My Model X is charging at a rate of 46km per hour on 400v 3 phase every night in my garage. 15000 km in 7 months now. My wife wanted a Porsche before. Not a single regret so far. On long road trips Tesla Superchargers will supply about 270km per hour of charge or more. An electric motor is much more efficient than an ICE. Only the weight and cost of batteries is holding it back but improving quickly with mass production and battery technology.
The future is to have solar panels on practically every roof combined with a storage battery in every home.
Look where mobile phones have come in 25 years. It is the beginning of the end for ICE and the end of the beginning for EV.
Peter wrote:
An aircraft would need a charger at least as big, because the power delivery to the prop is pretty well constant.
So unless every aircraft in the world is replaced by an all electric and battery powered aircraft until January 1st, 2018 the electrification has to be considered to be a complete and utter failure? It has to be binary?
There are many profiles and usage patterns. Design studies have shown that 19 person commuters are technologically feasible today. Chemical battery technology has so far surpassed any prediction by pundits. The next big thing after lithium chemistry is starting to become tangible.
Also of all transport means, long distance aircraft are the least suitable for battery propulsion which means they will be last. Last but not least, electrification is not limited to carrying batteries. Wind/sun can split water, hydrogen can be used as fuel or converted into hydrocarbons and used in existing turbine aircraft. That is as good as an electrification in terms of the goals behind.
You can quote as many studies about the impossibility of a charging infrastructure you like — yet I still charge my car every night and an exponentially growing number of others start doing it every day.
My comment on PDF encryption still evidently stands!
My Model X is charging at a rate of 46km per hour on 400v 3 phase every night in my garage
Dirk – what power do you have available?
I have gone through the PDF and it is the usual stuff. I didn’t find anything interesting in it.
I have 3×32A in my garage, all from a bog standard German household connection which is 3×63A for a single family house unless you ask for more (3×80A is just a replacement of the fuse, more requires a change in connection) (*).
Who says that everybody has to charge his electric cars at home? That’s one of the many misconceptions.
( * ) There is one thing that Germany doesn’t officially allow a household: to draw a strong current from one of the three phases only (asymmetric load, max permitted 4.6kVA). I have gotten an official permission to do it a few years ago through a mistake by the energy company (I would have done it anyway, no way for them to detect). Nowadays most electric cars have 3 rectifiers and draw from all 3 phases so it’s no longer a problem.
Peter,
It is 16A 3ph, 400v in the garage. I use the Tesla Wall charger. Many companies would have no problem installing multiple chargers. A full charge of my car comes to about 7€ in electricity, good for about 330 km. Road tax on a similar powered ICE car would be about 4000€ per year, I pay 0€.
Thanks for posting this PDF, Peter. I always enjoy quantitative insights rather than the usual qualitative ones.
I guess one of the valid points that he makes is that we should not be too binary. Indeed it may make sense to focus on BEV mobility for cities and urban areas, and look for alternatives for heavy/long haul transport, like H2. The pollution issue is more pronounced in cities too..
For the avoidance of doubt, I am an advocate for 100% electric mobility and do my best to promote it, but I guess it’s not all black and white.
As to the use of infrastructure, some figures from my perspective: My wife (i3 with gas backup generator, she’s a cheater!) and my i3 BEV are almost exclusively charged at home and our PV installation (5kW peak) can take one car (plus the rest of the house) easily. We make it a bit of a sport to charge when the sun is out. All in all quite impressive how easily we can get the sun to take care of 80% or so of our transport.. Not trivial, we drive 40.000 km combined.
And for those instances that we need grid power for both cars at night, it’s a load of 20A, single-phase. Good for grid balancing too, charging at night..
“Your mileage may vary”, especially in cloudy UK 
I read until I got to the acronym “GHG” (WTF is GHG?) Browsed through the rest, and didn’t really see anything new. I don’t know what we are smoking in Norway, but as of today 20% of private cars are already all electric, while another 15-20% is plug-in hybrid. By 2025 we will be all electric, or even before for all practical purposes.
