BEVeedom wrote:... Actually the SAE Combo makes sense to me and I believe it should become the standard for the industry. It's an all-in-one unit. No more optional cost DC Fast Charge port.
Not every car with an J1772 port can use the Frankenplug port... and not even the European version of Frankenplug will be compatible with the USA version until 2017. Only three cars are slated to have the Frankenplug, and we do not know yet if this will be standard, or optional on those cars.
The announcement of Frankenplug was intended to put the brakes on Nissan and CHAdeMO (they've spent more time on press releases than engineering), but I suspect this effort will fail. Not because either charging protocal is significantly better or worse technically than the other, but instead it will be a simple matter of supply and demand. There are currently over 2000 CHAdeMO chargers in the world, with 70,000 cars that can use them; Frankenplug has zero and zero today.
Of the three cars coming to market soon that will offer the Frankplug; BMW i3, GM Spark, and a VW car, the first one is expected to be far more expensive than the LEAF, and therefore not expected to sell in significant quantities, compared to LEAF with CHAdeMO. If you want an idea how few electric vehicles a manufacturer might sell at $40,000 - $50,000, the Toyota Rav4 EV has sold less than 200 since Sept 2012. There currently is a total of $16,000 in credits and rebates offered to move this car, making the effective price about $34,000... and it still doesn't sell.
The latter two Frankenplug cars, GM and VW, are strictly California ARB compliance cars, to be sold in very limited numbers. None of these small numerical offerings pose a serious challenge to the expansion of CHAdeMO, and it certainly hinders the growth of Frankenplug.
FrankenFew cars means FrankenFew Frankenplugs!!!
To give you an idea of just how few of these compliance cars will actually be produced, Toyota intends to sell 2600 Rav4 EV's in three years to meet the 0.79% Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, so you can expect GM to be required to sell a similar number, and VW to sell far less over the same period.
Nissan alone will likely sell 50,000 or more LEAFs in the USA in that time period.
It is believed that the number of CHAdeMO chargers will double in 2013, and literally explode this year in California (like it already has in Washington and Oregon). I'll bet that there is not ONE public operational Frankenplug (beyond a demonstration or factory installed "see, we have one") in the USA in 2013.
Switch to SAE Combo, make an adaptor for CHAdeMO to SAE Combo and get on with it.
Or, don't switch at all, and let the manufacturers of the non-CHAdeMO cars build an adapter to use the already existing CHAdeMO infrastructure. Quite a bit more cost effective.
Hint: The Chevy Spark EV, due out this summer, will have the SAE Combo as standard equipment.
Hint for you... there won't be many of these cars, and compared to a LEAF, it feels like a tinker toy (I've only sat in one and not driven it, however). Like other compliance cars, it just rolls down an assembly line, and they plop an electric drive train in place of the oil burner. I can hardly wait to see Spark and i3 owners wondering where all the Frankenplugs are that they were promised at the dealership, while all the other EV drivers are plugging into existing Tesla and CHAdeMO chargers.
Again, I don't care what the ultimate standard is, but I do want the folks at GM to fail in their attempts to divide and diminish the electric car world while they provide virtually nothing to bolster BEV's (ya, that Spark doesn't count, because they wouldn't build it if they didn't have to).