Failure mode seems to have been a pin welded to socket.

Maybe standard practice should be to visually examine the pins on every charger you use, to look for corrosion or deposits or dirt that might cause a high resistance connection.
View attachment 40047

I've been wondering when something like this would show up. And like VD, that now-bad charger can destroy many cars before it is corrected and each of those cars can go on to destroy other chargers. (Anybody remember back to removable disk hard disk drives and "head crashes"? A customer could wipe out a whole string of disk drives and all of their backup disk packs before they recognized what was going on.)

It's one of the reasons why I'm VERY skeptical of claims that cars can ever charge successfully, reliably at Megawatt power levels.

 

(Anybody remember back to removable disk hard disk drives and "head crashes"? A customer could wipe out a whole string of disk drives and all of their backup disk packs before they recognized what was going on.)

You made me cringe. I too-clearly recall the scraping sound of the second pack - usually the backup - lowered into the drive in the rescue attempt.

At least I knew the failure was fatal before trying a third one, and had the policy of adopting a third pack, and 9-track mag tape as a secondary backup system. I ran some calculations once and determined that 30% of our resources were consumed by multiple backup systems.

 

Maybe Inductive Charging will have a life after all!

 

Looks like an opportunity for someone to develop and sell a plug pin cleaner that you use prior to connecting to your vehicle.

In my limited public charger usage I have witnessed some dirty connectors that I know now I should have cleaned.

Kirk

 

Or a like-to-like adapter that YOU own and ALWAYS use so you know that at least the car-side pins on the thing you plug into your car are sound. Then, if the adapter welds itself to the charger's cable, you just unplug your adapter from your car and leave it welded to their charger; their problem.

 

I guess it makes me feel safer using Tesla chargers with my adapter… hopefully VW gets there soon!

 

At least then a similar problem would result in only the loss of the adapter.

Which suggests the question of whether you could use two adapters on a CCS charger:
CCS charger <> adapter to NACS <> adapter to CCS <> car.

 

We are only charging at home now but besides inoperable or crowded public chargers there is something else to be aware of. Yikes.

Not only does the charger connector look dirty but receptacle in the car also looks quite dirty. Maybe they lose the HV protective cover?

 

In commercial aviation, where 400Hz cables are used to supply auxiliary power to aircraft, there is a test box that the cable can be plugged in to to assess output and connection problems.

I wouldn't be surprised is the technicians who work on DCFCs have similar equipment. But in this age of cheap electronics, I wonder if a dumbed down version of this could be accessible to owners to act as a relatively simple go / no-go device to vet a connection before plugging in.

I could even imagine this having some sort of reporting capability so the CPO would know that a user test failed one of their connectors, and they could remotely take it off line before it damages the next car.

 

In commercial aviation, where 400Hz cables are used to supply auxiliary power to aircraft, there is a test box that the cable can be plugged in to to assess output and connection problems.

Interesting idea. Question would be whether the CCS protocol would support such a device. Is the only way to get power onto the pins is to have a valid "car" plugged in?

Also I wonder about whether you can polish the sockets on the cable connector. There aren't really any regulations about what you do with a charger; what if somebody shows up with a wooden rod with emory cloth wrapped around it and starts fiddling with the sockets???

 

Maybe the NEXT iterations of the DCFC charging standards will MANDATE:

1. In-pin thermistors (as compared to them seeming to be optional today),
   
   
2. Ramping up the current slowly (over the course of a few seconds) so the in-pin thermistors will have time to react to bad connections before welding or burn-up occurs,
   
   
3. Extra pins or extra communications protocol logic so that each side can monitor the voltage drop across each pin pair so again, the charger and vehicle will have time to react to the fault before welding or burn-up occurs.

The current consumer-grade DCFC standards don't really seem up to meeting real-world challenges.

The proposed North-American Megawatt Charging Standard was pretty short on hard details the last time I looked; I wonder if they've considered these points?

 

By the way, for all you kiddies out there, that was a whopping big 200 MB (Megabytes!) of storage! Nowadays, the videos you shoot of your pets are probably bigger.