The two German and Japanese carmakers are now working together on expanding a fast-charging program in certain areas in the United States.
While numerous automakers are looking to increase the number of public DC fast-charging stations for electric cars, unfortunately, not all of them can be used by different cars. At the moment, there are three different fast-charging standards: the CHAdeMO, which is used by Nissan Leaf, Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Kia Soul EV, the Combine Charging Standard (CCS) – chosen by the majority of the U.S. and German carmakers and the Supercharger, Tesla’s unique standard.
BMW and Nissan announced they have collaborated towards the availability of new fast-charging stations at 120 locations spred across 19 states in the U.S. using the Greenlots standard. These stations are dual 50-kw stations with a CHAdeMO connector which can cater for Nissan’s Leaf EV and also a CCS connector that works with BMW’s i3 model.
These new stations can recharge most electric vehicles’ batteries to around 80% of the battery’s capacity in 20-30 minutes and the states where they are available are California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Owners of electric cars can identify these stations using the navigation systems in their cars or both BMW’s i Remote and Nissan’s EZ Charge smartphone applications.
Dual-standard DC fast-charging stations are becoming the standard for EV charging as despite CHAdeMO stations reaching 10,000 units for its drivers worldwide, the CCS stations did not manage to keep up with them.