Even if it’s mutilated (not its fault).

One big obstacle on the path towards an all-electric car future (besides pipe-dreams like these, of course!) is that it is hard to build enough economically sustainable charging stations, if there is no standardization to speak of behind those chargers. That’s why it is great that the Linux Foundation (LF) just announced plans to fix this lack of standardization with a new project called “LF Energy EVerest”.

What will EVerest do?

In a nutshell (see this ZdNet article for details):

• develop and maintain an open-source software stack for the charging infrastructure for Electric Vehicles (EVs)
• make that software usable on “any device. I repeat, any device. This includes everything from AC home chargers to public DC charging stations. In short, it will support all three Electric vehicle charging level standards”

Of course, software cannot standardize hardware…

EVerest is great news, especially because it is an Open Source standard. All Hail EVerest! At the same time, it is crucial, at least if EVs want be really “green”, to fix as soon as possible the other half of the picture. As good as EVerest surely is,

“we’re still stuck with five different EV connection types: SAE J1772, CHAdeMO, Combined Charging System (CCS), Tesla Supercharger, and ISO 15118 / Plug and Charge. This is a major problem in its own right, and it needs to be fixed."

In other words, we must NOT repeat with EV charging hardware the same idiotic mistake we made with cellphone chargers, with smartphone batteries, and in many other cases like those: