Comment by Kirby64
7 hours ago
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
7 hours ago
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
What parts of the car need that amount of current?
Are you talking about the charging circuitry?
What are the requirements for the motor(s)?
Both as you mentioned. Charge circuitry for DCFC can be >200kW.
Motors, for instantaneous current, can easily exceed 100kW, some much much more than that.
Even assuming limitations to 100kW (which, would be very low for motor current), that's still 2000 amps at 48V. Remember, 100kW is ~134 hp.
Charging speed is directly related to the voltage of the pack. Even if your own vehicle had arm-thick cables to support high speed charging at 48v there is no quick charger in the world that could support it. You would be stuck in the bad old days of needing hours to recharge the battery on your EV.
No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
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I wouldn't see why not. A battery is internally a series-connection of lower voltage batteries.