We also require arc-fault breakers in the electrical code for new construction despite even their first-order effects being negative. We're drowning in over-regulation and the most prominent people pretending to care aren't going after the real problems.
Arc-fault protections are required primarily due to lobbying by receptacle and panel manufactures, not because they provide a real benefit. The number of people injured due to arc faults is vanishingly low, and a better solution to the majority of applications is to replace the NEMA 5-15 receptacle with almost literally any other (or at least improve upon the design). A more fitting comparison might be ground-fault circuit protections, which do very much have real benefits in all required situations without any drawbacks, while being very cheap to implement (effectively, a current clamp driving a relay).
On the other hand, feeding 7.2kV down a wire handled by very normal people in very normal (read: adverse; wet, humid, non-careful) conditions without any passive protections, relying on the portable (car) end to perform all of the shock safety is laughable at best. A bug in the car’s charging circuit (hardware, firmware, or software) and whoops, the chassis has 7200V to ground when the cable gets plugged in during a rainstorm.
Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
The car can't have the ground-fault circuit; it must be in the stationary part.
The article does point out they believe non-galvanically-isolated can be as safe in practical usage; similar to half of Japan outlets are all protected by GFCI and don't use a ground, yet have a similar safety record. The authors built a system using the motor as an inductor and the inverter as a step-down buck regulator to charge the batteries, back in the 90s; they know what they're talking about.
> Engineering safety regulations and guidelines are written in blood. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is either ignorant of the dangers involved, or narcissistic to the point of believing they are immune to danger.
Not sure how you square this with your opening paragraph.
Construction with decades old regulations and fast paced technology is a pretty different environment from electric vehicle development where regulators are (usually) actively trying to make things easier.
