Level 3 charger time

You should have used a capital L in your thread title -- due to InsideEVs' sanserif font, this looks like a BMW I3 thread.

How long charging takes depends how much charge your battery has when you begin your charging session. This graph illustrates how charging slows down when you get closer to a full charge:

 

I get about 4.3 miles per kWh so in my experience its about between 8-12 minutes, assuming you are receiving the full 50Kw charging speed and the battery is not above 80%. If your driving style is very inefficient then it might take longer.

 

The SAE J1772-2017 standard is for:
AC Level 1/2/3*
DC Level 1/2

AC Level 3 (96kW single phase or 166kW three phase) was planned for industrial vehicles with beefy onboard chargers but was never implemented. DC Fast charging or CCS1 (North America) is probably more appropriate.

Anyways what you need to do is determine your average efficiency for highway/city (3.0mi/kWh to 4.5mi/kWh), then figure out the total kWh and add in a 10% buffer for DC charging losses. So if you need to travel 40 miles with 4mi/kWh, that would take 10kWh (about +34.6% or 10/28.9 usable kWh on the MINI)

If you roughly estimate 40kW on average for DC fast charging (stop at 80% SoC) then it's 10kWh every 15 minutes. Add in a 10% charging losses and it will be 11.11kWh or 16.7 minutes. Generally you will get a feel of the SoC for local checkpoints, but consider A Better Route Planner for long distance travel!

 

The DC Fast Charger (NB: I’ve only used one so far, but all of them on the networks around here appear to be similar) should let you know the power it is supplying in kW during the various phases of charging. I “needed” a few extra kilometres the other morning, so I used the free ChargePoint station at a local BMW store, and it supplied 19.2 kW; 15 minutes gave me about 13% or ~25 km.

 

If your battery is between 15-80% charged, my rough rule of thumb is a DC charger adds about 3 miles/minute. So to add 40 miles is about 13 minutes.

This is a rough back-of-the-envelope number. YMMV.


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I think we need a better way to describe charging rather than miles per minute for our ICE friends who are EV hesitant. Take for example an ICE 30MPG vehicle fuelling up at a flow rate of 6 gal/min. That would mean 40 miles would take roughly 13.33 seconds.

For those who live in condos/apartments with no access to overnight charging or charging at the office, it is certainly a challenge for the MINI.

 

The issue is that there are two types of EV charging - the type you have to wait for (typically DC charging) and the type you don’t (home or work charging, typically L1 or L2). You cannot appreciate it fully until you have lived with it.

The OP asked how long to add 40 miles, I just gave a rule of thumb one can use while driving. I used it on Sunday when estimating how long I’d have to add for charging to a 140 mile drive to meet someone. She was driving 110 miles and wanted to time it that we roughly arrived at the same time. I was off by less than 5 minutes on my trip estimate. Not bad for planning a 140 mile trip in a 110-mile EV and doing the math in my head.


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I feel bad I even wrote such a comment. Clearly, other forum members are having no problem with l3, so please accept my apology and forget I mentioned it.

 

How much battery it takes to travel 40 miles depends on many things:

1) If you go by EPA then you need to add 35% to the battery. (10.1kWh+10% for charging losses is 11.1kWh).

2) If you travel on the highway according to my experience you need to add 30.75%. (9.8kWh inc losses),

3) if you are driving suburban 45mph roads with plenty of red light intersections then you need to add 24%. (7.6kWh inc losses).


The car charges fastest just as it hits 80% so for the cases above:

1) you need to go from 45% to 80%.
The curve there would average about 47kWh so you need 8.7 minutes.

2) you need to go from 50% to 80% so would average more like 48kWh and take 7.8 minutes.

3) you need to go from 56% to 80% and average more like 48kWh so take 6.1 minutes.

 

I thought the same thing until I read the thread. I thought it was a thread about using the charge cord that comes with a BMW i3.

Technically, there is no such thing as “level 3” charging. But in the vernacular it generally is used to refer to DC fast charging. I gave up that battle long ago.


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I wanted to give up that battle too, until I saw @teslarati97's post that "level 3" was defined for extremely high voltage AC but never implemented. So that means DC Fast charging truly is something different. I love being pedantic, but I know others don't appreciate it so I try to keep it to myself as much as possible.

 

As everyone has rightly pointed out it depends but here is a real world example that just happens to match what you asked. The short story is it took 17min and 13.13 kWh to add 44 estimated miles for $5.91 per my charge point receipt. Charge rate was ~50kW stoping at ~80% charge, I don't remember what the % was when I started charging.

Longer story. Took the mini out for our first long drive over the weekend, since we got it about a month ago. We normally just use it for short drives around town and charge L1 at home. So far it has worked out. Neither my wife or I have a daily commute if we did not sure it would work. Anyway we took it for a drive in the rockies we live in CO Denver area. So guessing range with all the up and down was a guessing game. On top of that we did not leave at 100%. So when we made it to Estes Park I had a decision to make, see if we could make it home, I was calculating it would be close but mostly down hill so probably doable or try out DC fast charging to see how easy or hard it was going to be. You hear the horror stories of the apps not works or the chargers them self are all broken... Needless to say it was quick and easy, got some weird message that my card was not supported but then it started charging so who knows. But we went to the restroom walked around for few came back and it was almost at 80%, see data points above. No issues. And based on my calculations we would have made it home fine with out the quick charge. Only interesting data point was it said it charged to 80% but as soon as I turned it on it dropped to 78 so there are some losses in there somewhere. O ya and there was another SE owner using quick charging for the first time there as well. His was a few days newer than ours.

 

Charging on DC kills our HV batteries faster about 20% than charging with level L 2 or L 1 means if you charge at home a batteries last longer

 

At 50 kW I don't believe there's enough heat generated to damage the batteries in the SE, with its battery cooling. But I haven't seen any actual data on the subject.

 

I refuse to coddle my SE's battery. MINI knew when they designed a 110/114-mile car that most owners would be fully charging them frequently. I assume MINI could have followed Tesla's example and designed a longer-range (140-mile?) battery management system and then warned owners to charge their batteries to only 80% most of the time. Instead, MINI chose not to make battery longevity the responsibility of the customer.

 

Me too. I just drive and charge as needed. Of course it helps that I own a home with L2 charging available. Most of the time I use that. But on a trip, I don’t hesitate to use a DC charger or two. Last Sunday I drove almost 300 miles with 4 separate stops for DC charging (of duration ranging from 10 to 30 minutes each). I’m not worried at all about the battery.

There is time-related degradation that occurs too. Sitting on a shelf in a climate controlled environment, batteries still lose capacity over time. That will likely be a bigger factor than the occasional DC charging.


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Yeap. You can look to the i3 to see that they designed them to be charged hard with minimal degradation.