deploying existing charging stalls. Lowering that cost would clearly increase infrastructure rollout.
    - rswail 2y ago
skykooler 2y ago
A big issue I see with this is that it would necessitate a new fast charging standard, which (due to the extra ground connection) could not be backwards compatible with any existing fast charging standard - rendering it useless for the 40 million electric cars already on the roads worldwide.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pavon 2y ago
  Right after we just changed charging standards here in the US. And from what I've heard the cost and time required to run service to a charging station far exceeds the cost of the charging station itself.
- KurSix 2y ago
  Convincing automakers to adopt is never easy
tjmc 2y ago
It's a pity they didn't discuss 2-way charging
tehjoker 2y ago
The argument sounds kind of persuasive to a layman (even one that did a little bit of EE a while back), but my gut says there would be no need to write this article if there weren't regulations or other engineering traditions that decided galvanic isolation is necessary for safety. I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too... Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?
- nickff 2y ago
  The system proposed in this piece could probably be safely implemented, but it would much more challenging to do than the author seems to indicate. There are a variety of failure modes that they ignore. The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    I particularly dislike how this article tries to sweep the power loss issue under the rug: The first mention of loss says that the isolation link is "responsible for about 50 percent of the charger’s power loss". The second mention of loss says "the power loss would be less than 20 percent". They want you to think that those numbers are comparable, and that they've reduced loss from 50% to 20%.
    - loeg 2y ago
      I can't really tell. They also claim this change would improve total energy efficiency by 2-3%. So maybe those numbers are supposed to be comparable.
    - DevelopingElk 2y ago
      The article needs absolute efficiency figures to know if this is a good idea. I also wonder if better conversation electronics could make a difference. I'm guessing there is some tradeoff between cost of conversion and volume/weight/efficiency. The other question is how this fits in with regenerative braking. Is this power conversion circuit dual purpose?
metaphor 2y ago
Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it? - With galvanic isolation baked directly into onboard charger, I'm thinking worst case outcome is charging infra and isolation link get fried, but that really expensive EV battery remains safe. - Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.
- gilbetron 2y ago
  Lightning strike on a near empty tank of gas can go boom, too. Definitely can start a fire. This is like asking, "yeah, but what if the charging station gets hit by a meteor?"
- cyberax 2y ago
  > Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it? They don't. If lightning strikes, you make a claim and get an insurance payoff. > Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety. Nope. The lightning current won't go through the battery, it'll just melt the conductors in the charging cable.
  - nick3443 2y ago
    I would guess it will jump to a grounded conductor inside the charging cabinet or the grounded case of the cabinet itself before it goes to the car that is sitting on rubber tires
    - jmb99 2y ago
      Lightning can strike cars directly, and when it does, the couple inches of air and rubber between the car and the ground mean nothing (the tires sometimes explode, which looks neat when caught on video, if nothing else). Remember, the lightning travelled for thousands of metres through the air before reaching the car - another 4” of “insulator” isn’t going to stop it. Now, if lightning were to strike the charging cabinet itself, I imagine that most of the surge current would go through the cabinet into the ground. If any were to make it to the chassis of the car through the charger, it would probably (“educated” guess) be at a low enough potential to not jump through the tires, but rather off some other low-hanging metal components. If it’s below the ~dozens of kV needed for that, charge will build up for a good fraction of a second, and dissipate over the next few seconds (or close to instantly if the ground wires don’t melt in the charging cable). Really, the level of isolation in either the current case or proposed case doesn’t do that much to help with lightning strikes. They’re both designed to mitigate shock hazards measured in the hundreds to single-digit-thousands of volts. When the arc distance is measured in kilometres rather than centimetres, a 3” galvanic isolation transformer isn’t going to save you. The solution for lighting is the same as it always has been: ideally, don’t get struck by lightning; otherwise, install a lightning rod nearby.
Elixir6419 2y ago
It would be nice if instead of the fast charging problem the focus would be shifted to standardized battery packs, that can be field replaced. I don't really want to own 50-100kwh battery. I just want to use the charge in it and happy to pay for that.
- fritzo 2y ago
  Right, like propane tanks for my bbq
- ForOldHack 2y ago
  Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Is there any universe where we go the electric route instead of gasoline back then? I imagine the range was nothing
    - dboreham 2y ago
      There were electric milk delivery vehicles when I was a kid.
    - pastage 2y ago
      One where people figured out that CO2 would lead to global warming, tried to limit coal use and then discovered oil. Maybe?
    - adrianN 2y ago
      When cars where new they didn't go very fast and ICE efficiency was very bad. It just turned out that it's a lot easier to improve ICE power output and tank size than to improve batteries.
    - Gibbon1 2y ago
      There were issues with charging, motor driving, and batteries. For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors. When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery. And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them. Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper. I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.
aetherspawn 2y ago
You don’t really need two ground wires, CP has a diode with series resistance 2.74K to PE (ground) so it’s trivially possible for the EVSE to just send a push/pull waveform over CP and if it reads push but not pull (remember diode) then it knows it’s connected properly. The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.
- darig 2y ago
  [dead]
- sunami-ai 2y ago
  Maybe you should prototype and get an investor?
- Gasp0de 2y ago
  If I understood the article correctly, the high safety comes from having two ground connections and stopping already if one of them is broken. Your way would mean that if PE breaks, and at the same time contact between some high voltage component and the chassis is made, electrocution is possible.
coryrc 2y ago
