First DCQC Unit in the East Coast Express Charging Corridor Installed

An i3 sits next to a 24kW DC Fast Charge unit during the announcement of the BMW, VW & ChargePoint joint venture earlier this year. 

It's been seven months since BMW, along with Volkswagen and ChargePoint announced a joint venture which would install roughly 100 DC fast charge units on the East and West coasts. While there's been a lot of work identifying potential locations and negotiating with site managers, there hasn't really been any tangible progress that electric vehicle owners could see.  

The plan is to create "Express Charging Corridors" on both coasts, with DC Fast Charge stations placed no more than 50 miles apart. The East Coast Corridor will connect Washington DC to Boston, Massachusetts and the West Coast Corridor would extend from San Diego, California to Portland, Oregon.  There would be two kinds of DC Fast Charge stations utilized. The stations placed directly on the highway locations of the corridors would be 50kW units, most of which will be dual head CCS & CHAdeMO stations. Then, on secondary locations slightly off the direct corridors, 24kW CCS-only units will be placed. While these 24kW units aren't necessarily quite fast enough to be convenient for long distance travel of hundreds of miles, they are very useful for intercity travel and charge at three to four times the speed of standard level 2 public charging.

ChargePoint's East and West Coast Express Charging Corridor Infographic

I applied, and was recently approved under the program guidelines to have one of the 24kW units installed on my commercial property in Montclair New Jersey.  I'm currently awaiting the permits to be approved and hope to have the station installed and working before my National Drive Electric Week event on September 12th. Always the competitor, I was also hoping to be the first East Coast public location in the program to get a station installed, but I'm actually happy to report that won't be the case. That's because a friend of mine and fellow BMW i3 owner, Bruce Redman Becker has beaten me to it. Bruce, and architect and developer, is responsible for 777 Main Street in Hartford Connecticut, a newly developed 285 unit apartment building with a 250 car parking garage. In describing the location to me, Bruce had this to say:

"The site is just two blocks from exits off I-91 and off I-84.  We have one SAE combo DC fast charger and 10 level 2 chargers (3 duals in the surface lot and 2 duals up the ramp within the covered garage).  Power  for all 11 Chargepoint chargers comes from a 400kw fuel cell adjacent to the chargers that also provides renewable clean energy to heat and power the apartment tower�.We have three coffee shops on our block, including a Blue State Coffee on the first floor of 777 Main opening in September.  And there are over a dozen great restaurants nearby as well as a great camera shop, CVS, banks and the Hartford Atheneum museum to enjoy while charging."

An i3 using the DC Fast Charger at 777 Main Street, Hartford Connecticut 

So while none of the main corridor, 50kW units have been installed yet, it seems the secondary, 24kW stations are beginning to materialize here on the East Coast, which is welcome news. I know some i3 owners have been frustrated by the seemingly lack of action with regards to the DC Fast Charge roll out, but I also know first hand that BMW and ChargePoint have been working very hard to locate potential locations, negotiate site agreements and collect bids for the installation. They've been at it for half a year now and I believe we're going to begin to see some real progress made in the next couple months. Getting the first one up and running can sometime seem like the biggest hurdle in programs like this. Well, now that that's done I'm optimistic that in the next six months we'll see dramatic progress made on both coasts. 

Three 24kW DCFC units have been up and running at BMW Headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, NJ since January. They are open to the public and free to use.

Did The DC Quick-Charging 'Standards War' Just Quietly End For Electric Cars?

A BMW i3 and a Volkswagen e-Golf charge on DC fast chargers side by side at BMW Headquarters in Woodcliff Lake NJ.

I wrote this article for Green Car Reports, where it was published a few days ago. The proliferation of a robust DC fast charge network is vital to electric vehicle adoption, and I wanted to give this story as wide an audience as possible, which is way I let GCR publish it first. Now that they had it for a while, I'd like to share it with the readers here.

I was invited up to BMW NA headquarters by BMW product manager Jose Guerrero to try out the new DC fast chargers installed there. There are three of them, along with four Level 2 EVSEs, all of which are open to the public 24/7.

A couple weeks ago at the DC Auto Show, BMW, Volkswagen, and ChargePoint jointly announced they would install about 100 DC fast chargers for electric cars. Their goal is to create �Express Charging Corridors,� on both the East and West coasts, by the end of this year. The most intriguing news, however, was that the hardware will--in most cases--offer fast charging for electric cars using two different standards: CCS (used by BMW and VW) and CHAdeMO, used by Japanese and Korean automakers.

The three DC fast chargers at BMW NA HQ are CCS only. The reason being is these are not directly included in the Express Charging Corridors, but secondary locations which are more likely to support local driving, not long distance traveling.

I say �most cases� because not every single location will have a dual-standard fast charger that provides CHAdeMO, although most will. Today, CHAdeMO stations are far more widely installed in certain areas--totaling several hundred in the U.S.--than CCS stations, of which only a few dozen exist today. The "Express Charging Corridor" project will determine whether a desired location is close to an existing CHAdeMO station. If so, that location will provide only CCS cables.

I suspect this may only happen in a few locations, largely on the West Coast, since the East Coast has very few operational CHAdeMO stations to date. The East Coast corridor will connect Boston to Washington, D.C., while the West Coast corridor will extend from Portland to San Diego. Both corridors will have DC fast chargers installed at intervals of less than 50 miles, making it possible--if tedious--to do long-distance trips in electric cars with ranges of 75 to 90 miles, including the BMW i3 and the Volkswagen e-Golf.

Then, less than a week after the DC Auto Show, Kansas City Power & Light announced that it had partnered with Nissan and ChargePoint to install 1,000 electric-vehicle charging stations throughout the greater Kansas City region.


That in itself is fantastic news. But if you drill down into the press release, you will find that only 15 of the stations will be DC fast charge stations--a little disappointing. However, these 15 stations �will charge any model of electric vehicle on the market,� meaning they too will support both CHAdeMO and CCS. So BMW and Volkswagen�s project will provide CHAdeMO charging, and Nissan�s endeavor will include CCS support.

These Efacec units will be installed along the new "Express Charging Corridors" by ChargePoint and support both CHAdeMO and CCS

What just happened here?

Did the automakers all quietly agree to support both standards, so every electric-car driver can benefit? I interviewed BMW�s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Manager, Robert Healey, on the morning of the DC Auto Show. He told me BMW has no problem with supporting dual-standard stations, because the main goal is to advance the proliferation of charging infrastructure for plug-in cars as rapidly as possible.

CHAdeMO and CCS connector side by side comparison.

He went on to say that in these early stages of adoption, �a rising tide raises all boats�--and this kind of cooperation among competitors is in everyone�s best interest. While he couldn�t elaborate or speculate on the future, Healey said he would be open to similar partnerships with other automakers, should the opportunity arise.

So it's looking more and more as though the DC fast-charge standards war that everyone was predicting may be over, really before the first shot was even fired. I hope so, because if this trend continues, everybody indeed wins. Especially electric-car drivers--not only today's, but the many more to come.