How to improve the current electric vehicle charging experience?

You don’t have to get out of the car to refuel, and now you don’t even need to take out your mobile phone to pay. It’s so convenient.

Recently, a function called "smart refueling" has been launched in gas stations across the country. The main feature is to fill up and go, and pay without contact. By using license plate recognition, mobile payment and other operations, it only takes a few minutes for car owners to enter the gas station and leave.

But in sharp contrast is the charging experience of electric vehicles, which often take an hour or two to charge, have a slightly complicated operating process, and have to drag a heavy charging head to find an available charging port... Some obvious defects make many car owners feel that charging their vehicles is a major disadvantage of electric vehicles.  

At present, the charging experience is still not comparable to refueling | Visual China

If we draw a time axis, we may be able to look at this issue more rationally. Gas stations were born in the early 20th century and have a history of a hundred years; public and private charging piles were not widely popularized until the emergence of new energy vehicles. After the emergence of new things, there will inevitably be various imperfections. Due to the amazing growth rate, the functions of charging piles are mostly still at the stage of meeting basic needs, not to mention design improvements.

Because there are many problems that need to be fixed and it is a new thing, the charging experience has great potential. It is foreseeable that with the improvement of scientific and technological means, the speed of upgrading and improving the charging experience will be several times that of the refueling experience, completing the "overtaking on the curve".

From the optimization of a user's action details to the planning of the entire city, all belong to the new cognition that new energy brings to people. Therefore, we can start from three dimensions and optimize the charging experience step by step.

Acceleration and "weight loss"
When it comes to charging experience, the most direct thing users feel should be the charging speed.

Currently, most electric vehicles are equipped with fast charging, and the efficiency can generally reach 60%-80% in half an hour. Even so, the charging time is still too long. The traditional refueling process has been made very convenient, and it can basically achieve "use it and go"; the charging situation is slightly special. If you charge in a public area, you must wait for the power to be sufficient to support people to go to the destination or the next charging point, which causes some trouble.

Many electric car companies will choose to cooperate with retailers and real estate developers to build public charging piles near shopping malls. As early as when Tesla entered China, it cooperated with China Yintai to build Tesla-specific charging stations in commercial department stores and real estate projects in more than 30 cities. The first batch of Tesla-specific charging stations were officially put into use, which made it easier for Tesla users waiting for charging to not be too bored.

Tesla charging station built next to the shopping mall | Visual China

Therefore, improving charging efficiency has become a rigid demand. In this regard, whether it is charging facilities or in-vehicle battery configuration, we are looking for better solutions.

Taking Tesla as an example, its recently updated V3 supercharging station can charge up to 50% in 15 minutes. Based on the range of the long-range rear-wheel drive version, it can last for 300 kilometers, which is half the charging time of the previous generation.

The V3 Supercharger can support a maximum charging rate of 250 KW per Tesla. Even if two Teslas share one V3 Supercharger, it can still maintain a full power output of 250 kW peak for each vehicle.

Tesla has also done a lot of safety work in the case of such high-power charging. The new charging pile uses a liquid-cooled cable design, which not only strengthens temperature control during high-power charging, but also makes the cable thinner. Tesla said that the cable is "lighter, more flexible, and more efficient" than the air-cooled cable on the V2 Supercharger.

Tesla Supercharger V3 cable (left) vs. V2 cable (right) | electrek

This design is very user-friendly. Generally speaking, if you increase the power to shorten the charging time, the cost is to increase the current carrying capacity and cross-sectional area of ​​the cable, in other words, increase the weight of the charging gun. Geek Park (ID: geekpark) learned that a 250A, 7-meter-long charging gun weighs 60 kilograms, while an 8-meter-long oil pipe refueling gun weighs only one-sixth of the former.

The charging gun that girls find difficult to lift has isolated a large number of electric car owners from the source. Therefore, the first step to improve the charging experience is definitely to "lose weight".

