> 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.)
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.)