How important is having the DCQC ability...

I've been told I absolutely MUST have DCQC ability if I plan on driving it across the state What do you owners think? Would it be practical. Couldn't I do it with a portable Level 2 charger almost as practically as a level 3 DCQC?

Ben

Hi Ben
Welcome to the forum.

How far and how often do you plan on traveling across the state?

For your reference charging times from near empty.

Approximation

Temps above 50 F
L2 - 6-7 hrs = 55 -60 mile @ speeds under 55 mph - seat heating only
L3 - 30 minutes = 40 -45 miles @ speeds under 55 mph - seat heating only

Temps below 0 F
L2 - 7-8 hrs = 55 -60 mile @ speeds under 55 mph - seat heating only
L3 - 45 min -1 hr = 40 -45 miles @ speeds under 55 mph - seat heating only

The faster you go or the more heat you use, the less distance you will go.

If you have quick charge stations in your area I think you will really regret the decision to save a few bucks by buying a cheaper used car without it. My car doesn't have it, but then there are zero QC stations anywhere near here so it's never been an issue, but if I were to buy a used iMiEV today, I would make sure it came so equipped - Eventually it will become a 'must have'

Don

Even though there were no stations around when I was shopping for my first i-MiEV, I refused to buy one without QC. If not for using a quick charger, I wanted to have the ability to use DIY CHAdeMO stuff and, if Mitsubishi ever released the MiEV Power Box in the US, that too.

Now that things have evolved, e Motor Werks sells a charger that works with a CHAdeMO interface to charge the i-MiEV at 6.6 KW through the QC port.

Around me, There are now quick chargers dotted from Blairsville, PA through to Harrisburg. They are still too far apart for an i-MiEV, but they seem to work well for LEAF drivers. If I wanted to, I can get to Punxsutawney, PA pretty easily now because of the quick charger in Blairsville. I've also used the one in Cranberry, PA when we went to a model train show.

As for the range approximations, you might have some trouble getting 60 miles on a charge when temps are below 10 F.

I live in the NYC area, and my Miev has the chademo charger outlet...and I know of no level 2 or 3 charging stations within my driving area, other than level 2 chargers in paid parking lots. I knew of this when I bought the car. My attitude is that I bought the car knowing full well that I would always be charging it at home. I would not have bought it otherwise.

Most of my daily driving falls within the 65-75 mile range. Any single trip longer than 50 miles round trip, I take an ICE...which is maybe once or twice per month. I have to be conservative because I never know when I might get trapped in a road construction detour, or get stuck in traffic. and in a place like NYC, I'm not going to buck traffic and drive halfway across the city to get to a "public" level 2 or 3 charger, even if there were one available.

Thanks for the welcome. Its good to be here. These are my charge scenarios for the present:

My immediate family and most common trip is about 45 miles away. I do this drive about every other month right now in a friend's Leaf, that I car share.

If I go a bit out of the way by 10 miles halfway to my sister's house there is a low powered level two charger, across from a really nice Mexican restaurant...

If instead I go directly to visit my sister instead of the halfway charge detour, the nearest other level 2 charger makes the one way trip 55 miles before I get to a level 2 charger. That charger is outside of town on exclusively private property at a gated community (except for the public charger) so I stay in the car while it charges...

There is also a possibility of buying one of those portable level two chargers and I could plug in at a friend's dryer socket @ mile 35 on the direct 45 mile drive.

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Two to three times a year I visit my other sisters who live 116 miles away. There are Level 2 chargers throughout the journey and about 80 miles from my starting point a DCQC available from 8am to 5pm (when not in use) at a Nissan dealer. I understand Nissan will be putting up more DCQC, I'm not sure how soon and where and how okay it is for Mitsu people to use them.
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BTW - I know on the Leaf, I can simply turn on the fan, without heat or a/c to reduce the drain to the battery to almost nil and keep the windows free of fogging up. Can this be done on the i-miev?

I bought this
"Mitsubishi Approved" dual 120-240v portable charger
AeroVironment's TurboCord for home or on the road

http://store.evsolutions.com/turboc...forum/viewtopic.php&__utmv=-&__utmk=175371814

It's my security blanket.
Nice and compact & always in the car along with a 50' extension cord and several plug adapters to fit different plug configurations - Dryer - Welder, etc, that I made up.

If there is a plug 110, 240 there is a charge available!
You're never really stranded - delayed possibly.

BenBrown said:

I've been told I absolutely MUST have DCQC ability if I plan on driving it across the state What do you owners think? Would it be practical. Couldn't I do it with a portable Level 2 charger almost as practically as a level 3 DCQC?

Click to expand...

Ben, welcome to the forum. I recently got a second i-MiEV because I wanted DCQC to enable longer trips and took a 200-mile 11-hour trip on Christmas Day.

With my first i-MiEV (without CHAdeMO) I've made a number of longer daily trips, but the recharging coincided with other activities and/or longer meals, so they were painless.

