FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

CHAdeMO is an association that is open to every organisation that works for the realisation of electric mobility. The Association, established in 2010, has over 420 members worldwide. In Europe, CHAdeMO European office based in Paris, France, actively reaches out to and works with the 130 European members.

Going beyond the borders of industrial segments, CHAdeMO provides a platform for a variety of stakeholders including charger manufacturers, automakers, utility companies, charge point operators, municipalities, certification bodies and NPOs.

Fast Charger Maps of CHAdeMO chargers, provided by our partners PlugShare and ChargeMap, are available on our website (https://www.chademo.com/about-us/fast-charger-maps/). Their charger description usually includes the information on necessary access card etc. which is verified by users.

You may not find enough information on our maps, as the charger installation is accelerating, in which case you may want to consult other charger mapping services to identify the chargers and operators.

The future market will depend upon the development of the ecosystem but there are already some encouraging signs both from the public and private sectors. Many cities, regions and countries are already making plans to enhance the development of the electromobility ecosystem through the creation of financial and other incentives, infrastructure improvement and the switch towards public electric fleet.

The Electric Vehicle Initiative (EVI), gathering the major players of the EV market, set a target of 20 million EVs worldwide (including plug-in hybrid and fuel cell vehicles) by 2020. The European Commission’s EUCO27 scenario (achieving 27% primary energy consumption reduction by 2030) indicates a necessary stock of 34,2 million EVs by 2030 in Europe in order to achieve this target. Electromobility is also at the heart of the strategy of many manufacturers, for instance Volkswagen plans to launch almost 70 new electric models in the next 10 years, while Nissan is targeting 1 million EV sales annually by 2022.

IEC has published 4 fast charging standards in the world. The German automakers developed CCS Combo 2-EVs that Germany promoted. While the Japanese government accepts all IEC standard chargers to be installed, since the EV infrastructure in Japan was already well-equipped with the CHAdeMO standard, we presume that the German automakers decided to utilise the existing infrastructure to maximise the benefit for the users.

The German automakers and CHAdeMO Association consensually validated the technical information concerning the safety and compatibility when they adopted the CHAdeMO protocol.

As for the European market, CHAdeMO standard chargers and EVs had already been well established in some countries before CCS EV/infrastructure was introduced. Therefore, multi-standard chargers with both CHAdeMO and Combo 2 connectors are the de facto standard today.

This refers to the Directive for the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure, which was part of the Clean Power for Transport package proposed by the European Commission in January 2013. In this package, in order to break the dependence of European transport on fossil fuels and cut back on greenhouse emissions, the Commission aimed to set out a long-term policy framework to guide technology development and investments in the deployment of various alternative fuels including electric, hydrogen, natural gas, etc.

The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Directive (2014/94/EU) was adopted in October 2014.

The objective of it was to have a single European market in this field, and to set 1) minimum national targets for national infrastructure build-up, such as EV charge point numbers, and 2) common technical specifications.

Usually the abbreviation ‘EV’ refers to Battery electric vehicles and Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles as these are the most produced types. However, there exist other EV configurations too.

The European Environment Agency in its 2016 “Electric vehicles in Europe” report distinguishes six types of EVs:

  • Hybrid vehicles (combining an internal combustion engine and an electric motor)
  • Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) (powered by an electric motor -supplied by a rechargeable battery- and an internal combustion engine)
  • Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) (powered solely by an electric motor, using electricity stored in an on-board battery)
  • Range extended electric vehicle (powered by an electric motor -supplied by a rechargeable battery- and an internal combustion engine that has no direct link to the wheels, but acts as an electricity generator)
  • Fuel cell electric vehicle (powered by an electric motor that gets energy from a fuel cell ‘stack’ that uses hydrogen from an on-board tank combined with oxygen from the air)