Require a coin-operated 120V outlet with gfci and accessible way to reset the breaker for every two parking spots, everywhere. Many benefits: 1. Everywhere you go, you know there'll be somewhere to charge overnight. 2. It's the cheapest per installed spot, by far, allowing way more locations. 3. Renters can safely by an electric car and have home charging. 4. Coin-op 120V are far more robust than cables with valuable copper. 5. It de-incentivizes excessive parking.
- aaronbrethorst 2y ago
  What's a 'coin'?
  - 1-6 2y ago
    I think the concept revolves around a small IoT chip that connects to an online payment system. It could trigger a relay to enable/disable the outlet.
  - jmb99 2y ago
    If you’re not being facetious, a unit of currency, minted out of metals of varying preciousness throughout the ages in the shape of a circle, usually imprinted with the monarch or head of state on one side and a symbol on the other. If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions. These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less. Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.
cyberax 2y ago
So basically, remove isolation transformers, and feed the line voltage (7.2kV or so) through a simple buck converter into the car. Instead of galvanic isolation, use redundant ground connectors that are monitored for continuity. I'm not sure I agree with this. It puts too much responsibility onto the EVSE side, as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens. If something like emergency pyro disconnects are mandated, I might be able to trust it a bit more.
- loeg 2y ago
  > as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens Are you talking about the case where both of the ground wires fail while charging? If either is non-functional when charging starts, it disallows charging. If one fails during charging, charging disconnects.
  - tlb 2y ago
    When a fault occurs (say a battery fluid leak to the chassis) and is detected, a mechanical relay has to open to disconnect the power from the grid. That can take 200 ms or so, which is a long time to have 400v flowing through you.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      One can have in series a very fast solid-state relay (which would disconnect in some tens of microseconds at most; e.g. with IGBTs) and a mechanical relay for permanent disconnection. This would increase the cost, but by many times less than the insulated power converters used today.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Imagine a catastrophic fault: a dude in another car drives into your car, and a conductor in the car breaks off and energizes the car body. The current now goes through the car body into the ground, and also through the grounding wire back to the charger (EVSE). It's a phase-to-ground short. The charger tries to interrupt the flow, but the short circuit fries the power electrics in the buck converter (MOSFET/IGBTs can fail _short_). The charger will have contactors that physically disconnect the line from the converter, but they normally interrupt the line with zero voltage when the controlling IGBTs are closed. In this case, they'll have to interrupt high voltage and high current flow. Can they do it reliably within the fractions of a second?
mrheosuper 2y ago
So the problem is about preventing electric shock. Which is not a new problem at all. Using galvanic isolation is 1 of the solution, but it's expensive. How about using something like RCB to detect mismatch between output current and input current. This is well tested after all
- KurSix 2y ago
  Yet they don't provide the same level of isolation as a transformer-based system.
jjallen 2y ago
We could use smaller external batteries that take seconds to replace more often? I still think road charging would be cool and obviously the fastest if we never have to stop anyways. Couldn’t work everywhere in the US probably but I can dream. Trains and buses do it already where I live.
- tejtm 2y ago
  Had the thought once of autonomous batteries who lived on a stretch of interstate that when charged, would zoom out and attach themselves to a moving vehicle to dump their charge then peel off to go charge again
- est 2y ago
  NIO does that in China
yuliyp 2y ago
I can't help but wonder while reading the article: why didn't this win in the market? As the author mentioned, the tech was there with the prototypes they built over 20 years ago. Why did Tesla and every other electric car manufacturer decide to go in a different direction?
stahtops 2y ago
This doesn't solve fundamental problems with how America has built its charging infrastructure. We never should have placed hardwired cables on the L2 or L3 chargers. The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? It's a joke. Rented an EV in Europe... the cable is in the trunk! You own it. Take it out, plug it into the charger, plug it into your car. Having a bad day? Drive over the plug? Smash it with a hammer? Don't know how plugs work so you tried to kick it off your car? No problem, go buy yourself a new one. The charger still works for everyone else. The charger HW can be agnostic. Car manufacturers can make up whatever crazy plug they want for their car, just provide the cable. Tesla wants a 1" cable? No problem! You want a 300' cable? Do it!
- loeg 2y ago
  Somehow this largely isn't a problem for gas stations. Not sure why you'd want to carry around a bulky cable when it can just live at the charge station. > The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? Anecdotal, but this has not been my experience at all.
  - stahtops 2y ago
    Could be a combination of things: more robust nozzle design vs CCS, the gas station is manned and has security cameras. I would happily carry the cable on trips where I planned to stop and charge if it meant the L3 was guaranteed to work. Anecdotal for me as well. EVgo was so unreliable that I just stopped driving my EV for any trip that required charging. Almost every visit I’d have to try 2-3 chargers, hold the plug in or slightly bias it up or down to get past some comms/short/? check to start charging. Usually no issues with ChargePoint L2 or L3, (it’s not the car). But there just aren’t that many around.
- ralph84 2y ago
  Many DCFC chargers these days have liquid-cooled cables. Not sure how that’d work with a portable cable.
  - stahtops 2y ago
raldi 2y ago
Buried deep in the article, what the clickbait headline alludes to: Car chargers are too complicated and expensive. We can make them simpler and cheaper while keeping them safe, which would let us build many more charging stations.
- formerly_proven 2y ago
  Or we could install more destination chargers, which are cheaper, more practical, don't strain the local grid and don't strain the battery.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!). Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs? I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
  - IneffablePigeon 2y ago
    EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.
    - monero-xmr 2y ago
      The convenience to me of being able to refuel anywhere quickly, plus the dubious carbon savings, plus the immediate discount on the car purchase (without any subsidies), makes it a moral purchase rather than a practical one. I am not very impressed by the benefits. I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers
