CCS DC Fast Charging for Electric Cars Debuts at National Electric Drive Week

Since 2011, the USA has sold over 300,000 Plug in all electric cars and plug in hybrid cars. Since there are now so many EVs on the road now, the once a year day event has been pushed out to a full week of EV events across the USA. One interesting bit of news to come out of the Montclair, NJ NEDW event today was the debut of the first SAE CCS High Voltage DC Fast Charger in NJ.

At the event today were many different types of Electric Vehicles and not all can use the new EVSE. At the moment different manufacturers have different charging standards for DC fast charging. The Nissan Leaf’s use CHAdeMo and there are already a large number of these DC fast chargers around if you look for them. You can find them on PlugShare. The BMW I3 and VW eGolf use a different standard of DC fast charging from the Society of Automotive Engineers known as CCS.

At the NEDW event today in Montclair the first DC CCS Quick Charger was unveiled. This allowed multiple I3s and eGolfs to quickly charge up their EVs for their trips back home! I expect to see many more of these start to pop up over time throughout the USA but at this point I believe this is the first one that is public.

The CCS plug differs from the CHAdeMo in a couple of ways. While both deliver high voltage DC energy directly into the cars traction battery pack, the CCS is a combination plug and the CHAdeMO is a dedicated High Voltage plug/connector. The SAE decided to go with a combination plug so that only one connector was needed in the car for Level 2 charging and Level 3 charging. Level 2 charging is 240v AC charging while Level 3 is DC fast charging.

At the Event today, there were 12 BMW i3s, 2 Tesla Model S, 1 VW eGolf, 1 Mercedes B-Class, 1 Nissan Leaf, 1 Chevy Volt, 1 Tesla Roadster, 1 Zero motorcycle and 1 Toyota RAV4 EV.