5 Major Automakers Join Forces to Deploy 400 Ultra-Fast Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles in Europe
November 29th, 2016Via: Electrek:
BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes, Ford, and Volkswagen’s Audi and Porsche announced today that they are creating a joint-venture with the goal of a “quick build-up of a sizable number of stations in order to enable long-range travel for battery electric vehicle drivers.”
The new venture is similar to the Ultra E project announced earlier this year to deploy 25 new charging station for electric vehicles along the trans-European transport network (TEN-T), but it’s apparently a separate and much more ambitious project to deploy 400 stations across Europe.
The new network will be based on Combined Charging System (CCS) standard technology and each station will feature not only both level 2 AC chargers and level 3 DC chargers, but also the new ” ultra-fast high-powered chargers” and, like the ones of the Ultra E project, they will be able to deliver up to 350 kW – more than twice the capacity of the current best charger, Tesla’s Supercharger at 145 kW.
400 sites are apparently just the “initial target” of the joint-venture and deployment will start in 2017.
