Volkswagen of America and Eaton announced the country’s first single-port Combined Charging System (CCS) electric vehicle chargers at the Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) in Belmont, Calif.
Capable of recharging most electric vehicles with compatible systems in as little as 30 minutes, the installation of the new charger is the beginning of the new CCS-compliant single-port fast charging infrastructure development in the United States and Europe.
The CCS charge point meets the approved Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standard for plug-in electric vehicles. The system utilizes a single-port and integrates one-phase AC charging, fast three-phase AC charging, DC charging at home and ultra-fast DC charging at public stations.
The efficient design optimizes customer ease-of-use with a single standard that will allow EV customers to not only charge at most existing stations, but also improve customer convenience by offering a single source for various charging levels.
The state-of-the-art DC Quick Charger features the CCS charge connector and communicates with the electric vehicle’s battery management system to provide direct current flow to charge the battery. This direct communication between charger and battery enables an 80 percent recharge to the electric vehicle battery in as few as 30 minutes.
The 50 kW charger housing consists of five individual 10 kW power drawers providing the flexibility to offer a 20 kW, 30 kW, 40 kW or 50 kW configuration. In the event the output is reduced due to the failure of one power drawer, the DCQC has N-1 capability, which allows the charger to remain operational.
The CCS standard is a global open standard and can be used by all vehicle and charging station manufacturers. To date, eight automotive manufacturers from the United States and Europe have adopted the CCS standard. Commercial CCS charging stations will be available in the coming months with the first vehicles equipped with the new system expected to launch in Europe later this year and the United States in 2014.
The announcement of one of the first CCS chargers in the United States supports Volkswagen Group’s ongoing development of electric vehicles for markets around the world. With a production EV slated for 2014 in the United States, the team at the ERL led an evaluation of more than 20 prototype e-Golf battery electric vehicles throughout 2012 in three select markets — San Francisco, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.
The pilot scheme has equipped Volkswagen Group engineers with valuable data that will be used in the final development of future EV technology applications. In addition to the new charger, today the first CCS-equipped e-Golf in North America was introduced with plans to update the remainder of the prototype test fleet in 2013.
