CCS is Dead Man Walkin’

[SASSquatch]

https://electrek.co/2023/06/12/tesla-nacs-connector-gains-support-list-companies/

With these announcements, ChargePoint, EVgo, and several charger manufacturers will support NACS. Electrify Americas chargers come from two manufacturers in the list.

As far as I’m concerned, the EV Chargers ‘Standard’ War is over. CCS is dead man walkin’.

Except the largest EV market by market share worldwide (Europe) has banned NACS and their entire infrastructure can only be CCS.

Ooops.

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[Cosmacelf]

Except the Tesla network wasn't open to other EVs, so Tesla's lead was irrelevant until now. CCS wasn't "tenuous", it was the standard for "everyone but Tesla."

It would be like saying USB-C was tenuous, because airports/hotels/etc had Lightning charge cords everywhere, but little USB-C. Those are useless to non-Apple owners, so Lightning charge cords don't matter to other phone owners.

Now if Apple had opened up Lightning to other manufacturers in 2017, when USB-C was just getting established (yet there were plenty of USB-C devices on the market,) that would be like where we are now.

If you work out the economics of a charging network, you find that making money from one is very, very hard. It was estimated that in the early few years of the Supercharger network, Tesla was spending about $2,000 per car building out the network, and it wasn’t at all clear they could ever be profitable. Presumably Tesla did make it profitable but only because they a) iterated their design and manufacturing to wring out costs and b) had high utilization across the network.

CCS1 networks, on the other hand, had to pay charger manufacturers a nice profit to buy their machines, which were more expensive to begin with because they were made in much lower volumes, and had CC readers, screens and long cables all of which made reliability and cost much higher. Then they had much lower utilization.

That’s what I meant by tenuous.

I do wonder how much of a choice the charging networks had. Evgo has almost 600 NACS plugs on their network. So there was a way. Tesla always said they would partner with any EV manufacturer. No, I think it was a lot more that industry was simply too full of hubris to partner with Tesla, until it became obvious they were only hurting themselves.

 

[Cosmacelf]

There’s a lot of posts talking about CCS is Europe. The Europe CCS2 is completely different from CCS1 in NA. And irrelevant anyways. People as a rule do not move personal cars across oceans, so whatever they have in Europe (and China, and Japan) has no bearing on what we use in North America.

 

[ohseedee]

When people say "NACS is so far ahead of CCS" - what exactly do they mean. Please be specific on details. As far as I knew/know - they both support data transmission, and similar power delivery capabilities, with CCS actually providing more peak power than your average tesla supercharger station - is that wrong? The plug and play capabilities of NACS I believe is more down to being within a single ecosystem than the entire inability of CCS to do such things as a specification.

Where does NACS greatly exceed the capabilities of the spec for CCS - not the implementation(s) we currently have - the spec? I'm not upset and demanding justification, I'm asking for the info because I feel like my understanding is apparently very limited/incorrect based upon what seems to keep coming up about it.

Fair. I am only referring to the number of working chargers currently in the US when I say "so far ahead."

 

[RexRemus]

Fair. I am only referring to the number of working chargers currently in the US when I say "so far ahead."

Appreciate the clarification

 

[Sgt Beavis]

Except the largest EV market by market share worldwide (Europe) has banned NACS and their entire infrastructure can only be CCS.

Ooops.

That really has no impact on the US market. We've had differing standards on various things for ages. Even the Chinese uses something other than CCS (GB/T)

 

[av8or]

There was no standard when Tesla started building out their network, so they designed their own. Fast forward to CharIN and they need to make a standard but can’t copy Tesla so here comes CCS. On no planet is CCS better than NACS (I’ve heard the arguments how CCS is better and I’m not buying it) and so it only makes sense to make NACS the new standard. That’s currently what’s happening and all who are opposed can simply buy a vehicle that doesn’t have NACS and if all have NACS you have the privilege of driving right past all superchargers and run that scoundrel out of business. That’s how the FREE market works, not we need to wrestle somebody’s business away from them because they had foresight while nobody else did.

 

[Sgt Beavis]

CharIN just surrendered...
https://www.charin.global/news/char...o-supports-the-standardization-of-tesla-nacs/


Hey @jjswan33 I think I should start a new thread for this but I'm worried about your PTSD.. ?

 

[zefram47]

CharIN just surrendered...
https://www.charin.global/news/char...o-supports-the-standardization-of-tesla-nacs/

Saw that earlier. Good news, but let's see if they actually manage to get a standards body to approve NACS as presented by Tesla or if some stick-in-the-muds will insist on changes. I'd venture the whole business of not isolating AC and DC will be a sticking point.

 

[Sgt Beavis]

I would really like to get a behind the scenes story on how Tesla pulled this off. IMO they played this masterfully.

 

[MDH]

There was no standard when Tesla started building out their network, so they designed their own. Fast forward to CharIN and they need to make a standard but can’t copy Tesla so here comes CCS. On no planet is CCS better than NACS (I’ve heard the arguments how CCS is better and I’m not buying it) and so it only makes sense to make NACS the new standard. That’s currently what’s happening and all who are opposed can simply buy a vehicle that doesn’t have NACS and if all have NACS you have the privilege of driving right past all superchargers and run that scoundrel out of business. That’s how the FREE market works, not we need to wrestle somebody’s business away from them because they had foresight while nobody else did.

Amen!

 

[sub]

Where does NACS greatly exceed the capabilities of the spec for CCS - not the implementation(s) we currently have - the spec? I'm not upset and demanding justification, I'm asking for the info because I feel like my understanding is apparently very limited/incorrect based upon what seems to keep coming up about it.

According to the cpec for CCS, the Maximum current is 500 amps. According to the spec for NACS, it can handle at least 900 amps. So that is nearly 2x the current - I would say that would qualify as "greatly exceeds".

Note that NACS does not have a specific max current - the spec says watch the temperature and turn it down as-needed, and that it has confirmed that 900A did not overheat.

So the max power for a CCS1 port on a 400V vehicle (like a Rivian) is 400V*500A=200kw while a NACS port could handle 400V*900A=360kw.

 

[SASSquatch]

That really has no impact on the US market. We've had differing standards on various things for ages. Even the Chinese uses something other than CCS (GB/T)

I know but I couldn't resist since you didn't specify markets.

Even if every OEM jumped on the NACS bandwagon tomorrow - by the time NACS cars were produced, there would be 1 Million + CCS vehicles (including a lot of Rivians) on the road that will need access to CCS indefinitely.

CCS would need to be included in all new infrastructure for decades probably.

You're not going to kill it off that easily - like it or not.

 

[Sgt Beavis]

At this point, I'd say it's only a matter of time before Rivian announces support for NACS.

 

[DuoRivians]

According to the cpec for CCS, the Maximum current is 500 amps. According to the spec for NACS, it can handle at least 900 amps. So that is nearly 2x the current - I would say that would qualify as "greatly exceeds".

Note that NACS does not have a specific max current - the spec says watch the temperature and turn it down as-needed, and that it has confirmed that 900A did not overheat.

So the max power for a CCS1 port on a 400V vehicle (like a Rivian) is 400V*500A=200kw and 400V*900A=360kw on NACS.

It is very dangerous to send 500A down a connector, let alone 900A.

Which is why going up in voltage to 800V or more is the safer route.

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