The single only thing you need to know about electric cars, is that throughout the lifetime of a single car, it will use much less energy than an IC car, due to higher efficiency in every single process that gets the car rolling on the road, no matter how that electricity is produced. This translates to much cheaper personal transportation (as well as better cars). Add to this the added freedom of being able to charge your car with electricity you yourself are in charge of (smart grids, solar panels and so on), and you have whole new reality that simply is much better for everyone. The economics of this is dead simple, the advantages are dead simple. What has happened is that the very reality has changed. You cannot possible try to say anything sensible of a “future electric world of transportation” by simply extrapolating the current reality and replacing IC cars IMO. The real change isn’t electric vehicle vs IC vehicle. The real change is a new reality with a new economy.
Peter wrote:
What size chargers are they using and are they single or three phase?
Besides the replies already given, a Tesla owner friend has indicated the following which of course applies only to Tesla’s but I think is interesting nonetheless:
Tesla’s are delivered with a mobile charger that has 2 adapters:
- one for a “normal” home jack (in this case CH) which is mostly 1-phase/230V/10A ==> 2.3kW
- one CEE16 adapter, which is normally 3-phase/230V/16A ==> 11kW
The Tesla will charge 54-56km/hr over the CEE16 adapter and 11-13km/hr over the normal home 1-phase outlet…… so about double the quoted 7km/hr
Tesla also sells a wall charger with 2.5 or 7.5m cable that can be used for everything from 1-phase/6A up to 3-phase/32A. Four of these (1x master + 0-3 slaves) can be connected in parallel to a single power jack/outlet, allowing 4 cars to be connected to one jack.
Tesla wall connector, 32A three phase Europe
Tesla’s have a built-in AC-DC converter. The first ones were only 3-phase 230V 16A. Then came a “doublecharger” version with 2 of these in parallel giving 32A.
The model S which came out in 2016 had an air filter with insufficient room for 2 chargers but there were 2 charger versions: 16A and and optional 24A “extended” charger. I believe the 16A version has been dropped and only the 24A is being delivered.
For travelling, Tesla’s are able to indicate where the various charge points are available and which are reachable, can be reserved, etc. These have a more powerful direct DC charging capability with Mennekes Typ2 7-pin plug having 3 phases and 2 data pins which allows communication. These “superchargers” are able to deliver 400V/300ADC …. i.e. max 120kW, which can theoretically provide 550km in 1 hour. Theoretically because there are aspects related to the starting charge in the akku.
chflyer wrote:
Besides the replies already given
The standard today for charging is:
In Norway we have fast chargers about every 80 km on the main roads now + “everywhere” in the cities and shopping malls etc. A Normal “non-Tesla” charging facility is DC fast charging, 50 kW, Combo/CCS and Chademo. In addition they have outlets for 22 kW AC using Type 2 cable that all cars can use. Tesla can also use Chademo, but only Tesla can use Tesla DC chargers.
Just to get a perspective. With the simplest 8A single phase you can charge the car in less than 8 hours, and it will run for 160 km. On average a person drives less than 100 km each day, 95% of the time. If you drive more, or don’t have access at home, there is DC fast chargers or fast Type 2 everywhere.
My impression is that the “German” standard is winning. The Combo/CCS DC standard is only an extension of the already universally adopted Type 2 AC standard. At the moment it is rather confusing with all the different chargers though.
chflyer wrote:
These have a more powerful direct DC charging capability with Mennekes Typ2 7-pin plug having 3 phases and 2 data pins which allows communication. These “superchargers” are able to deliver 400V/300ADC …. i.e. max 120kW, which can theoretically provide 550km in 1 hour.
Type 2 (originally by Mennekes) is the mandatory European standard for AC charging which is slow charging and what cheap public stations as well as private chargers use. Up to 3×32A so not actually slow unless you are standing next to your car waiting for enough electrons.
What you mention with DC is called CCS which is the mandatory European standard for DC. Typically it is found as Combo2 which means one Type 2 and CCS in a single plug. CCS is currently mostly 50kVA but specified up to 350kVA of which we will see first public installations in 2018. DC charging is fast charging and meant for public charging points as the infrastructure is expensive. The reason is that the grid supplies AC which needs to be rectified to DC and those rectifiers are very expensive, heavy and bulky so cars do not carry very big ones, especially since they need one per phase.
The approach is private slow charging and public fast charging. We have seen mostly public Type 2 AC stations in the last few years but now there is a big push for public DC (for which Tesla’s proprietary system was the first mover). Germany’s high end luxury brand Aldi has free of charge public CCS fast chargers all over South Germany and Aldi has become a place to meet for owners of super expensive electric cars 
