Is one of these in the works? Ideally with a 45W+ power capacity?
Would love to be able to power my USB Type-C enabled laptop (Dell XPS 13) from a car (or airplane) power port with a device from a brand I trust.
And I know there are no shortage of MacBook owners with similar wishes.
Anker is behind the curve, a bit too focused on Quickcharge and not enough on USB-PD
In the meantime, while Anker doesn’t want to take your money there are others who will
https://www.amazon.com/Charger-Tronsmart-Charge-Technology-Attached-Approved/dp/B0146FK3G0/
Not only that but car chargers do not seem to be their main focus. Are new vehicles even coming out with those things or just USB ports?
Well i’d say Anker is not ignoring car chargers, e.g. the new Elite, it’s just seems to be a QuickCharge focus and USB-C barely getting any attention. i think its because there are more mobiles than laptops, and mobiles are mostly either QC or Lightning (or the older micro-b) hence the QC and Lightning focus.
Unfortunately, the Tronsmart is garbage and not USB-PD spec compliant. See Nathan K’s review. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1NL7P460O369P/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B01ER4J564#R1NL7P460O369P)
Even if it was spec compliant, the wattage is too low for most laptops. Would need to support a 20V/2.25A profile.
Literally the only device I can find is from Targus (http://www.targus.com/us/usb-c-45w-dc-car-charger-apd39us), but (a) it’s hideous (b) I can’t seem to find any properly thorough reviews and © I’ve had bad luck with Targus products in the past.
Well, if you look at car chargers vs power banks and USB chargers, there are far fewer. Also, they are not released as regularly.
There’s much less need in cars, much less combination of problems.
Also, the Turbo is a car-specific powerbank. https://www.anker.com/products/A1694011
As mentioned here https://www.periscope.tv/AnkerOfficial/1YqKDXXWYwzKV?
The Verizon one has actually been recalled for a spec compliance issue (it’s out of stock on Verizon’s site and has been for months), and was only 27W, if I recall correctly.
The Turbo doesn’t have the Power Delivery output capacity via the PowerBank. Not that I want to carry yet another heavy battery and mess of wires. Trying to unravel that and plug it in mid-flight would be a nightmare. The whole point of USB-C is to reduce what’s necessary in terms of support gadgets.
It boggles my mind that the market doesn’t seem to have a product that fits the bill, other than the Targus unit.
I agree, USB-PD is under-represented and I agree there are too many forked USB-C implementations, for example my OnePlus3T is yet another proprietary standard and so there is a common denominator of 10W 5V 2A.
You of course have a long winded way to do this which is 12DC to 110V AC in an inverter, then plug in a 110V AC to USB-PD charger. Two lots of losses, i’d expect at least 20% loss and so the 10A (or less) of 12V so 120W would produce 100W max, still above your 45W+ desired state. If you owned an inverter, and you must necessarily own the USB-PD charger, its an interim step which may cost nothing.
Yea that option has crossed my mind, but an inverter isn’t really something I’d like to have in my travel kit since I’ve managed to reduce everything else to USB based power (along with two AC->USB wall chargers).
The biggest surprise to me is that Apple hasn’t released a car charger for its MacBooks. It’s not like Cupertino to not offer a complete set of (usually overpriced) quality accessories.
(or Google for its flagship Chromebook, for that matter.)
I have a suggested cause of the delay: PowerIQ 2. It is a more power efficient and more powerful successor to PowerIQ, which would proportionally benefit higher power demand such as the higher profile USB-PD.
It is due in May (so it said earlier this year). There have also been hints of more USB-C coming. So I’m expecting from about May, PowerIQ 2, to be the gateway to more powerful options.
Exactly what, exactly the sequence, I cannot predict. But if you keep asking, and in particular try to get like-minded to add your combined voices, it will tend to make it happen earlier.
This forum does not do surveys, but if you can do surveys in other platforms? Can Facebook do surveys? Twitter? I think XDA can?