progbits 2y ago
> We estimate that the cost of the bill of materials and assembly of a galvanically isolated charging port is about $300 per kilowatt. So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link. I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up. Seems ridiculously high, like paying some military/space grade premiums, or just using very niche parts without economies of scale driving the cost down.
- marsokod 2y ago
  > > So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link. > I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up. This kind of checks out with the price of 200kW and 400kW chargers from Alpitronics: https://www.connect-gp-joule.de/en/shop/dc-charging-stations/alpitronic/hyc400 https://www.connect-gp-joule.de/en/shop/dc-charging-stations... Between €67k and €102k (for some reasons VAT included in that price) for these units.
  - progbits 2y ago
    That's the product. I'm not questioning the price of those, but the price of components vs markup Show me the IGBTs and inductors that cost 90k.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  These things also generate revenue. It's not a zero sum game. Fast charging pricing varies quite a lot but 50 cents per kwh is a nice round number to work with (and probably lowish). Some places charge more, some less. If an average charging session charges 30 kwh, that's 15$/session. To earn back 90K, you need 6000 charging sessions. At 17 sessions per day, you'd get there in about a year. You also have to deal with power and other overhead obviously. And chargers are more expensive than just that. A good charger should be generating 50-100K of revenue per year and do that for several years until it is replaced. The lifetime revenue should be at least a few hundred thousand $. Of course this whole article is based on the notion that its assertions about cost are correct. They probably are high balling a few numbers. All I'm reading is that US charging companies are paying a high price for their infrastructure and are apparently failing to benefit from economies of scale, learning effects, etc. High speed chargers are being deployed at scale across the globe. The US is technically behind on this front with relatively low EV adoption rates. So, I would expect US companies to be somewhat behind on the cost front as well. Bottom line: done right, unsubsidized charging infrastructure should be doable and profitable. Subsidies are of course involved in a lot of places. But it's not like fossil fuels are un-subsidized. Regardless of what you think of that, there's a good reason for that: governments are eager to sponsor energy infrastructure because it's an economic multiplier. Economic growth is strongly connected to energy availability and usage. Lucrative economic activity tends to be very energy intensive. The US has invested many trillions in it's oil and gas infrastructure over the decades. And that's just direct investments. All those expensive wars in the middle east to secure access to oil are also part of this. And it has had a decent return on investment on those investments. It's nowhere near matching that for the clean replacement for any of that stuff. Other countries are outspending the US so they can provide clean, cheap energy to their economies. The US should be spending more and spending smarter or it risks pricing itself out of the market. China in particular has built up quite a lead here. I don't think the Chinese are wasting their money.
timewizard 2y ago
> indicated that 62 percent of EV owners were so anxious about EV range that they had at times curtailed their travel plans. So.. wouldn't increasing overall range be the "one thing" you could do to actually improve this?
- gilbetron 2y ago
  This is it - even a highly available charging network only lightly alleviates range anxiety, as the other portion is the time it takes to charge up. If I can drive for 600+ miles on a single charge, the vast majority of my trips are covered, even round-trips. But sitting around waiting 30m to charge gets annoying every several hours, even if I can find a working station.
lstodd 2y ago
BTW everyone is fond of Norway while having zero idea how it's actually over there. Consider this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Order_of_Disappearance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Order_of_Disappearance The protagonist plows snow for a living, using 200-300 bhp diesel truck for like half a year each year, day after day. This thing just can not be replaced with an electric no matter what you try. And without it there would be zero traffic, electric or no. It often looks like people here mostly do not comprehend what snowfall is.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  First off, who are you talking to? I didn't see anyone suggest replacing every truck in the world with electric. Second, that's not a particularly large number for horsepower. Please explain why you think it can't be electric. Note that charging time can be solved by having a bigger fleet, and while that is expensive it's well within the range of "no matter what you try".
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  "Electric snow plow put to the test by the Norwegian Road Administration" https://www.designwerk.com/en/post/e-truck/pioneering-work-electric-snow-plow-on-behalf-of-the-road-authorities/ https://www.designwerk.com/en/post/e-truck/pioneering-work-e... I also saw a person in Norway commenting about their high uptake of EVs noting that at the end of the day the snow piles in the city are noticeably cleaner than they used to be when ICE engines were more common.
- kelnos 2y ago
  There will always be corner cases. That doesn't mean we shouldn't make the common case better. Not really sure what your comment has to do with the article, though. Seems like you're just here to complain about EV advocacy?
tomas789 2y ago
I'm no electrical engineer but would that really be so much cheaper? A buck converted is essentially the same thing where the transformer is replaced by an inductor. You get rid of a bit of copper but all the power electronics to do the high-frequency switching is still there. Together with most of the components. They "estimate" this would save 60% on galvanic link, and on the rest, you can save another half. So that would mean you are at 20% cost plus some ground wire fault detection HW.
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Related, a recent video intereview with the Peterson Car museum with one of the authors, discussing the EVs he's worked on: https://youtu.be/Wv9hPIPhR9w https://youtu.be/Wv9hPIPhR9w
kkfx 2y ago
To reduce public infra cost we simply need to ERASE the speculation around it. Simply only grid operators are allowed to install chargers and them are allowed to be payed only with a bank card not with apps not with dedicated cards and so on. Cutting this part will makes the very same hw much cheaper.
KurSix 2y ago
I'm not entirely sure about safty in this case. Especially in a system that has to work in a wide range of real-world conditions...

