Many of my articles thus far have been relatively technical, but this one covers a much simpler issue: We all really need to agree on where the charge port is placed on a car.
An odd legacy of gas fillers is that we’ve come to terms with them being placed on either side of the car. But it’s not as if this is of no consequence. Gas stations take up a larger footprint than they would if we were consistent. Often you will see cars doing a bit of a shuffling act to get to an available pump. Most of this nonsense could be avoided if, at least as a country, we could pick a side, as we have with steering wheels and turn signal stalks.
EVs have not only inherited this problem but have given it another degree of freedom. Charge ports can be located just about anywhere–not only on either side of the vehicle, but also in the front or rear. The Nissan leaf has the port in the middle of the hood, while the F150 Lightning has it just in front of the driver’s door. Meanwhile Tesla has always placed its charge ports on the driver's side rear.
Inconsistent charge port placement has real consequences. Chargers that are designed to serve all vehicle types need cables that are 20 feet or longer in order to reach the potential port locations. This doesn’t sound like a big deal until you realize that the cables themselves are often the bottleneck when it comes to charging speed. Increasing amperage requires either thicker or water-cooled cables. Both solutions are expensive, and the former–thick copper cables–are unmanageable when 20 feet long.
Tesla neatly solved this problem for itself by putting the charge port in the same place on every car it produces. This relatively obvious solution meant that Superchargers could have cables that were only 6 feet long: either thick, passively cooled cables carrying 400A, or water-cooled cables handling 600A or more. This has allowed Tesla to charge 400V cars at 250kW, a feat that no other charging provider has been able to replicate.
Other charging providers have been saddled with the responsibility of catering to a range of cars manufactured with charge ports in every imaginable place, and thus have needed to deploy extra long cables, which have typically been limited to 350A even when using active water cooling. This means that even some fancy 350kW stations are only capable of charging at 175kW when charging the standard 400V cars.
Another problem is arising now that Tesla is opening up the Supercharger network to other vehicles. Because of the seemingly random charge port placement, it is possible that a mix of vehicles could tie up all of the charge post/parking space combinations while only using half of the posts themselves. It seems that Tesla is tackling this problem by creating a new charge post with a slightly longer cable and placing it between spaces rather than in the center of the space, but all this hassle could be avoided if we could just agree to put the port in the same place. From a technical standpoint, standardizing port placement wouldn’t pose a significant burden on EV manufacturers and is a common sense step for the industry to take.
Stay tuned: in a future article I’ll move beyond the location of charge ports and discuss flaws in the ports themselves and why we have committed to an inferior charging standard.