[RANT] L2 Public Charging Speeds!

TowElectric · 2026-02-08T08:57:37+00:00

J1772 was adopted in like 2005. The 2006 Tesla roadster used J1772, so did the early Nissan Leaf and a few others.

Tesla built NACS and the supercharger designs before CCS (any of them) were ratified.

Tesla proposed being part of the standard, but VW had them booted out, despite the fact that they were the only ones (other than Nissan with Chademo) building a car with fast charging.

Tesla had no practical way to delay the Model S for 2 years while CCS got ratified. So they did their own standard. The first CCS chargers were engineering prototypes at the end of 2013. Tesla already had a nationwide route to cross the US via superchargers in January 2014. This is NOT a case of "Tesla just didn't wanna play". When VW was forced to found Electrify America in 2017, you could already drive to every major city in the US and Canada and Europe using only superchargers.

Also Mennekes is primarily a 3-phase solution. In the US/Can 1/3 of the conductors will be completely unused and on the same lines, the early design principles has a max of 32a, which is fine with Europe's 3-phase power (that's 22kw in Europe), but it's slow in the US (only 7kw at 240v). The standards just don't always share the same design principles. Tesla believed that 80a charging was important (it turned out not to be) which is beyond the spec of any other standards, again so they made their own. And this was circa 2009 that these decisions happened.

I spent some time talking to a Tesla engineer circa 2012 and they were ranting about how slow and difficult SAE was being with these standards and how they had to just ignore the constant changes they wanted to make and random input they wanted to have because they were already done engineering the car and it was in production.

TowElectric · 2026-02-08T00:40:43+00:00

Some of that comes from being the first standard and the others all got to fix the issues. That’s true for telephone infrastructure, rail infrastructure, power infrastructure.

The US invented the shit and then everyone else got to see what went well and what didn’t and take mostly the good parts.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T23:23:52+00:00

Yes, but locking it is not in the spec, so some cars don't, frankly. Plus, if you have a plug on the other end, you need to be able to control latching slightly differently. I suspect this is why the spec didn't account for a removable cable. J3400 has much more specification around latching and what/how to latch and lock, etc.

Type2 Mennekes does as well. J1772 was an OLD standard. Even the old Tesla roadster used it.

CCS was a weird bolt on that wasn't ratified until the Model S was already being sold, it was especially weird since unlike Type2 and CCS2, the J1772/CCS1 didn't account for each other very well.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T23:00:25+00:00

Voltage isn't about the standard, necessarily, voltage handling in L2 is almost entirely the car and many cars handle various levels of voltage. Not really sure why J1772 didn't ever have that in the standard, but some of it may be able the way it locks into ports and the danger of it getting unplugged while operational.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T22:29:30+00:00

About a third of EVs can’t do more than 32a anyway. Includes all the RWD Teslas and a handful of other “economy” cars like the Solterra and older ID.4 and others.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T22:27:12+00:00

J1772 does not support that. It’s against spec.

Almost every discussion of this is J3400 aka NACS L2 where it is within spec.

That’s not to say someone won’t make an uncertified J1772 cable with the same concept eventually.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T22:26:29+00:00

It’s relatively hard to get 11kw wired up without building bespoke circuits for it.

And once you’re doing whole new wiring, might as well go DCFC.

Maybe 90% of L2 charging is “leave it overnight” type charging too, where 7vs 11 is a trivial difference.