157 points by jnord 2y ago

medhir 2y ago

If only we could set up subsidies for this infrastructure in the same way we subsidize ag and oil…

tomrod 2y ago
Heck, no need to subsidize oil or ag, they are doing fine.
- edoceo 2y ago
  How would they do w/o the current subsidies?
  - reaperman 2y ago
    Oil would be pretty much the same. Ag would be a chaotic disaster. The subsidies for ag were written in blood based on the need to smooth the natural forces of extreme cyclic market fluctuations that affect all inelastic commodities. But a society cannot afford those cycles to play out for their food supply. Prices need to be stable and we need a slight oversupply of staples to be robust rather than perfectly efficient. I’m not saying the subsidies are perfectly dialed in and that there’s no waste or pork. But some are very very necessary.
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      the big division we need to kill is ethanol in fuel. it's 30% less efficient than gas, much more expensive, produces more CO2 and gums up and destroys engines if you let it sit for a few weeks.
      - Vecr 2y ago
        You need some. Otherwise you would need to re-engineer for a different anti-knock. Tetraethyllead is unusable in modern cars.
        fingerlocks 2y ago
        There are many premium gas stations that sell unleaded ethanol free gasoline
jdminhbg 2y ago
We passed legislation spending a few billion on charging stations and totally failed to get any built.
- loeg 2y ago
  We passed legislation authorizing spending a few billion ($7.5B, 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act), and have deployed a portion of it. Most of the authorized $$$ has not yet been spent; it unlocks over the decade from 2021-2030. One fault of the bill is it depends on states actually doing the work to build these stations; the feds aren't doing it directly. If states drag their feet, stations don't get built.
  - jdminhbg 2y ago
    Ok. It's the failure to build that's the issue more than the spending.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      A lot of projects were planned to start this year. It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits.
      - derektank 2y ago
        >It takes a while to get all the surveys and permits. Yes, that's exactly the problem, an over regulated permitting regime. If we are in a climate emergency then we should treat it as such, which means that if the Federal government can't overrule local permitting restrictions, they should prioritize funding to states that are willing to relax permitting requirements and get shovels in the ground.
        loeg 2y ago
        Feds could/should be reforming NEPA.
        2y ago
rexpop 2y ago
For context, US agriculture subsidies come principally in the form of Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC). These programs pay subsidies to farmers based on price or revenue losses for covered commodities like corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton. Farmers choose between PLC, which pays based on national average prices, and ARC, which pays based on county or individual farm revenue. ARC and PLC are projected to cost approximately $1.6 billion in 2025, which is more than triple their 2024 levels, but The American Relief Act of 2025 allocated $31 billion in ad hoc disaster aid to farmers. So maybe I was wrong about ARC/PLC being the principal method of subsidy? > Under current law, USDA’s total outlays for 2025 are estimated at $231 billion. Outlays for mandatory programs are $189.6 billion, 82.1 percent of total outlays.[0] 0. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda-budget-summary.pdf https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2025-usda...

loeg 2y ago

tl;dr existing galvanic isolation in fast chargers is very costly (~60% of capital cost) and delaying deployment of unsubsidized EV charging infrastructure; the authors think it can be replaced safely and cost-effectively with a second ground wire and some logic to detect/verify grounding.

