Near the top of concerns Tesla Motors’ co-founder Marc Tarpenning has about the coming wave of electric cars is the non-standard recharging plug.
Imagine pulling into a charging station to discover the plug on your car doesn’t connect to the 240 volt recharging waiting to give you electric juice. Talk about going postal.
Apparently the industry is aware of this potential snafu and is (belatedly) addressing. SAE International, an organization of 128,000 engineers, including some from Ford, said Tuesday it released a new standard for electric cars – its first of five.
The standard will allow utilities and stations to communicate with one another about electric grid load-management requirements and electricity rate. This should allow drivers to recharge their vehicles at low costs during off-peak hours, and helps the utilities reduce grid congestion during peak periods.
The J2836/1 standard is obviously a good first step. Let’s see the others…pronto. The first crop of mainstream electric cars is coming to market in less than six months.
