3 phase is a huge deal, especially for commercial fleets.
For public charging DC fast chargers are incredibly expensive, whereas a 3 phase AC charger is pretty cheap and effectively the same price as single phase charger. Delivering more power for the same install cost is valuable since it opens more charging use cases for low cost charging.
I think north america is going to regret not having 1st class support for 3 phase charging baked into all electrified vehicles in the long term.
> 3 phase is a huge deal, especially for commercial fleets.
Unless various European systems are weirder than I think they are, I’m not convinced I buy this. For a fleet, you have more than one car charging in a location. So you can connect each car to all three phases, use more complex AC-DC converters, and get a perfectly balanced three phase load for each car. Or you can connect each car to one phase and neutral or to two phases, use simpler AC-DC converters, and get an overall load that is still, statistically, close to balanced. And you can draw just as much total power across all cars in the two-wire configuration as you can in the three-phase configuration. And you use fewer wires and fewer switching elements in your circuit breakers.
It seems to me that the actual advantages of three-phase charging are:
1. A single car on a small three-phase service can charge faster if it uses all three phases.
2. A very long cable with only two current carrying conductors from a three phase service will have an unbalanced average voltage, thus potentially increasing capacitive leakage. (But a split-phase North American 240V system does not have this problem.)
> I think north america is going to regret not having 1st class support for 3 phase charging baked into all electrified vehicles in the long term.
Doubt it.
Long term, I think cars are going to drop AC chargers entire (they're heavy and expensive), and when DCFC are available everywhere there won't be any reason to pay for one in your vehicle. As manufacturers look for places to reduce cost and bring vehicles down market, we will start to see this.
For people who still want it, someone will build a portable 1.4kW DC charger that you can plug into a regular household socket.
I doubt your doubt. They’re not that heavy, and a 12kW inverter charger isn’t particularly expensive. Maybe $600-700 retail or $200-300 in BOM.
Asking everyone to put a high power AC/DC converter in their house or charging infrastructure even for “low” (8-12kW) power stuff is asking a lot for pushing cost around. Long term, you want chargers to be cheap as chips… not more expensive.
No, long term you want cars to be cheap as chips and chargers to be more expensive. There are way more chargers than cars, and they probably last a lot longer. And removing the converter from the car means you can make it bigger and heavier and cheaper. And it removes an expensive point of failure from cars.
If there’s more chargers than there are cars, then moving cost into the chargers is bad. Adding cost to something we want to be as ubiquitous as possible (charging infrastructure) will hamper it.
Also, not sure if you’ve ever seen even the infrastructure for existing EV chargers… but I’m skeptical that infrastructure will outlast cars in most cases. There’s a ton of maintenance I’ve seen required just on the “dumb” AC chargers. People hit them, they get vandalized, or they just stop working. Making them even more expensive to repair would be the wrong move.
>3 phase is a huge deal, especially for commercial fleets.
Commercial fleets in the US will use 3 phase for DC. For commercial installations, this is a non-issue [0]. It's more efficient to use DC charging at scale than reside on the vehicle's onboard rectifier.
>I think north america is going to regret not having 1st class support for 3 phase charging baked into all electrified vehicles in the long term.
It's already here... Where are you getting your information?
That involves expensive external hardware converting AC to DC. I'm talking about native 3 phase charging embedded into every vehicle and the charging port design and specification itself.
There are certainly fleets that need rapid charging throughout the day and they will need expensive DC units. There are many fleets that only need lower speed, longer duration overnight charging at the fleet yard. Native 3 phase with load sharing charging hardware is the lowest cost way to achieve that. No need for expensive labour to move vehicles or power connections overnight, much lower installation cost than even the smallest DC charging hardware, and no need for expensive 400+V DC certified electricians.
You can get to 24kW charging with single phase NACS, which is where the vast majority of EVs' on-board rectifiers max out at. Many max out lower than that.
If you need charging above that, especially at fleet level, it is cheaper to go with dedicated DC charging like the one's I linked. 48A single phase charging is more than enough for the vast majority of all EV use-cases, even for fleet vehicles. Amazon has the largest EV fleet fielded right now, and that's in the US.
You're complaining about a non-issue. Three phase AC EV charging is a solution in search of a problem.
Orange is 3 phase AC. It's about as popular as single phase, and way less popular than DC.
They just opened a brand new transport hub near me with 100 charging points. All single phase.
I just don't think it's a big deal. I don't think people really care about the difference between 7 kW (takes hours to charge) and 22 kW (takes hours to charge).
Maybe people don't care about the hilarious clumsiness of the plug either; I don't know.
For public charging DC fast chargers are incredibly expensive, whereas a 3 phase AC charger is pretty cheap and effectively the same price as single phase charger. Delivering more power for the same install cost is valuable since it opens more charging use cases for low cost charging.
I think north america is going to regret not having 1st class support for 3 phase charging baked into all electrified vehicles in the long term.