Megawatt Charging System. It is a standard meant for heavy haulers with its own specialized plug, but adding a CCS plug for these hyper fast charging cars would make a lot of sense.
The MCS plug supports up to 3,5 MW, so the CCS plug would need to be limited to e.g. 1 MW and heavily cooled, or both cable and plug would melt.
@ninthant in some ways I get the feeling that MCS-capable cars are just waiting for long haul electric trucks to get some traction in the market. Here the MCS makes a lot more sense and there is a financial gain to be had for the company if they can increase the practical daily range.
@Sunshine
Probably because the cost of the chargers will be really, really high and only two cars supports them so far.
Also, while it's technically impressive what BYD have done, the real world need for MCS is somewhat limited.
Personally we drive around 50000 km every year in our Kona 64kWh model, and it has a maximum charging speed on a good day of 77 kW, in winter around 55 kW.
However, given that it charges every night on a 11 kW home charger, it hardly ever sees a fast charger - perhaps 10 times a year, unless our summer holiday is a 3000 km roadtrim through Germany and their neighbouring countries.
Still, even then we tend to find slow destination chargers and charge through the night.
@Sunshine This seems to be very close to what Hyundai does in the Ioniq 5N, just using a stick instead of paddles. I don't know if that difference will be enough to warrant a patent, but time will tell.
As for the feature itself - yeah, it seems stupid and pointless, but every single review I have seen of the 5N acknowledges the stupidity but also concludes (usually with a huge grin on the reviewers face) that it makes the car an absolute blast to drive.
Will this be a thing in 20 years? Most likely not. Could it be the gateway drug for petrolheads? Yeah, looks like it.
@DemBoSain @Sunshine
I think that a part of the "server hurdle" can be solved - at least for brand new users - by initiatives like the Vivaldi Social network.
New to Vivaldi? Nice - welcome. Would you like to join Mastodon? Register here. Boom.
If people have heard about Mastodon and are curious about it, this is the easy way to get them hooked. No talk about servers or instances - you register and you are off to the races.
How this all plays into the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and who is going to fund those servers is a different question - but it is definitely the easiest gateway for new users (as you can see, I was one of them).