RENAULT-forum

• ZOE I die we nu rijden, super flexibele laadopties, max 43 kWh laadmogelijkheid
• ZOE II dat ding dat range anxiety opwekt, max 22 kWh laadmogelijkheid
• ZOE III de über-ZOE die nog komen gaat met megabereik en flexibele (snel)laadopties die we gewend zijn, die aansluiten bij de marktnorm en die toestaan dat we ons huidige thuislaadpunt kunnen blijven gebruiken

As I also said on InsideEVs, I think it’s important to consider three points before panicking. Firstly, the EU standard for fast-charging is CCS. Secondly, the maximum AC charge capacity for CCS is 22kWh. Third, DC charging totally bypasses the motor, drive electronics and all other AC parts of the car’s systems. I strongly suspect as a result of this announcement that Renault have decided to adopt CCS and see no point in engineering their new AC systems (motor, inverter, drive electronics etc.) to support more than 22kWh charging because higher capacity charging will be DC and directly linked to the battery system.

To be fair, this does make sense in the wide picture. The AC side of CCS is compatible with existing AC chargers up to 22kWh so all existing AC chargers are still available (but 43kWh chargers will scale back to 22kWh). DC charging has the advantage of not requiring complex electronics onboard and can scale much easier to higher wattage than AC because you don’t need to re-engineer the entire drive system to support it. As so many other companies have agreed to adopt CCS it is not high-risk for Renault to switch and, tbh, if CCS had been ready when the Zoe was being developed they’d prob. have gone for it – I suspect the engineering of the Zoe drive system to support 43kWh was purely due to a need for fast-charging that wasn’t as complex as Chademo or require 2 charging sockets (plus 43kWh AC chargers are cheaper to make than DC, reducing the risk that not many of them would be deployed).