NACS Megathread

[Kaycee1980]

This will be true on 400v Tesla Superchargers, there are some 1000v chargers finally landing which will fix this.

Thats promising then. Thanks for the info.

 

[ViperSSD]

Doesn’t bother me. I’ve done road trips from Rhode Island to Indiana and back, and trips from Rhode Island to Quebec City and Montreal and back and never once thought “I wish this car could charge on Tesla”. I think I was also the first Lucid to charge on a commercial Tesla charger once they came up with the magic dock in Brewster NY, ran into Tom Moloughney there making a video of his F150 Lightning and Marcus Brownlee in his Rivian. Tom did a little segment with me towards the end of that video. It’s always great to have more DCFC options and I’ve heard a lot of progress has been made towards higher speeds and surprisingly Tesla charging network people are very amenable to working with Lucid, but for me at least Tesla is a backup to a backup, like if there’s no CCS and also nowhere I’m staying has L2 charging then I’d slum it on the 50kw Tesla chargers haha.

I've had it happpen once where I would have loved to have the Tesla Supercharger as a backup but basically only go juice up just enough to get to my next 1000v charger

 

[RD7]

The Gravity charging curve is out, and it is a monster. The yellow line shows a 1000V charger and the teal line a Tesla V3+ (V4 dispenser with V3 cabinet). (from https://outofspecstudios.com/charging).

Does not dip below 150kw until ~75% SOC on either type of charger. 200mi of range in 16.5m on a Supercharger and 10.6m on a 1000V/400kw charger (brand not specified - Alpitronics I'd guess).
There is no side-by-side test yet, but Gravity beats the Taycan to 300mi by a minute (29m for Gravity vs 30m for Taycan). Pretty impressive work by the Lucid engineering team!

 

[RD7]

I just watched the actual charging video. The 400kw charger was a ChargePoint Express Plus at ChargePoint's lab.

 

[Haggy]

I've had it happpen once where I would have loved to have the Tesla Supercharger as a backup but basically only go juice up just enough to get to my next 1000v charger

The same thing happened to me, but a lot of "once" things are ways of learning lessons so that there won't be a next time. I showed up in Los Angeles and needed a small amount of charge after a few days to get out of the City, after which there would have been plenty of places to charge with no wait. I could have easily spent a few minutes more charging on the way over. I could have gotten up early that morning to find a place to charge off hours, which would have been the one exception so far with the Lucid.

The essence of the problem is that EA has a reliability problem. If they have a station with ten chargers, and one is down, it's easy to call it 90% uptime. But if their app shows that there are two available chargers, one has a broken plug so it can't be used, and the other is L2, then people will show up thinking that there's no wait, making for a very long line. I was at a different station where I missed a free space by a matter of seconds. I waited around, but there were only four chargers there. With Tesla, if there are a dozen chargers at a small Supercharger station, waiting for one of a dozen to leave is not bad. I waited and nobody was moving, so I went to the one that supposedly had two free chargers, and learned my lesson.

It's not just that Tesla is 400V. They don't seem to be in any hurry to upgrade to 1000V. Even the few V4 Superchargers that have been installed in the US have 400V at the back end. The chargers themselves will be able to remain when Tesla upgrades, as opposed to their older stations where the only solution will be changing the equipment.

The other issue is that they had a closed system for many years, as was the case when the Air was designed. Nobody would have designed the car to be backwards compatible with a network that nobody was allowed to use, had cables with the wrong connector and were too short to reach the car.

Lucid had time with the Gravity to get around the problem, and I don't know the details about how they use one of the motors to up the voltage, but they seem to have solved that problem.

I haven't seen anything directly from Lucid about adapters, so if it's online somewhere, somebody please point me to it. If not, does anybody have experience with third party adapters?

 

[Knucklehead]

I just watched the actual charging video. The 400kw charger was a ChargePoint Express Plus at ChargePoint's lab.

This is a great video. I watched it at 1.75, because it is long. But it is worth watching the entire video.

Good job, Lucid.

 

[RD7]

I haven't seen anything directly from Lucid about adapters, so if it's online somewhere, somebody please point me to it. If not, does anybody have experience with third party adapters?

In the first Gravity review Kyle showed the 2 adapters that were included with the vehicle: a 1000V/500A CCS1 to NACS and a J1772 to NACS 80A adapter, both branded as "Lucid" on the adapter and in a Lucid-branded box. Exactly what I was hoping for and expecting.

 

[RD7]