It is basically certain that liquid cooling will be the general trend of charging in the future, but it will also increase the cost accordingly. According to industry insiders who revealed to Geek Park (ID: geekpark), adding liquid cooling technology to a single charging pile will increase the cost by 10%, which is a considerable expense for charging pile companies, and the transformation process will not be too fast.  

Tesla V3 Supercharging Station | Tesla

In addition to the upgrade of supporting facilities, the role of in-vehicle configuration in improving charging efficiency cannot be ignored. At present, Tesla V3 super charging piles only support 250KW peak power for Model 3, because Model 3 uses a new generation of 21700 cylindrical battery cells, which supports a higher charging rate (2.2C), while Model S and Model X are equipped with 18650 battery cells, with a charging rate of about 1.5C.

Of course, hardware transformation is the foundation. In the era of smart car OTA, software optimization can make users feel the pleasure of experience upgrade and iteration. A small upgrade has also been launched on the Tesla V3 supercharging pile. As long as the user navigates to the supercharging station, the vehicle battery will automatically heat up in advance to ensure that it enters the fast charging state directly when the charging gun is plugged in. This is also the use of software combined with hardware to achieve technological upgrades and ensure timely experience.

After optimizing the experience and creating a closed loop
to solve urgent problems, the next focus is to further optimize the experience.

There is an aesthetic called "minimalism" in design. It was based on this concept that Jobs removed the complicated numeric keys on the mobile phone and created a minimalist design for the front of the phone.

The same is true for making a product. It is not an easy task to satisfy real needs and make users feel simple. It does not mean that there is no innovation. On the contrary, sufficient innovation is needed to simplify the product.

If we use the Internet or mobile Internet thinking to judge, whether it is refueling or charging, the specific operation is relatively complicated. The general operation process is: lift the fuel gun/charging gun-open the cover-insert and start-pull out the fuel gun/charging gun after completion-close the cover.     

Saving charging steps is very user-friendly | Visual China

In fact, these five steps can be reduced to three steps through technical means, that is, the two steps of opening/closing the lid can be eliminated. Now some car companies are trying to interact with the car and the charging gun - when the user lifts the charging gun, the charging port will automatically open.

Porsche has added this function to its upcoming pure electric car Taycan. After charging begins, the charging plug will automatically lock to prevent someone from driving away. Tesla Model 3 and NIO ES6 have already begun trying to use this function. However, one thing worth noting is that NIO specifically mentioned that only dedicated charging piles can currently operate this function.

NIO ES6 automatically opens the charging port | NIO

Similarly, there is an opportunity to simplify the process of paying for public charging stations. Although mobile payment has eliminated physical cards and improved efficiency to a certain extent by using mobile phones, in public charging stations, users can only use the QR code displayed on the screen or on the charging station to charge and pay. If the QR code is damaged, the charging station can only be suspended, resulting in reduced charging efficiency, which is not particularly convenient.

"Swiping card to charge" will become a thing of the past | Visual China

If the plugging and unplugging of the charging gun and the payment do not require scanning the QR code through the mobile phone, it can be considered "contactless payment". At present, some companies are trying to build a contactless payment process, through the vehicle VIN code and license plate information entered during registration, and connect with the cloud platform behind it. Once the charging gun and the vehicle are physically connected, the digital space is also connected together, meeting the charging conditions. Finally, it is bound to the mobile phone payment, and combined with the interaction between the vehicle and the charging gun, the whole charging process basically does not require the use of the mobile phone, and a complete charging closed loop can be completed.    

Although it is an innovation in details, we must not neglect things related to user experience. Just as product managers pay a considerable price to reduce the number of clicks on their phones, the voice interaction in the car can directly call out some unimportant functions. If we can save some steps in charging, the experience will be improved.

It is well
known that the development trend of technology has always been to develop and integrate each other. If the two experiences mentioned above are mixed together, will new inspirations be generated?