You can leave your manufacturer-issued charger in your garage instead of yanking it out of the wall and packing it in the car every time you go on a trip. The ruggedness, utility and svelte design of the TurboCord make it an easy choice. Most importantly, as an EV owner, you need to make sure you have a charging option on the road. However, the TurboCord works incredibly well as a stopgap until you get a permanent charging solution and you *can* use it every day. I wouldn’t recommend the TurboCord to be your daily, home charging solution. Bulkier stationary chargers are much less expensive and more powerful and connect to the Internet. Overall, I would recommend the TurboCord for certain uses. On a ski trip where my options were 110 or 240V at 20A on a NEMA 6-20, it pretty much save my life, or a few hours of it, by giving us the charge we needed to make it back three times faster than using a 110v outlet would have been. For our Prius, which we plug into a 110V, it charged about twice as fast on 240V. While much faster that level 1 AC charging, it isn’t what you are going to want to use on a daily basis with a big-battery car. That means it only charges at half the speed (~14 miles/hour of charge on the Tesla) as the 40A adapter that comes with the Tesla. And while level 1 charging was pretty standard, level 2 charging only went up to 20A, the limit of the 6-20R interface. The design of the plug is a square and is sometimes hard to fit in a standard outlet. There were a few downsides to the package, however. The whole package is light but super durable, thanks to Nema 6P weather proofing and ruggedness. The “brains” of a Level 1/2 charger are tucked in the little square at the base of the cord, which has a big bright blue charging indicator light. It loops up quickly and easily for storage. The cable is thin and very flexible - unlike the cables that came with the default Tesla charger or Prius Plug-in charger. It can fit in a glovebox or tucked under a seat, as well as in the usual charging cable locations in the trunk. It comes in a little purse-sized zipper bag and is about the same size as a lunch bag. The first thing you will notice about the TurboCord is how small it is. ![]() ![]() How well does it do? I’ve been using one as my main on board charger with vehicles ranging from the Plug in Prius to the Tesla Model S since the beginning of the year… Their main consumer product is the TurboCord Dual, a tiny combination Level 1/2 charger that can be plugged into a normal 110V outlet or with the included adapter, 240V NEMA 6-20 outlet and charge a vehicle at three times the speed. ![]() AeroVironment was a big part of the Sunraycer and Impact/EV1 project with GM in the late 80s and 90s and now powers the charging solutions with a number of automobiles through its EV Solutions subsidiary. Since then, the company moved on to building drones for governments (boo!) and working on innovation in the electric car space (yay!). At the time, founder Paul McCready and Co were working on human powered flight and then solar powered flight, which required radical battery and charging systems. I first encountered the company in the 90s in undergraduate Aerospace Engineering when the Southern California company took part in USC’s engineering and internship program. Aerovironment is a company with a long history of innovation.
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