[DcinBC]

OK, so I’ll offer a contrarian opinion. I was travelling around before Christmas and charged my car in Fairhaven, south Bellingham, WA at a 100kw peak shared EVGo charger. I had about 40% state of charge and the car started at about 50KW, dropping for a bit and then going up briefly to 60KW before us leaving with 80%. Ambient temperature was about 40F. Certainly, lots of chargers split maximum available power on a shared unit, but the car’s Battery Management System ultimately decides how quickly it will allow the car to charge. Too cold and it will slow down until the pack warms up. Too hot and it will do the same, using the HVAC system and power modulation to prevent damage to the cells. Volvo is quite conservative in their charging algorithm, which is good in my book, since the end result is a healthier battery pack. Lots of people unhappily still compare filling a gas tank to charging their car, getting impatient as the minutes tick by. Go find a bathroom, get a coffee and catch up on the news, work or what have you - if necessary, drop your partner and kids at a mall. Above all, enjoy the down time and quit fussing about the lost minutes charging. 99% of the time most of us are plugging in at home overnight anyway, a convenience no ICE driver can share, or the lack of maintenance, or… we’ll, you get the picture. It’s different. Enjoy the difference and don’t worry about losing minutes - your battery thanks you.

 

[DcinBC]

I respectfully disagree. Companies need to continue to drive those charging times lower and lower.

Fast charging is important for road trips. Road trips are where you can take a 3-4 hour journey that is barely inconvenienced in an ICE vehicle. One 15 minutes gas stop. To adding 25%+ to your total travel time.

Take a typical trip in that 3-4 hour range, where your final destination doesn't have charging, whether its because your visiting a hotel or your visiting family that has only ICE vehicles it doesn't matter. You're going to have 1 stop and charge from 10-80. In a Hyundai Ioniq 5 or a Kia EV6 that stop is 18 minutes. Or barely a difference vs an ICE stop.
In your scenario using a 50kW charger, that would take our vehicles over an hour to replenish adding ~25% total travel time to the trip.

Personally, I don't consider that a minor inconvenience.

Lots of 50 kw chargers around here. They’re cheap and we just go for lunch. I seem to recall Hyundai being in the news for their $60K replacement batteries in a $50K car. Ours list for $14,300 US. I’ll take slower charging, thanks. We just got back from a 400 mile trip to Vancouver and the US. One 30kw fast charge for $22 Cdn, and a free 7Kw charge on level 2, getting home with 15%. By comparison, it would take a full tank in the VW camper at $100+. And we usually go across town to Costco and back to save money, taking about the same time as a 50KW charge. Charging at home took, what 15 seconds to plug in and eight hours overnight? Priceless. You really want to ‘be barely inconvenienced’ in an ICE vehicle? Just driving around in Vancouver traffic for three days was enough for me. Electric is just easier, charging and all. Oh, and one more thing about Hyundai/Kia fast charging: you have to find a 250kw+ charger, the outside temperature must be just right, and you are at 10% SOC. Maybe Hyundai has fixed their warm-gating issues now, but overheating the battery from fast charging severely limited their performance at first. Volvo is very cautious about protecting their packs, hence the charging speed. I plan on keeping my car a while, but I don’t think I would with a Hyundai.

 

[DcinBC]

Volvo chose to go with an 400V architecture vs Hyundai/Kia/Genesis's 800V system. That's more the explanation on charging speeds vs Volvo just being cautious.

Well here’s the thing. We have a 16 station 150KW Tesla site, a 2 station 100KW PetroCan site that rarely works, and a handful of 50KW Hydro units in the provincial capital. The nearest high performance chargers are 120km away in Nanaimo, or across the water in Vancouver. Yet despite that, Ioniq5s and EV6s are quite popular. here, despite needing a half hour to charge like my car. Why not get a Hyundai and see how it works out after four years? Don’t think I’d want a car with a battery that costs more than the purchase price of the car, and that $60K was for a 400v Ioniq, BTW.

 

[DcinBC]

I can only suggest that if you prefer a Hyundai or Kia and believe their architectures are superior, you should go for it. As to why Volvo continues to use 400 volt systems, dunno but it works for them. Maybe the EX60 will move to 800 volt.
As to the whys and wherefores, the primary argument is the ability to deliver more power over a thinner cable, so for Tesla, they are thinking about big batteries in the pickup and their heavy duty tractor unit. As to why the Koreans do it who knows, but for me I don’t see a big advantage going from 30 minutes to 14 minutes. We don’t have the HP chargers here in any case. Maybe Nio is onto something with their battery swapping, which evidently takes as long as a gas fill-up. Geely seems to think so, and the big advantage is that they don’t need big power to recharge the batteries they reuse. The other side of the coin is the amount of power needed to charge quickly at a level 3 site. A single 50KW charge station draws about the same amount of power as a residential home, so compare that to a 16 station Tesla 350kw Supercharger site and you’re looking at an entire housing development - 112 homes. That sort of power is a big infrastructure pressure.
For myself, I don’t see the point in worrying about losing time when I’m charging, but I’m just one person. If I’m in a rush to travel big distances, I would prefer to fly. It’s less stressful. I actually enjoy the downtime of charging on the road. As long as I can find a bathroom, have something to drink, a snack and a book, I’m happy and well rested. The destination will wait as we’re not on a timeline any more, and my wife is content too if I drop her off to poke about the shops first.

