It was put in be me (muxsan) in the Netherlands. Because it's built into the car, it doesn't have any chademo limitations, like the max 110A charge current limit, so if your battery is large enough and can handle it, you can increase charging speeds.
Downside is that at the moment, this is only available in the Netherlands and quite a bit more expensive.
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On the legitness of the adapter: It's almost certainly not going to pass muster in Europe. It's missing a bunch of parts that are necessary to ensure safety. To be clear, I've only watched Dala's video, I don't have one at hand to check. But:
- It only has a positive side contactor. That's an immediate fail, also for reason two:
- It doesn't have a port lock on the CCS side. This means you can expose high voltage when unplugging the CCS port during operation, which can then draw an arc and cause a fire or personal injury. Massive safety issue
- It is unclear if there is a HV bus and port sensor, but considering there are no auxiliary contacts on the contactor, I don't think the adapter is capable of measuring voltage on both sides of the contactor. This means it is incapable of testing for contactor welding, also an important safety issue
- The battery is really tiny, especially if it's to power that contactor for an hour+. That makes me think that contactor might be the wrong type. High current interrupt-capable contactors have strong return springs that actuate a little arc extinguishing feature, and thus need a strong electromagnet (and a lot of power) to keep them closed. An EVC 135 for instance uses about 4W *with* economizer, per contactor. Just keeping the contactors on requires at least 8W continuous. Our CCS controller also uses about 3.6W continuous. Accounting for degradation of the operating battery and at least a 2-hour life (which is probably the minimum convenient lifespan that doesnt require you to recharge the adapter after every use), you'd need 30-40Wh in there.
Much less importantly for safety or functionality, but very important for acceptance:
- It doesn't look like they're using a certified CHAdeMO side plug positive, or paying CHAdeMO royalties. Most likely, this is an unauthorized CHAdeMO product
- They're definitely not using a standards-compliant CCS controller (e.g. Vector/Sensata VC-VCCU)
All of this happened before. Back in the '00s and early '10s, people made adaptors to charge their DIY and small series EVs on all those newfangled fast chargers that were popping up, and the poor quality of those adapters often caused issues for the charging provider. Broken and molten connectors, charging fires, anything you can think of, it happened. They ended up flat-out banning all adapters at Fastned, only allowing for that one certified CHAdeMO to Tesla adapter to allow Model Ses to charge.
This adapter is heading the same way if they don't address the main safety issues. I'm not super stressed about the adapter becoming banned, especially because... who's going to enforce that? There are no humans there to check on you.
To make this into a certified adapter, the costs are quite high. They'd need to:
- become a member of the SAE as well as the CHAdeMO organization (not that expensive)
- pay royalties per plug (~500 euros).
- They will at least need to do certification testing at CHAdeMO, which runs between €20k-40k. I don't think you need to do certification with SAE unless you want to implement PnC and internet-connected features.
- Do field testing with cars (we've had customers do that alongside myself for our CCS upgrade, but if you'd need to hire somebody for this, that would be about the salary of a field application engineer for a year).
- Add the right kind of high interrupt capable contactors to the body (e.g. TE EVC 135, about €100 for two in medium quantities)
- Add dual HV sensing circuits (e.g. Isabellenhütte IVT-3, ~€175 in medium quantities)
- Add a port lock and actuator circuit (e.g. Duosida DSIEC, about 15 euros)
Altogether, it's easily €100k in testing/validation plus about €800 per plug in costs, so when adding typical Chinese margins (~7%) and VAT (~20%) that would mean a price increase of about €1100 per plug just for materials. Then also, you need to amortize €150k in fixed costs over the production volume. Say they can sell 1000 units, that's about 200 euros on top.
So I don't see a possibility to sell this for less than, roughly, €2200. And this is in line with what we figured out long ago when we were about to start development on CCS products.