bangaladore 2y ago
> ~60% of capital cost As far as I can tell there is no source provided for the number. Nor is there are source for the stall cost. Tesla almost certainly has the lowest stall cost on the market, while consistently providing higher uptime and reliability. I want to see numbers based on them. It is no secret that the other charging stall manufacturers are incompetent (terribly reliability and uptime), so it wouldn't surprise me if their hardware was designed poorly AND terribly high in cost. According to a bid in Texas, Tesla's cost per stall was about 20% of competing companies. So is the cost a problem when the charger is designed correctly, or only when not?
rswail 2y ago
It also didn't compare the capital costs to the costs of building an ICE refuelling station. What is the cost of the tanks, fuel pumps, calibration, etc? Including the costs of rehabilitation of the ground from fuel contamination over the lifetime of the infrastructure as well? That's what needs to be compared, not the current capital costs of infrastructure that is only just been sufficiently standardized and regulated to be able to be rolled out for all EVs, not just one brand or another.
- loeg 2y ago
  How is that useful for this analysis? I agree it might be interesting in the abstract, and probably interesting for an investor choosing how to deploy capital. But I don't think it has any impact on the argument. Clearly there is a high cost to deploying existing charging stalls. Lowering that cost would clearly increase infrastructure rollout.
  - rswail 2y ago

skykooler 2y ago

A big issue I see with this is that it would necessitate a new fast charging standard, which (due to the extra ground connection) could not be backwards compatible with any existing fast charging standard - rendering it useless for the 40 million electric cars already on the roads worldwide.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pavon 2y ago
Right after we just changed charging standards here in the US. And from what I've heard the cost and time required to run service to a charging station far exceeds the cost of the charging station itself.
KurSix 2y ago
Convincing automakers to adopt is never easy

tjmc 2y ago

It's a pity they didn't discuss 2-way charging

tehjoker 2y ago

The argument sounds kind of persuasive to a layman (even one that did a little bit of EE a while back), but my gut says there would be no need to write this article if there weren't regulations or other engineering traditions that decided galvanic isolation is necessary for safety. I guess the difference is galvanic isolation is physically (i.e. passively) fail safe, while ground detection is an active safety measure? You can always put in two ground wires in the current system too... Is there some way for the ground wire to have a signal in it even if it were broken (via EMF)? Can the chip fail in an unsafe way?

nickff 2y ago
The system proposed in this piece could probably be safely implemented, but it would much more challenging to do than the author seems to indicate. There are a variety of failure modes that they ignore. The author also glosses over a 20% power loss (to heating), which would cost money and bulk to dissipate.
- wtallis 2y ago
  I particularly dislike how this article tries to sweep the power loss issue under the rug: The first mention of loss says that the isolation link is "responsible for about 50 percent of the charger’s power loss". The second mention of loss says "the power loss would be less than 20 percent". They want you to think that those numbers are comparable, and that they've reduced loss from 50% to 20%.
  - loeg 2y ago
    I can't really tell. They also claim this change would improve total energy efficiency by 2-3%. So maybe those numbers are supposed to be comparable.
  - DevelopingElk 2y ago
    The article needs absolute efficiency figures to know if this is a good idea. I also wonder if better conversation electronics could make a difference. I'm guessing there is some tradeoff between cost of conversion and volume/weight/efficiency. The other question is how this fits in with regenerative braking. Is this power conversion circuit dual purpose?

metaphor 2y ago

Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it? - With galvanic isolation baked directly into onboard charger, I'm thinking worst case outcome is charging infra and isolation link get fried, but that really expensive EV battery remains safe. - Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety.

gilbetron 2y ago
Lightning strike on a near empty tank of gas can go boom, too. Definitely can start a fire. This is like asking, "yeah, but what if the charging station gets hit by a meteor?"
cyberax 2y ago
> Lightning strikes...how do EVs currently guard against it? They don't. If lightning strikes, you make a claim and get an insurance payoff. > Without galvanic isolation, battery goes...boom? Hopefully without you or your family waiting inside the vehicle under some false pretense of safety. Nope. The lightning current won't go through the battery, it'll just melt the conductors in the charging cable.
- nick3443 2y ago
  I would guess it will jump to a grounded conductor inside the charging cabinet or the grounded case of the cabinet itself before it goes to the car that is sitting on rubber tires
  - jmb99 2y ago
    Lightning can strike cars directly, and when it does, the couple inches of air and rubber between the car and the ground mean nothing (the tires sometimes explode, which looks neat when caught on video, if nothing else). Remember, the lightning travelled for thousands of metres through the air before reaching the car - another 4” of “insulator” isn’t going to stop it. Now, if lightning were to strike the charging cabinet itself, I imagine that most of the surge current would go through the cabinet into the ground. If any were to make it to the chassis of the car through the charger, it would probably (“educated” guess) be at a low enough potential to not jump through the tires, but rather off some other low-hanging metal components. If it’s below the ~dozens of kV needed for that, charge will build up for a good fraction of a second, and dissipate over the next few seconds (or close to instantly if the ground wires don’t melt in the charging cable). Really, the level of isolation in either the current case or proposed case doesn’t do that much to help with lightning strikes. They’re both designed to mitigate shock hazards measured in the hundreds to single-digit-thousands of volts. When the arc distance is measured in kilometres rather than centimetres, a 3” galvanic isolation transformer isn’t going to save you. The solution for lighting is the same as it always has been: ideally, don’t get struck by lightning; otherwise, install a lightning rod nearby.

