A suite of big-name manufacturers including Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, Fiat, Toyota, and Mitsubishi, have agreed on a common standard for the plugs used for charging electric vehicles. According to German energy company RWE, the plug will be a three-point (live, neutral, earth) arrangement that uses a fixed 400V supply. Daimler, maker of the upcoming electric Smart car, has already begun a pilot scheme [2] with RWE in Berlin (pictured). Although talks are ongoing to finalize the design details, it's due for unveiling today in Hanover, Germany, at the world's biggest industrial tech fair--Hanover Messe [3].

This agreement means that whatever brand of EV you own, you'll be able to pull into a roadside electric "gas" station and hook it up to a charging stand for a top-up without having to hunt for one that matches your car's brand of connector. That makes charging electric cars on the go (perhaps at a rest-stop on a long freeway ride) identical to how you can pull into any gas station today and top-up your petrol tank, a fact which will undoubtedly aid public adoption of the new technology. The adoption of a standard should also help keep costs down in terms of car production and for the manufacturers of public charging points--both good in lowering prices for the EV owner.

That "rest-stop" model will probably only be relevant in the early years of the EV, while the cars have limited range. But there's also the issue of cross-boarder traveling to think about--less of an issue for private drivers in the U.S., but the European public is used to crossing boarders on a daily basis. If each country had a different standard, then having to haul around a bunch of socket/voltage converters would be a severe barrier to adoption. And there are all those millions of trucks on the roads, hauling materials between exporters and importers--someday soon they'll be electric too [4].

The big names involved in this agreement dwarf some of the the interesting, but low-volume EV producers currently in the news, such as Tesla [5], Aptera [6]. With these companies getting behind the EV plug standard, electric cars could become viable sooner than you may have imagined. 

[via Beurs.nl [7]]

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Related: Cellphone Makers Agree on Universal Charger, But Is It a Good Idea? [10]