 

[DcinBC]

Because all common components used in the high voltage system ie. contactors, motor control units, pumps, heaters, distribution units, compressors, motors, etc. need to be designed to work with that 800V architecture.
And items like those, that are readily available from suppliers, are currently designed to work in a 480v system, as this is the common "high voltage" system found in commercial and industrial applications in the US. It's very common in the electrical industry to have 600V ratings on most components for this reason. And they won't work in 800V systems.

When Porsche developed the 800V system for the Taycan they had to design everything themselves, for the first time in an automotive use.
They were probably only able to do it because they had the entire engineering and financial power of VAG behind them.

TLDR it's much cheaper to produce a 400V EV given the current environment of off the shelf components.

Same thing with 12v versus 48 volt parts. The cost of a replacement 48v battery alone is enough to make me wonder, much less custom wiper, power window and power lock motors. The electronics all need stepping down anyway. With the changes in battery chemistry and EV charging infrastructure, I wonder if the long term need for high speed charging performance is such a big deal. You drive for three of four hours, take a bio break, eat and drink, and your car is charged in a half hour vs 14 minutes, if a 250+ kWh charger is handy. Cross country dashes of 1000 miles a day as roads get busier? People do it, but it’s quicker and easier to fly. I can see the point of 800 and 1000 volt packs when you’re charging 150-500kwh of energy, but not so much in a 75kWh unit just because.

 

[DcinBC]

In this scenario you're letting the car dictate your trip. Sometimes you don't have that flexibility. Last summer we took a vacation to the Outer Banks in NC. We wanted to be on the island before traffic started to build up for the day. That meant leaving our house at 4:30-5am. If we had taken our XC40 that would mean getting up at 3am or earlier!


I somewhat disagree with you here. You are correct in that it's quicker and easier to fly... once it gets to a certain distance away. No one is going to argue that it's easier to fly from NY/LA to CO. But here on the east coast, trips between cities can be faster, and certainly cheaper, than flying.

Flytime between Philadelphia (my closest airport) and Boston is only 1.5 hrs. Drivetime is 5.5 hours (I've actually done this drive in 5.5 hrs).
Except the drive to the airport is 1hr, getting through security and leaving enough time before departure is 2 hours (if you follow the TSA's advice), plus deplaning, time at the bag carousel, and the travel time between the airport and your final destination starts to add up to pretty close to that drivetime of 5.5 hrs.

Taking an slow charging EV adds 40-60 minutes to this trip. Taking a fast charging EV (Porsche Taycan/Lucid Air/EV6/Ioniq5) can be almost comparable to the ICE trip.

And by driving I've saved $250 (2 tickets @$150 each vs <$50 in gas), taken as much luggage as I want and was able to drive exactly to my destination.
Now I have my vehicle for getting around during my stay (saving more money on Ubers/taxis, and I can leave when I want to when the trip is over vs having to arrive to the airport on the plane's schedule.

I know all of this makes it look like I'm trying to convince you your argument is wrong. I'm not. I'm trying to convince you that despite how you, or I, take road trips, enough people have voted with their wallets (slow EV adoption rates) and their thoughts (repeated surveys show that Americans say they won't adopt EV's until their range is 300+ miles and charging times are sub 10 minutes) that charging times/speeds are important.

If you lived in 1907 before the model T was released, you would be stopping to feed and water the horse every 20 miles or so. Then when motor cars became widely available, people started to build service and gas stations - before then drug stores carried the stuff. I learned to drive a mark 1 Mini with 37hp which would stall if it hit a puddle of water. We didn’t travel as much then as it was expensive and each trip was an adventure! Today we complain about our EVs not being in the same league as gas cars for long trips, or not having the newest breakthrough. Fair enough, but we live in the microcosm that is North America where we tend to supersize things, including problems. I look at Norway through their EV vloggers, and see how different opinions can be. They already have a built-out charging infrastructure, they deal with extreme cold and at 2500km north to south, some serious distances without even travelling across Europe. But the one thing they don’t bother about is whether charging is a big deal (except on a long weekend), although Bjørn Nyland complained the Ioniq 5 didn’t give him time to use the bathroom and eat his lunch. They have plenty of 300kw chargers as well as the Tesla network, but when he started he would complain about 50KW chargers and cars cold gating in the north. In fact he said the Hyundai had a problem with losing power after charging so quickly, a problem they’ve doubtless fixed by now. Having an EV has given us software updates and a lot of new technology as they’ve evolved, but the important things to me are a quiet and affordable means of personal travel (try gas at almost $10Cdn a gallon here last summer), once the sticker shock of a new luxury car is dealt with; and the fact my EV isn’t going to contribute to the pollution the kids and grandkids will inherit. We have a VW camper van, and take trips in it too. Our last round trip to Oregon cost the far side of $500 in gas. When we had to take the old dear in for yet another service ($30K in 8 years and counting), we looked at taking the Volvo. It would take a bit of planning but the main issue was space for our camping gear vs the convenience of popping the top, or hunkering down if the weather turned bad. But then, our only timeline was where we had reserved a campsite or a ferry. Did my time as a worker so I appreciate everyone isn’t as lucky!