Complimentary Toyota Homecharge (probably not).

The demand may not be the problem. If the competition is advertising free charging for their cars that may become a tipping point when deciding which car to buy.

 

Are you sure they're really offering a level two charger and not just some cheap level 1 charger in a box?

Or maybe it's because in the UK with everything 220v AC it's easy and cheap to install level two? Seems suspicious to me!

In the US it costs thousands of dollars to get your level 2 charger set up if you aren't DIY...

 

I don't know why people are saying that it costs thousands of $$$ to get a simple SAE J1772 level 1 or 2 EVSE adapter. The Prius Prime charger is built into the car and the adapter that it uses is pretty simple and yet quite safe.

The EVSE and J1772 Level 2 plug is available for less than $175 from Amazon.

The item listed above is plug and play. All that you need is a simple 30 amp circuit (like your electric clothes dryer uses) that you can plug your EVSE into. That should be just a hundred or so more dollars for a competent electrician to install. It should NOT cost much for the outlet and some copper wire + conduit to locate the outlet near your car.

I suspect that people who quote "thousands of dollars" are using the information provided by Tesla when they asked about installing a fast DC charging station. The fast DC charging hardware is more complex and therefor more expensive.

 

afaik - UK doesn't have 120v outlets .... at least not when I was going to school in the UK some decades ago

 

Why do you even need an EV charger in the UK for the Prius Prime? The UK voltage is 230 V; so, it is already Level 2 with 2.76 kW at 12 A if you use the included OEM charging cable. It makes little difference if it is 2.76 kW or 3.3 kW. I charge my Gen 4 at 120 V with Level 1 (1.44 kW at 12 A), and I am OK with even that.

 

Or like Gokhan is saying Toyota is making a point to emphasize that the car already includes ad level 2 charging cable that you can just plug into a standard 3 prong 230V 13A outlet for 2.76 kW charging.

 

There seems to be some confusion floating about on Prius chargers. First, the "charger" is built-into the Prime. It can operate on line voltages from 100V (Japan "line" voltage) to well over 200V (Most EU and what's called "Level II" in NA). When I got my first Prime, the .gov furnished me a free "Level II Charger." Of course, this is a misnomer, since the charger is in the car! What I actually received was a voltage control device that communicates with the car charger and selects and feeds it appropriate line voltage and current according to the onboard Prius charger's needs. I paid a good bit to have a 240V 40 amp line, jack, and breaker installed for this controller device, even though the max current that circuit will ever have to supply the charger inside my Prius is around 13 amperes. I appreciate the .gov giving me this device, and someday I may use its full capability to charge another EV that has a much bigger battery, and a concomitantly much larger on-board charger capacity.

But it's been known for years now that anyone with a 240V circuit in their home, even a 20 amp circuit (i.e., not a dryer circuit) has all the juice they need to obtain a maximum current charge for their Prius on "level II" - which at 240V is about 13 amperes. This, combined with the fact that Toyota apparently builds one charger for all the world's Priuses, means the chargers essentially have the ability to automatically switch to provide both level I (100-120V) or level II (200-24-V) as they are available worldwide -- no manual switching or factory pre-selection for a given world market is necessary. The cable that's supplied with every Prius is the same, (except for the connector) and that cable is ALL YOU NEED to obtain the maximum current charge. Of course, it must be fitted with an appropriate plug to connect to the available line voltage. The nice "charger" that the .gov supplied me has a much larger cable diameter (think garden hose) to supply up to 40 amps that will NEVER be needed for my Prime, but will come in handy if I ever get that Tesla S Plaid! But the original cable supplied by Toyota is perfectly capable of supplying the Prius' Level II needs, and if I hadn't been given the freebie, I'd have put in a cheaper 240/20 amp circuit. Hope that helps make sense of all this.

 

Different countries use different maximum amperages for vehicle charging (presumably by some regulations), so there are different variants of the IC-CPD.

It's 10A in the UK, so 2.3kW. Here in Finland we plod at 8A (1.8kW).

And 10A is actually the highest possibility in the manual for the Toyota (actually Aptiv) IC-CPD my car came with:



Here's a third-party charger - the "technical description" there shows their list of currents per country. They're less conservative than Toyota, going above 10A in some places, but still not the UK.

But that one does have an "high mode" that gives you higher current for two hours, potentially knocking an hour off the charging time.

But anyway, no, that cable is not what Toyota are talking about in this offer. A charging station is a perfectly reasonable deal. Cheaper than the winter wheels and tyres deal offered for a month here, which was worth over €2000. (And I missed...)

 

230 V/10 A, giving 2.3 kW, is pretty good. As opposed to 3.5 kW, you charge in 6 hours instead of 4 hours. It's no big deal if you are charging at home. It still easily beats the 11-hour charging at 120 V/12 A in the US for Gen 5.

I believe the 120 V/12 A US OEM chargers also supply 12 A when you plug them into a two-phase 240-V outlet using a plug adapter; so, you get 2.88 kW. I have never tried it, but quite a few people on this board do that without issues.

At least in the US and UK, they set the current limit to 3 A below the standard-outlet fuse rating.

 

The 'charger' under the SAE j1772 standard is known as an EVSE(electric vehicle supply equipment)

Some of that amp rating is the difference between the peak rating of the outlet and the continuous rating allowed for the appliances plugging into it. The max rating for the EVSE in the US will be 12 amps, but the outlet used is 15 amps.

If the rating of the typical home outlet can't explain a country's amp limit, authorities could be taking precautions for what the load of EV charging can put on the home and local grid.

The Aptiv itself has a 16 amp rating. Changing the plug and cord should be all it needs to make use on more powerful outlets. That is what some did with the EVSE supplied with the gen4.

Curious as to why. It isn't fast charging in terms of battery health.

 

J1772 is not the exclusive model for evse normanclature. Tesla's NACS is considered an EVSE as well. Some are set to deliver >10kw. Thankfully, it's going to be the standard. Sure - it CAN charge at a paltry 3kw slow charge, but NOone ever hopes to find a slow charging plug-in stopping up a NACS stall - where Mr slowpoke can take up to ½ a day. It's like finding a car doing 55mph in the fast lane on a freeway. Just kill me.

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It started under j1772, and became the accepted term. At least in North America, didn't see it used in that Aptiv manual.

 

It sounds like the VW forums are claiming that using the slower 10.0-A OEM charger as opposed to a faster third-party EVSE at 14.3 A shortens the cycle life of the battery. They probably saw some studies that faster Level 2 charging might give a slightly longer cycle life than slower Level 1 charging. It is nonsense, especially given that in Europe with 220+ V, there is not even Level 1 charging. In any case, the difference in the cycle life would be negligible if any for Level 1 vs. Level 2 or for 2.3-kW Level 2 vs. 3.3-kW Level 2.

 

The issue where I live with trades now is that if they're at your place they're not somewhere else. And the opportunity cost of other jobs is factoring into the price you pay now.

If they could spend 3 hours doing a 240v or 8 hours wiring a small basement, you're paying the rate of the larger job since they might not have jobs to cover the second half of the day of your booked job. So it becomes a "I don't want the job" price because demand for work is high.

Eventually this will change, but it's rough for trades pricing now

 

Now you're talking. Why stop at a measly 3.7 when it could be 7.2 kw. Last year of Chevy Volt production had 7.2kW as an option & that means you go grocery shopping & come back with 2X the range to head back home. I mean if we're going to be wishing, let's wish large.

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I feel like tech is changing enough that I wouldn't want any sort of hardwired EV solution in my home. I'd just want the 240v installed, and then I'd get an appropriate EVSE instead.