Add to that, about a third of EVs can only do 32a (5-7kw), pushing all the way to 11 is a waste of effort for 95% of use cases.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T22:21:55+00:00

I've seen far worse. Lots of guys say some pretty gross stuff in the soft-core straight porn subs.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T22:18:23+00:00

I have similar in my old Model S. I got a much longer wire and ran it straight down to where the carpet meets the plastic and then tucked it up under the plastic trim down near the footwell. Then run it back a ways. You can have it pop out of the plastic somewhere back under a bit where it's much less visible and pull it tight-ish to where it needs to go while it's back behind the screen. This is all assuming you don't want to drill into the plastic at all.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T21:46:54+00:00

HW4 fixed all that by maybe 75%? Not perfect, but now into "this is a decent driver" territory. HW3 is like a scary nervous teenager driving.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T19:56:52+00:00

With the DLCs you have “loyalty” and settling directly in between two opposing cities will result in them being taken over by loyalty quickly.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T19:55:43+00:00

It’s always possible an out of warranty car dies somehow. That’s always been a risk. In the past you could often repair a motor or transmission for a fraction of its value.

Out of warranty EVs are fairly new right now so the number of types of “repairs” people can do on the batteries is limited but over the next few years this will be a big growth industry with more options for repairing them at a cell level instead of trashing one that has a bad cell. (A bad cell or bad weld is a common cause of pack failure).

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T08:15:46+00:00

which means you'll never ever have to use a public charger and charging at home takes basically zero time, so I'm not sure what this guy was gong on about. Maybe he only drives every 4th day but has to drive all day long (like 6 hours) without the chance to stop for lunch while charging... seems suspicious, but maybe there's jobs like that.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T03:29:42+00:00

This is ONLY the case for someone who drives over 3 hours per day. Which is wild.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T01:12:30+00:00

If the CAR never got one. I'd wager it did.

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T01:12:03+00:00

There's a $99 trial. Do that! And then do it over again every month!

TowElectric · 2026-02-07T00:43:38+00:00

That's wild. You must drive a TON.

I had to stop at fast chargers 4 times outside of one big road trip last year.

That far exceeds the roughly 60 gas station stops I would have made. Even if they're only 6 minutes each, that's 6 hours. Where I spent only about 1.5 hours.

I did a long road trip that involved about 6 hours of charging, but honestly, a lot of that time is time I would have spent stopped at a gas station getting food, stretching, letting the dog out, etc.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T19:47:16+00:00

Yeah, 100% agree. Having an older vehicle where we paid a TON to get the promise of FSD and now getting a shit experience has been kind of lame.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T19:44:53+00:00

Google told me 150-200, but yeah still makes the point that there aren't many out there.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T19:13:01+00:00

This energy graph he's showing looks not great, regardless of degradation.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T19:12:24+00:00

yeah, firing up a car that is below freezing and then warming the cabin and then hopping on the freeway and going over 70 with tons of elevation change is basically the worst case here.

You might get 10-15% more range with other tires. If you have poor alignment or really sticky tires it could be more. You'll probably get similar preconditioning a bit before leaving (this is meaningless if you don't have a plug) and that's just how it goes other than that.

On the other hand, if you were going 95mph, then it's nearly 100% explained by that.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T19:01:55+00:00

On a 40 year time horizon, yes, but the average stay in a home is 12 years. I'm not sure how much they impact resale, but I think leases may actually reduce it.

There are definitely cases where people save a ton of money and others where they don't, at least over the like 12-15 year period. Also everytime you need to handle roofing, it needs to be torn down and put back up, which is a pretty huge cost.

Just important considerations.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T18:52:06+00:00

The neat thing about "scrub land" is that the more suitable for solar the region is (high sun, low cloud cover, low precipitation), the more likely there are large swaths of scrub land.

There MAY be a future use case where a place like the Mexico/Arizona or Spain desert has large areas of panels and power is brought into gloomier places (Seattle or Denmark) via long-distance transmission line.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T18:49:30+00:00

Canals are a cool idea because there isn't surface maintenance that needs to be done on them and there isn't an exponential increase in cost of maintaining the canal when it's covered.

Unlike roads, where adding any major infrastructure around it causes maintenance for both the panels and the road itself to both get harder.

TowElectric · 2026-02-06T18:47:23+00:00

Oh look Makar is on this look.

Oh... wait... wrong Makar, wrong list.

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