As others have noted, the recharge rate using DCQC is dramatically shorter than using Level 2 - depending on temperature, roughly 40 miles for 20 recharge minutes using DCQC vs. 12-15 miles/recharge hour using L2.

Unfortunately, around here the DCQC I have used stop charging at 80%, which means a usable range of 40-50 miles (function of speed, headwinds, temperature). A few times when I knew I would be pushing this limit to the next DCQC station, I actually plugged into L2 (after charging with DCQC) for an extra hour to ensure getting there - turned out that I was being overly-conservative.

Identify your exact charging point locations and then add up all the recharge times needed and see if they meet your needs. Google Maps and PlugShare are great tools. The examples you cited are all easily doable in reasonable weather if you're not in a hurry.

Welcome Ben. Your situation is one where though I love my i, I'd lean towards the LEAF. Having a 2013+ model with the onboard 6.6 kW onboard charger or an earlier model upgraded with the secondary Brusa charger essentially doubles your Level 2 charging speed from 15 mph to 30 mph.
Other than saia47, who has added input from a Manzanita Micro secondary charger by wiring directly to the traction battery and bypassing most of the OEM safeties, http://www.manzanitamicro.com/products?page=shop.browse&category_id=14&vmcchk=1 I know of nobody who's increased the L2 charging speed beyond 16 amps/3.3 kW.

Where CHAdeMO is available, it is invaluable. I traded in my first iMiEV in order to gain CHAdeMO, and having an L3 station along one of our regular local routes means that my family circus no longer switches cars halfway through a typical Saturday, having exhausted the MiEV. On a related note, the LEAF actually performs worse going down the West Coast Electric Highway (Interstate 5). Fast Charge station spacing is such that a LEAF cannot skip a station without heroic measures, but they take 50% more time for a fast charge than the i-MiEV does! Between Seattle and Portland, I and my i can speed like a maniac if I want to to leapfrog a LEAF between stations, and reduce the trip time by at least 30 minutes in the process! (DCFC lineups are now common at peak periods in Washington, since essentially no stations have been added since 2012, so on a highway trip you get to know your fellow EV'ers who are travelling the same direction at the same time).

Now for some EVen more SWOT ramblings....

Of course, if you're inclined towards mechanical creativity, or EVen better yet, electrical assembly and software hacking, the i-MiEV makes the most affordable platform to play with, in addition to being more 'hackable' than a LEAF or most other EVs. Now that my pusher trailer is operable, I wouldn't hesitate to embark on a long journey in any direction, albeit at barely more than 20 mpg. The main obstacle to increased pusher usage is that electrical range is compromised by perhaps 40% when pulling the dormant pusher, and in mixed city/highway use, it is a hassle to frequently switch modes. Of course, my choice of an aircooled VW with manual transmission is a big part of that. Pushing is otherwise so much fun... :twisted: .. that I am sorely tempted to build another with an automatic Geo Metro drivetrain, for more seamless transitions between dormant pulling and active pushing.

Don said:

If you have quick charge stations in your area I think you will really regret the decision to save a few bucks by buying a cheaper used car without it. My car doesn't have it, but then there are zero QC stations anywhere near here so it's never been an issue, but if I were to buy a used iMiEV today, I would make sure it came so equipped - Eventually it will become a 'must have'

Click to expand...

With much respect for Don's knowledge and judgment, I tend to make a qualified disagreement:
1) It depends on your situation:
We've had our MiEV for nearly two years and have never missed having the QC feature and likely never will in OUR driving/use style. We have a second car ICE and on the rare occasions we drive out of the MiEV single charge range we use the other car. So it's virtually certain it'll never be a must-have for us. Using the ICE car for longer trips is more convenient that even having to wait even 30 minutes at a QC station if we had QC capability.
So it depends much on how you're planning or needing to use your EV. In SOME scenarios you would NEED QC to even have a chance of making the EV work for you.
2) QC capability as an idea for making longer trips practical with an EV has a serious potential flaw in the very idea:
If it gets popular at ALL and you're planning a trip from point A to B with a QC stop between estimated at one hour, good luck if someone pulls in and plugs in 10 minutes before you do. ;-)
Sure, it's OK now while EVs, let alone EV's used for long haul trips, are a drop in the bucket... but they're getting more popular. I would not count on cash-strapped states and cities rushing out to install extra charging stations when EV owners find themselves on waiting lines at charging stations.
3) QC charging is unequivocably bad for the battery. This could especially be worrisome if you're buying used. Unless you have access to the pervious owner and trust him/her you don't know if that battery pack has been quickcharged many times at significant cost to its life.

Alex

I'm more than willing to develop and pay friends along my journey to use their 240v dryer and welder sockets... This is sounding more interesting as I hear from everyone. I'm still wondering about the development of Nissan's DCQC network.. I'd be willing to pay slightly about local electric rates for the access to a quick charge.

sandange said:

I bought this
"Mitsubishi Approved" dual 120-240v portable charger
AeroVironment's TurboCord for home or on the road...

