System Cuts Down EV Charge Time
General Motors and Southern California Edison on Thursday unveiled a new recharging technology that juices up an electric vehicle in minutes rather than hours, making the time investment for refueling more like that for conventional cars and trucks.
With GM’s new Magne Charge technology, an electric vehicle can be 80% charged in less than 15 minutes, a significant improvement over the three or more hours that most recharging setups require.
Electric vehicle devotees insist that the recharge, though still taking somewhat more time than most of us spend at the pump, might some day make driving an electric vehicle more convenient than its gasoline-powered cousins.
“This is extremely important when you put it in the context of our local air-quality problems in Southern California,” Barry Wallerstein, acting executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said at the debut of the charging system at Edison’s Rosemead headquarters. “This will help us along that path to clean air.”
The new charging system “knocks down a couple of the perceived barriers” to driving an electric vehicle, said Bill Van Amburg, spokesman for Calstart, a Pasadena-based nonprofit corporation that helped sponsor the project.
“We all have heard the naysayers who said that electric vehicles would never be practical, that they just don’t have the range that people want,” Van Amburg said.
But with the new system, the car can be charged “in about the time to go and get a cup of coffee and walk back out, unless you get a triple latte or something,” he quipped.
The system achieves its dramatic reduction in charging time because it is more than seven times more powerful than standard chargers--50 kilowatts versus 6.6 kilowatts.
Edison plans a six-month test on five specially modified Chevrolet S-10 electric pickups to collect data and hopes eventually to sprinkle the charging systems around the region so that EV drivers can easily “top off” while they’re at work or out shopping, supplementing their usual overnight charge, said Ed Kjaer, automotive director at Edison EV, which installs chargers.
EV owner Greg Hanssen, an Irvine electrical engineer, figures that such a charger would have made his recent car trip to Yosemite and Lake Tahoe considerably shorter. It took Hanssen 2 1/2 days, stopping every 70 or 80 miles at prearranged stops, where he would plug his GM-manufactured EV1 sports car into charging equipment he hauled in his trunk.
“It wasn’t all wasted time, because I arranged to meet people along the way, but I did do some sitting around,” Hanssen said.