Elixir6419 2y ago

It would be nice if instead of the fast charging problem the focus would be shifted to standardized battery packs, that can be field replaced. I don't really want to own 50-100kwh battery. I just want to use the charge in it and happy to pay for that.

fritzo 2y ago
Right, like propane tanks for my bbq
ForOldHack 2y ago
Like Henry Ford tried on the Model T: The Model T was offered in three fuels: Gasoline, Electric, and Alcohol. It only took I think less than a year to make it Gasoline only.
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Is there any universe where we go the electric route instead of gasoline back then? I imagine the range was nothing
  - dboreham 2y ago
    There were electric milk delivery vehicles when I was a kid.
  - pastage 2y ago
    One where people figured out that CO2 would lead to global warming, tried to limit coal use and then discovered oil. Maybe?
  - adrianN 2y ago
    When cars where new they didn't go very fast and ICE efficiency was very bad. It just turned out that it's a lot easier to improve ICE power output and tank size than to improve batteries.
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
    There were issues with charging, motor driving, and batteries. For converting from ac to dc for charging you had either a dc generator or old school selenium rectifiers or vacuum tubes ones. I used to have an old 60's battery charger with selenium rectifier. First car I drove had a DC generator. So wasn't until the 70's you got cheap high quality rectifiers and thyristors. When I started my career in the 80's it was all coming together. Robust power electronics shows up then. By the end of the decade inverter controllers for motors were becoming common. And the mid 90's is when Toyota starts working on their hybrid drive. The battery they used was a nicad battery. And then there are batteries. Before 1980 or so you're options were lead acid or nicad. The former have low energy density and the max output current was low. Nicads were expensive and also low capacity, but had higher output per weight. Which is why the Prius and the EV1 used them. Late 80's I got a hold of some lithium primary cells they could put out a few amps at 4.1V. I did a calculation if you put 5000 of them at $10 each into an EV the battery would weigh 600lbs and put out about 250 hp. Weeee! And at $15 each the battery would cost $75k. Cause primary batteries it's $250/mile. 1 years later you had rechargeables with similar specs and cheaper. I feel that in the 1910-20s when gasoline won the electric technology just wasn't there. People wanted electric cars to succeed buy the economics and performance wasn't there.

aetherspawn 2y ago

You don’t really need two ground wires, CP has a diode with series resistance 2.74K to PE (ground) so it’s trivially possible for the EVSE to just send a push/pull waveform over CP and if it reads push but not pull (remember diode) then it knows it’s connected properly. The return path for the pilot current will be over the PE contact, so it can also be detect and doubly verify that PE is low resistance, although ideally you’d want a much smaller series resistance.

darig 2y ago
[dead]
sunami-ai 2y ago
Maybe you should prototype and get an investor?
Gasp0de 2y ago
If I understood the article correctly, the high safety comes from having two ground connections and stopping already if one of them is broken. Your way would mean that if PE breaks, and at the same time contact between some high voltage component and the chassis is made, electrocution is possible.

coryrc 2y ago

Require a coin-operated 120V outlet with gfci and accessible way to reset the breaker for every two parking spots, everywhere. Many benefits: 1. Everywhere you go, you know there'll be somewhere to charge overnight. 2. It's the cheapest per installed spot, by far, allowing way more locations. 3. Renters can safely by an electric car and have home charging. 4. Coin-op 120V are far more robust than cables with valuable copper. 5. It de-incentivizes excessive parking.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago
What's a 'coin'?
- 1-6 2y ago
  I think the concept revolves around a small IoT chip that connects to an online payment system. It could trigger a relay to enable/disable the outlet.
- jmb99 2y ago
  If you’re not being facetious, a unit of currency, minted out of metals of varying preciousness throughout the ages in the shape of a circle, usually imprinted with the monarch or head of state on one side and a symbol on the other. If you’re being facetious, you’re probably aware that “coin-op” refers to any simply-operated payment terminal, as you’d find in a do-it-yourself car wash or parking meter (that doesn’t rely on some stupid phone app). In the past, you inserted the aforementioned coins into a slot, which it counted and provided you with some amount of time of use based on the amount you insert (coin op = coin operated). Nowadays, while there are still coin-op terminals (even in the western world!) they’re being replaced more and more by a pin-pad for processing credit- or debit-card transactions. These are much preferable to having to use a website or an app, make an account, verify your account, add you personal information, add your vehicle and plate information, add your credit card information, etc. for each different network you’re trying to use, be it parking, car washing, or in this case, car charging. In the past (or present, for the majority of the population), you could drive up to a gas station, pay with some form of currency or card, and receive fuel. The parent was suggestion that maybe, people don’t want to have to deal with more complexity than that while charging their vehicles, especially when travelling to different cities/counties/countries, which are the most likely times they would need to use not-at-home charging (and also the most likely times they’d encounter a new network, and have to go through the rigamarole of new app/website, account, details, etc). By just putting a coin-op (or if you insist on pedantic precision, pin-pad-op) receptacle, someone can pull up, plug in, pay, and be on their way in 30 seconds or less. Why reinvent the wheel and do anything else, which would take more effort in the best case scenario? If you insist on some godforsaken phone app, make that an option, but I imagine you’ll find most people won’t use it unless forced to.

cyberax 2y ago

So basically, remove isolation transformers, and feed the line voltage (7.2kV or so) through a simple buck converter into the car. Instead of galvanic isolation, use redundant ground connectors that are monitored for continuity. I'm not sure I agree with this. It puts too much responsibility onto the EVSE side, as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens. If something like emergency pyro disconnects are mandated, I might be able to trust it a bit more.

