Comment by mattmaroon a day ago
What do we need it for? Are you driving your car across the Atlantic? We don’t have an international standard for what side of the road to drive on.
Being something you practically always don’t take with you when you travel, as long as we’re standardized by continent what would even be the benefit?
Are people driving campers from New England to England? Or San Francisco to Tokyo? Semes like a challenging drive to me.
> the USA has borders with 2 countries with I imagine people crossing the border daily on both side to simply go to work
US, Mexico, and Canada all use the same charging standards. I can today drive an EV from Mexico through the US to Canada and use their chargers. They all originally agreed on CCS1. Small adapters from NACS to CCS1 are entirely passive and exist already.
They do. It’s literally called the North American Charging Standard. I specifically said “as long as they’re standardized by continent”.
But good take.
I think cars will be more commodified internationally as EV efficiencies continue to drive the prices down and new lower cost tiers for different vehicle classes open up.
This has certainly happened in China and arguably manifests itself as scooter/motorcycle culture in places like Taiwan, Vietnam and Indonesia. (In Shenzhen, the scooters were almost universally electric when I was there last month)
Imagine the container-ship car - packed efficiently and treated like any other international good that can be ordered online.
The manufacturer produces them ready for the world market in 2 technical variations, right and left - everything else is personalized. (The motorcycle avoids even the right/left problem) Essentially I don't think we're at the end game of the Toyota Production System.
So it's more about being compatible with a vision of how we'll be interfacing vehicles 10-20 years from now. That's when making these decisions wrongly will really start to bite us - after the infrastructure is rolled out and long established.
Or who knows, by then there might be an even newer plug and we'll all be on a single system.
> The manufacturer produces them ready for the world market in 2 technical variations, right and left
There are so many more regulations about cars than just what side the wheel is on or what kind of plug is used. Things like bumper design, headlight design, light positions, and more. Many are conflicting meaning being compliant in one market necessitates being non-compliant in another.
Right, I'm aware of all of these when I said that. This is a vision for what they'll look like at a lower pricing point. The $5,000 car I think will have fewer of these barriers than the $50,000 one. People tend to be less precious with cheaper things. Look at how much more universal cell phones have become after the bottom of the market fell out.
I'm pretty sure Christensen made this point in one of his less lauded followup books - the market disrupts with more universal implements. That's probably where I'm stealing this from.
Ease of manufacturing and export of vehicles globally.
Also, with everyone on the same standard, all companies have an incentive to optimize their hardware to accomodatte it.
It might not be that important short term but it is on the medium to long term to complete a proper transition.
I mean sure, they do this with electrical outlets fine. But that doesn't mean having a dozen or so different outlet standards is the enviable state of affairs.
That's too late to fix.
This currently is not. We are for some reason, however, voluntarily doing it again.
I am a steadfast engineering internationalist so in practice a single standard is always going to be my bias
It's a bit different from normal electrical outlets though. For DC fast charging, it needs to negotiate exact DC voltages. The dispensers are all designed to operate at a range of DC voltages to match the state of the battery and are constantly adapting to the battery.
In AC charging, the chargers are probably just designed to be way more tolerant of a wide range of input AC voltages.
So in those instances a purely passive adapter works fine. Or probably a cheap-ish retrofit of the outlet in the car since I doubt many cars go on intercontinental voyages very often.
And that's kind of the thing. The extreme majority of cars aren't going to go past their original target market continent. Taking a car from one continent to another often involves a lot of import duties, inspections, regulations modifications, and is generally very expensive.
Meanwhile with regular home devices you usually need to be sure you're supplying the right voltage as most home devices can't deal with other voltages. So adapters are more complicated and improper adapting is disastrous. Lots of things are small enough and unregulated enough to send through the post or carried on an airplane. It's a much more common hassle trying to plug in a shaver when travelling than figuring out what to do with the car you packed in your carryon.
Ok that’s the only good point I’ve heard, but I assume those countries will be fine with adapters.
Except sometimes campers.
There are still people doing world trips. We might collectively decide they need to keep using diesel forever or stop doing world trips with vehicles altogether but that is still currently a thing, even though it is very very marginal.
Also, the USA has borders with 2 countries with I imagine people crossing the border daily on both side to simply go to work. It seems weird to me that these 3 countries would not talk to each others about standards.