6/6/03
| Over the years, the EV1 Club has developed a very successful charger sharing protocol,
which improves utilization of the charging station infrastructure investment, and helps to
minimize instances where an arriving EV is not able to charge due to the presence of
another EV at the charging station. See http://ev1-club.power.net/chargers/chgprot/index.htm
for a description of the original protocol. Recently, many of us have been working with the California Air Resources Board, Clean Fuel Connection, Toyota, Ford, and others to update and improve this protocol, to cover RAV4 EVs now being delivered, as well as conductive vehicles, the new standard beginning with the 2006 model year. Bob Seldon got the ball rolling, and Tim Hastrup, Kim Rogers, Dave Kodama, Greg Hanssen and many others contributed to the effort. Many thanks to the California Air Resources Board for arranging for the printing of the new protocol cards. The new protocol, though based on the original EV1 Club protocol, no longer uses percentage state of charge as an indicator. This was done in recognition of the fact that newer chargers and especially conductive charging systems do not readily indicate state of charge without having the vehicle in run mode. Instead, the new protocol card asks the driver to indicate at what time his or her vehicle can be unplugged. The idea is that the driver will have a pretty good idea when he or she will have enough charge to reach the next destination. There are two documents comprising the charging protocol package -- a dashboard placard and an overview instruction sheet. You can view them below. Each one is available for viewing in two formats:
Clean Fuel Connection has agreed to send the new protocol cards to all new customers
with their welcome packet. This should get the card into the hands of new RAV4 EV
owners prior to delivery. If you are not a new RAV4 EV owner and you
would like one of the new protocol cards (no charge), please send an email including your
postal mailing address to protocolcard@evchargernews.com There's also another component of the charging protocol package -- a sticker that goes on the charger itself, in situations where the charger can serve more than one parking space.
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Photo credit: Michael Schwabe