loeg 2y ago
> as it'll have to be able to break the fault if it happens Are you talking about the case where both of the ground wires fail while charging? If either is non-functional when charging starts, it disallows charging. If one fails during charging, charging disconnects.
- tlb 2y ago
  When a fault occurs (say a battery fluid leak to the chassis) and is detected, a mechanical relay has to open to disconnect the power from the grid. That can take 200 ms or so, which is a long time to have 400v flowing through you.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    One can have in series a very fast solid-state relay (which would disconnect in some tens of microseconds at most; e.g. with IGBTs) and a mechanical relay for permanent disconnection. This would increase the cost, but by many times less than the insulated power converters used today.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Imagine a catastrophic fault: a dude in another car drives into your car, and a conductor in the car breaks off and energizes the car body. The current now goes through the car body into the ground, and also through the grounding wire back to the charger (EVSE). It's a phase-to-ground short. The charger tries to interrupt the flow, but the short circuit fries the power electrics in the buck converter (MOSFET/IGBTs can fail _short_). The charger will have contactors that physically disconnect the line from the converter, but they normally interrupt the line with zero voltage when the controlling IGBTs are closed. In this case, they'll have to interrupt high voltage and high current flow. Can they do it reliably within the fractions of a second?

mrheosuper 2y ago

So the problem is about preventing electric shock. Which is not a new problem at all. Using galvanic isolation is 1 of the solution, but it's expensive. How about using something like RCB to detect mismatch between output current and input current. This is well tested after all

KurSix 2y ago
Yet they don't provide the same level of isolation as a transformer-based system.

jjallen 2y ago

We could use smaller external batteries that take seconds to replace more often? I still think road charging would be cool and obviously the fastest if we never have to stop anyways. Couldn’t work everywhere in the US probably but I can dream. Trains and buses do it already where I live.

tejtm 2y ago
Had the thought once of autonomous batteries who lived on a stretch of interstate that when charged, would zoom out and attach themselves to a moving vehicle to dump their charge then peel off to go charge again
est 2y ago
NIO does that in China

yuliyp 2y ago

I can't help but wonder while reading the article: why didn't this win in the market? As the author mentioned, the tech was there with the prototypes they built over 20 years ago. Why did Tesla and every other electric car manufacturer decide to go in a different direction?

stahtops 2y ago

This doesn't solve fundamental problems with how America has built its charging infrastructure. We never should have placed hardwired cables on the L2 or L3 chargers. The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? It's a joke. Rented an EV in Europe... the cable is in the trunk! You own it. Take it out, plug it into the charger, plug it into your car. Having a bad day? Drive over the plug? Smash it with a hammer? Don't know how plugs work so you tried to kick it off your car? No problem, go buy yourself a new one. The charger still works for everyone else. The charger HW can be agnostic. Car manufacturers can make up whatever crazy plug they want for their car, just provide the cable. Tesla wants a 1" cable? No problem! You want a 300' cable? Do it!

loeg 2y ago
Somehow this largely isn't a problem for gas stations. Not sure why you'd want to carry around a bulky cable when it can just live at the charge station. > The CCS plugs are broken about 50% of the time? Anecdotal, but this has not been my experience at all.
- stahtops 2y ago
  Could be a combination of things: more robust nozzle design vs CCS, the gas station is manned and has security cameras. I would happily carry the cable on trips where I planned to stop and charge if it meant the L3 was guaranteed to work. Anecdotal for me as well. EVgo was so unreliable that I just stopped driving my EV for any trip that required charging. Almost every visit I’d have to try 2-3 chargers, hold the plug in or slightly bias it up or down to get past some comms/short/? check to start charging. Usually no issues with ChargePoint L2 or L3, (it’s not the car). But there just aren’t that many around.
ralph84 2y ago
Many DCFC chargers these days have liquid-cooled cables. Not sure how that’d work with a portable cable.
- stahtops 2y ago

raldi 2y ago

Buried deep in the article, what the clickbait headline alludes to: Car chargers are too complicated and expensive. We can make them simpler and cheaper while keeping them safe, which would let us build many more charging stations.

formerly_proven 2y ago
Or we could install more destination chargers, which are cheaper, more practical, don't strain the local grid and don't strain the battery.
monero-xmr 2y ago
Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!). Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs? I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening
- IneffablePigeon 2y ago
  EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    The convenience to me of being able to refuel anywhere quickly, plus the dubious carbon savings, plus the immediate discount on the car purchase (without any subsidies), makes it a moral purchase rather than a practical one. I am not very impressed by the benefits. I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers

progbits 2y ago

> We estimate that the cost of the bill of materials and assembly of a galvanically isolated charging port is about $300 per kilowatt. So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link. I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up. Seems ridiculously high, like paying some military/space grade premiums, or just using very niche parts without economies of scale driving the cost down.