I guess I’d be slightly more inclined to believe that if other USB-C PD chargers were on the market. It’s the dearth of 'em that has me confused.
I don’t believe that they have officially announced any car chargers with their new PowerIQ 2 technology at this point…
Correct. They only announced IQ2 and the Powercore II 10000.
So electrically if you are doing a DC-DC step-down you are using a buck converter such as from 12V DC down to 5V, or at least a regulator for the USB-PD profile 2 18W 12V 1.5A and profile 3 36W 13V 3A. You have the boost converter from 12V for profile 4 and profile 5 20V. It is genuinely very interesting to learn how these work.
What is happening is basically Faraday’s electromagnetic rules where a changing electric field makes a changing magnetic field, and a changing magnetic field makes a changing electric field. So if you pass DC through a coil it creates a magnetic field, and then when you stop that DC electric current then the magnetic field collapses (at the speed of light) and that being a change of magnetic field causes an electric current to flow (in the opposite direction). Consider the analogy being to draw an arrow in a bow and release.
https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/electromag/java/faraday2/
In a buck converter the switching on/off causes the release of the energy and the more often you switch the current the more efficient is the process. Like drawing lots of small arrows is more efficient than drawing one big arrow.
To do that switching involves a semiconductor chip running at high frequency.
That high frequency chip has its own losses.
Those losses are less if you use a smaller fabrication (the leading technology is 10 nanometer) as the wires all inside become shorter to lose less heat for any given task.
Hence, what I think is happening is the chips that Anker buys are moving to a newer more efficient smaller fabrication, so they are more efficient. Given less heat means you can have a smaller powerbank / device to spread less hear across smaller volume, those new chips = smaller devices. Or you can have more of them for more power in a given size. This matters more in portable powerbanks because heat from electronics accelerates aging of the Lithium cells.
So what I expect will happen is IQ2 will result in smaller products for a given power, and more power in current size.
In the case of the cigarette lighter problem your hand must touch the adapter without scolding, so there will be some ergonomically derived upper power limit which IQ2 will allow to produce more output. Efficiency matters increasingly with higher Wattage, because the lower your spike through the adapter the less likely the car’s fuses fry, less likely to have an angry customer. Given an IQ2 cigaretter ligher USB-PD product would be noticeably better than an IQ USB-PD product, they’d have some inventory and manufacturing cost for such a short produce run, so it was decided to not make IQ USB-PD.
In the ask of a 45W+ USB-PD even if you had 90% efficiency, you’re still talking 4W+ of heat accumulating inside the cigarette lighter charger, which would need a physically larger shape to reduce peak temperature. If you look at Anker’s 40W+ chargers they all are rather chunky, for good thermal reasons tending to be rectangular.
By coincidence, the 12V DC of a cigarette lighter is close to the USB-PD Profile 2 12V 1.5a 18W and Profile 3 12V 3A 36W, so I think the efficiencies here will be higher, so a 36W USB-PD looks most viable. It gets harder if you have to boost 12V to 20V for Profiles 4 and 5.
Exactly which products when, not a clue, but I see IQ2 as a gateway to more goodness.
What i expect someone has decided in Anker is if they used IQ to, say, make a car charge USB-PD, then it would to be quite a large device, and so not fit on certain vehicles and/or feel too hot to touch, so they elected to release USB-PD with IQ2.
There is clearly some clever electronics engineers in Anker, to offer reliable cost-effective consumer products.
What’s interesting is that there are apparently reference designs out there from low level hardware manufacturers.:
http://www.cypress.com/documentation/reference-designs/ccg2-60w-car-charger-reference-design
Hmm… specs look good but even in the pictures the build quality looks iffy at best.
Does that have PD?
No. Its QC and falls back to common standard at 10W.
QC and PD are in a conflict.
Hi Doug,
Please check this car charger. I believe it is exactly what you are looking for.
It is tested on MacBook and does really well even while you are using it.