EV Charging Cables

I saw this article in Fleet News. Do the charging cables really fall outside any testing requirements?

'Under the current Electricity at Work Regulations, there is no requirement for a charging cable to be PAT (portable appliance testing) tested but, for commercial vehicles, EV Cables recommends a yearly cable inspection and thorough testing of areas such as insulation resistance, contact 
resistance and continuity tests.'

The energy loss section also seems a little dubious. That's a lot of energy/heat going somewhere.

Electric vehicle charging cable care: what you need to know (fleetnews.co.uk)

Parents
  • This appears to apply to the low power AC charging cables with a connector at both ends. For a private user it will probably just be abused  until it fails, for a business user there probably should be some form of risk assessment. How great is the risk if a live conductor becomes exposed? As I understand it all the likely sockets the cable could be plugged into will have RCD protection. What will happed if a live conductor starts to break giving a high resistance 'hot spot'?

    The higher power charging cable that are fixed to the charger hopefully have some sort of testing routine. 1000V 500A capable systems are in use and 1MW systems are in development, but these should have suficient internal monitoring to minimise the risks.

Reply
  • This appears to apply to the low power AC charging cables with a connector at both ends. For a private user it will probably just be abused  until it fails, for a business user there probably should be some form of risk assessment. How great is the risk if a live conductor becomes exposed? As I understand it all the likely sockets the cable could be plugged into will have RCD protection. What will happed if a live conductor starts to break giving a high resistance 'hot spot'?

    The higher power charging cable that are fixed to the charger hopefully have some sort of testing routine. 1000V 500A capable systems are in use and 1MW systems are in development, but these should have suficient internal monitoring to minimise the risks.

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