marsokod 2y ago
> > So a single 300-kW port in a public charging station includes about $90,000 of power electronics, of which about $54,000 is for the isolation link. > I would love to see a concrete BOM for a sample build and mouser links to back this up. This kind of checks out with the price of 200kW and 400kW chargers from Alpitronics: https://www.connect-gp-joule.de/en/shop/dc-charging-stations/alpitronic/hyc400 https://www.connect-gp-joule.de/en/shop/dc-charging-stations... Between €67k and €102k (for some reasons VAT included in that price) for these units.
- progbits 2y ago
  That's the product. I'm not questioning the price of those, but the price of components vs markup Show me the IGBTs and inductors that cost 90k.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
These things also generate revenue. It's not a zero sum game. Fast charging pricing varies quite a lot but 50 cents per kwh is a nice round number to work with (and probably lowish). Some places charge more, some less. If an average charging session charges 30 kwh, that's 15$/session. To earn back 90K, you need 6000 charging sessions. At 17 sessions per day, you'd get there in about a year. You also have to deal with power and other overhead obviously. And chargers are more expensive than just that. A good charger should be generating 50-100K of revenue per year and do that for several years until it is replaced. The lifetime revenue should be at least a few hundred thousand $. Of course this whole article is based on the notion that its assertions about cost are correct. They probably are high balling a few numbers. All I'm reading is that US charging companies are paying a high price for their infrastructure and are apparently failing to benefit from economies of scale, learning effects, etc. High speed chargers are being deployed at scale across the globe. The US is technically behind on this front with relatively low EV adoption rates. So, I would expect US companies to be somewhat behind on the cost front as well. Bottom line: done right, unsubsidized charging infrastructure should be doable and profitable. Subsidies are of course involved in a lot of places. But it's not like fossil fuels are un-subsidized. Regardless of what you think of that, there's a good reason for that: governments are eager to sponsor energy infrastructure because it's an economic multiplier. Economic growth is strongly connected to energy availability and usage. Lucrative economic activity tends to be very energy intensive. The US has invested many trillions in it's oil and gas infrastructure over the decades. And that's just direct investments. All those expensive wars in the middle east to secure access to oil are also part of this. And it has had a decent return on investment on those investments. It's nowhere near matching that for the clean replacement for any of that stuff. Other countries are outspending the US so they can provide clean, cheap energy to their economies. The US should be spending more and spending smarter or it risks pricing itself out of the market. China in particular has built up quite a lead here. I don't think the Chinese are wasting their money.

timewizard 2y ago

> indicated that 62 percent of EV owners were so anxious about EV range that they had at times curtailed their travel plans. So.. wouldn't increasing overall range be the "one thing" you could do to actually improve this?

gilbetron 2y ago
This is it - even a highly available charging network only lightly alleviates range anxiety, as the other portion is the time it takes to charge up. If I can drive for 600+ miles on a single charge, the vast majority of my trips are covered, even round-trips. But sitting around waiting 30m to charge gets annoying every several hours, even if I can find a working station.

lstodd 2y ago

BTW everyone is fond of Norway while having zero idea how it's actually over there. Consider this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Order_of_Disappearance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Order_of_Disappearance The protagonist plows snow for a living, using 200-300 bhp diesel truck for like half a year each year, day after day. This thing just can not be replaced with an electric no matter what you try. And without it there would be zero traffic, electric or no. It often looks like people here mostly do not comprehend what snowfall is.

Dylan16807 2y ago
First off, who are you talking to? I didn't see anyone suggest replacing every truck in the world with electric. Second, that's not a particularly large number for horsepower. Please explain why you think it can't be electric. Note that charging time can be solved by having a bigger fleet, and while that is expensive it's well within the range of "no matter what you try".
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
"Electric snow plow put to the test by the Norwegian Road Administration" https://www.designwerk.com/en/post/e-truck/pioneering-work-electric-snow-plow-on-behalf-of-the-road-authorities/ https://www.designwerk.com/en/post/e-truck/pioneering-work-e... I also saw a person in Norway commenting about their high uptake of EVs noting that at the end of the day the snow piles in the city are noticeably cleaner than they used to be when ICE engines were more common.
kelnos 2y ago
There will always be corner cases. That doesn't mean we shouldn't make the common case better. Not really sure what your comment has to do with the article, though. Seems like you're just here to complain about EV advocacy?

tomas789 2y ago

I'm no electrical engineer but would that really be so much cheaper? A buck converted is essentially the same thing where the transformer is replaced by an inductor. You get rid of a bit of copper but all the power electronics to do the high-frequency switching is still there. Together with most of the components. They "estimate" this would save 60% on galvanic link, and on the rest, you can save another half. So that would mean you are at 20% cost plus some ground wire fault detection HW.

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Related, a recent video intereview with the Peterson Car museum with one of the authors, discussing the EVs he's worked on: https://youtu.be/Wv9hPIPhR9w https://youtu.be/Wv9hPIPhR9w

kkfx 2y ago

To reduce public infra cost we simply need to ERASE the speculation around it. Simply only grid operators are allowed to install chargers and them are allowed to be payed only with a bank card not with apps not with dedicated cards and so on. Cutting this part will makes the very same hw much cheaper.

KurSix 2y ago

I'm not entirely sure about safty in this case. Especially in a system that has to work in a wide range of real-world conditions...