It's my security blanket.
Nice and compact & always in the car along with a 50' extension cord and several plug adapters to fit different plug configurations - Dryer - Welder, etc, that I made up.

If there is a plug 110, 240 there is a charge available!
You're never really stranded - delayed possibly.

Click to expand...

Here's an example of a painless 210-mile day in an i-MiEV using only L2:

http://myimiev.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12726#p12726

I think I've mentioned elsewhere that our EVs are used for over 99% of our trips. For the occasional long-distance trip, the cover gets pulled off the Gen1 Honda Insight hybrid - it's actually cheaper to run that car (77.0mpg lifetime) than to plug the i-MiEV into DCQC here in California (I'm just now seeing the bills from my December trip).

JoeS said:

For the occasional long-distance trip, the cover gets pulled off the Gen1 Honda Insight hybrid - it's actually cheaper to run that car (77.0mpg lifetime) than to plug the i-MiEV into DCQC here in California

Click to expand...

Indeed, and if you don't sign up for the monthly $20 subscription, AeroVironment's $7.50/session fee translates to at least $0.17/mile! At the current gas cost of $2.20/gallon, AVI is charging the economic equivalent of 13 mpg! To reach cost parity with 40 mpg gassers, i-MiEV drivers on the $20/month subscription plan would have to do at least eight fast charges per month. I stayed on the plan for about 6 months longer than it was useful to me, thinking of it as 'insurance' and wanting to support public charging infrastructure, but decided to stop pissing away money since AVI hasn't added any DCFC stations since the federal money dried up....

I'm starting to draft an op-ed for InsideEVs.com on this subject, and would appreciably attribute any contributions. Would y'all like if I posted it here first for refinements?

jray3 said:

I'm starting to draft an op-ed for InsideEVs.com on this subject, and would appreciably attribute any contributions. Would y'all like if I posted it here first for refinements?

Click to expand...

Unless subsidized, the economics of DCQC never made sense to me, but that also goes for even simple parking spaces in shopping malls where I've heard numbers of >$50K/spot bandied about. Perhaps a public posting prior to publication by InsideEVs might not be appreciated by them, but certainly a PM to some of us interested in that stuff would work?

Well, I for one am looking forward to the 100 charging station being install along the Westcoast, starting in San Diego to San Francisco, with L2 and DCQC:

http://www.chargepoint.com/press-releases/2015/0122

The article said it'll be about 50-mile interval, perfect for the iMiev !

pbui19 said:

Well, I for one am looking forward to the 100 charging station being install along the Westcoast, starting in San Diego to San Francisco, with L2 and DCQC:
http://www.chargepoint.com/press-releases/2015/0122
The article said it'll be about 50-mile interval, perfect for the iMiev !

Click to expand...

I don't see anything to get excited about. This appears to be a new Combined Charging Standard (CCS) string of stations, affectionately known as the FrankenPlug. There is no LEAF or iMiEV access to that DCFC system. Yup, we're not just looking at Beta vs VHS standards war anymore (CHAdeMO vs TESLA); the SAE has gone and thrown the LaserDisc at us too!

Also, 45 miles is about the limit for DCFC spacing if it's to be a practical highway for the iMiEV. 45 miles is the 80% discharge reliable range at highway speed, and nobody wants to tack on an extra hour on L2 to top off after a DCFC session.

:evil:

I was talking to a Ford Focus Electric owner at the Mother Earth Fair last year, and he had an idea that seems so simple. Why don't all EVs have a 20 KW or so on-board charger so that no matter the amp rating on a charging station, the car can fully utilize the station? For example, plug into a (seemingly rare) 80 amp L2 charging station, and charge an i-MiEV in an hour and a half. A 16 amp station, our standard 6 hours. A 32 amp station, 3 hours. It wouldn't quite replace quick chargers, but an 80 amp charging station is cheaper than a 25 kW quick charger, without much difference in charge time. No plug war, more available, and allows an i-MiEV to charge faster in public.

Right on cue, here's a discussion on today's Green Car Reports:

http://www.greencarreports.com/news...ar-fast-charging-be-profitable-answer-unclear

Washington State just finished a study on this issue. It's amazing what $250k will buy these days.....
http://leg.wa.gov/JTC/Meetings/Documents/Agendas/2014%20Agendas/Meeting_Dec11/EV_Study.pdf

There's a fair amount of detail, that I haven't studied in detail yet, but the bottom line is that EVen with our high EV adoption rate, the authors don't think that a for-profit DCFC network is viable for another 5 years yet...

jray3 said:

I don't see anything to get excited about. This appears to be a new Combined Charging Standard (CCS) string of stations, affectionately known as the FrankenPlug. There is no LEAF or iMiEV access to that DCFC system. Yup, we're not just looking at Beta vs VHS standards war anymore (CHAdeMO vs TESLA); the SAE has gone and thrown the LaserDisc at us too!
:evil:

Click to expand...

I totally missed that about the Frankenplug, thanks for pointing that out. I wonder if an adaptor to a ChadeMo is possible, sort of ala Tesla to J1772 adaptor.