I am guessing the fuel dispenser-looking thing marked Nissan "Power Control System" is required to accomplish this fast charge. The article offers no information on this.

So you leave this thing at home/work, it sucks electricity all day long, and power-dumps it into the car in ten minutes.

How long between charges? That is, how long to charge up the charger? And how much does that thing add to the price? If I really buy into this electric car stuff and have two cars [no, three (I buy one for my high school kid)], do I need three of these chargers? How about fleet vehicles?

Now, after all of these negative vibes have been sent out, I agree this is a major step in the right direction. This seems a useful improvement, and will hopefully lead to more development.

From what I could find the battery they use is a 24 KWH 440 volt lithium ion type.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf

At a 10 minute charge of 24 KWh it would take around 500 volts at 400 amps!

That current is not terrible but given a load dump like that into a lithium based battery pack still makes me highly questionable of the diminished service life that would bring about likely being more than the estimated 10% as mentioned in the link.

As far as the chargers own recharge time say it was designed around a 500 volt 400 amp load dump capacity that would indicate it would probably take around 35 KWH itself to recharge. On a common American 120 volt 20 amp circuit that would still mean an 18+ hour recharge time or on a 240 volt 50 amp line like an electric stove may use thats a more reasonable 4 hour recharge time.

Still I bet it ain't cheap.

I hadn't thought to check Wiki. Jeez, is there anything Wiki doesn't know at least a little bit about?

From the site: "Nissan developed its own 500-volt DC fast charger that went on sale in Japan for ¥1,470,000 (around US$16,800) in May 2010..." The charger is only being sold and installed (as of the article date) to dealers.

Uff-Da! Well, everything takes a little time to develop.

I had another thought: Baxter's thread about the evolution of a computer hard drive. Look at how far those have come in thirty years, every few years another improvement. Have hard drives reached their evolutionary pinnacle?

I remember working with the washing machine size hard drives that held 100 MB or so. As incredible as the miniaturization is, it doesn't violate any physics.

Unfortunately, it requires so many Joules to move a car 100 miles down the road. The 3 minute fill up at the gas pump represents a rate of energy transfer (power) in the megawatts.

I still don't understand how these very fast charges are possible. Lithium batteries apparently have a higher internal resistance than Ni-Cd or NiMH batteries. I have not found a figure for this internal resistance per cell, but if it were only 1 Ω for the entire multi-cell battery, some 400 X 400 X 1 watts of heat will be generated within the battery i.e. 160 kW! This is enough to heat a castle. What am I missing?

To make it feasible to recharge in the same principal as gassing up, there would need to be charging stations side by side with petrol stations, and they would have to have tremendous storage capacity to handle the demand of hundreds or thousands of vehicles per day.This would require a completely new infrastructure for power distribution across the whole continent.But, it is not all gloom and doom.

The peak demand times vary across the continent with the time zones involved, so the fully charged stations could serve as load levelers during their respective ebb load periods.Also, fully charged vehicles parked in the garage at night could be allowed to back-feed into the grid to provide peak management.

I know this is just a pipe dream, but it would be nice to distribute power on a global scale, as TESLA attempted,by using the Earth's magnetic field as a carrier wave, because it is always day somewhere, and night elsewhere.Perhaps a phased array tuned to the earth's magnetic field frequency? There is also lots of energy in the ionosphere waiting to be harvested, constantly replenished by the sun.

I wonder why all of Tesla's towers were destroyed, and only a copper ball is left in the museums? All of his tower plans were also (somehow?) destroyed.

Can you spell c-o-n-s-p-i-r-a-c-y by the power companies, because at the time there was no way to bill the customers for wireless power?

Of course, I could be wrong.

"I'm not paranoid, are we?"