16 months living with an EV - my honest experience

billysielu said:
It is progress, but it's still garbage compared to the 2 mins it takes to fill up with petrol. You'd need 10x more chargers than petrol pumps.
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The difference is though that people can't fill up with petrol at home, whereas EV's can 'fill up' if your circumstances allow.

If I wanted to, I could always set off on a journey with 100% charge - ICE cars you would need to drive to a petrol station to do that.

I'm basically saying there will be less cars needing to go to petrol stations anyway, and by the time the EV's are more mainstream, the capacity will be there to cope - even if people are taking 20 mins to charge instead of 2.
 
If every petrol station had a few ultra-rapid chargers that would be more than enough. If you think about it, at the moment everyone has to visit a petrol station for fuel. In the future, only those that can't charge at home / at work / at the train station / whilst shopping etc.. would need what are currently petrol stations. (Or maybe people who are away from home so can't use their 'normal' charging point).

You'd be looking at maybe 20-40% of the current petrol station demand. Petrol stations these days don't make much/any money from the fuel they sell, they make their money from all the other stuff. So if you're charging for 10-15 mins, you'll probably buy something which means they'll still have a revenue stream.

I imagine we'll see petrol stations becoming petrol and recharging stations, then they will gradually reduce the number of petrol pumps and increase the charge points as the demand changes over the coming decades.

Real world example: I've used public charging <10 times in 16 months, and that's been on long trips. I didn't need to visit a charge point when away from home as just used a 3-pin plug where I was staying.
 
Always reminds me the Henry Ford quote, if I asked people what they wanted they would say 'faster horses' this is the same thing people are saying 'faster chargers' It's going to take a whole shift in mentality like blun says you don't explicity charge you car, you just always have it at full every day. you never need to actually go to a 'petrol' station any more.

The other thing is that the comments about ohhh it takes 23 minutes to get to 80% etc. Reminds me of almost everything technologically wise -- processor speeds, memory capacity, battery power, internet speeds. Used to be that you had to wait for web pages to render. Remember loading ahem, images, back in the day, line by line now its instant, most people have more internet speed than they can use. It really wont be long before electric car 'charging' and waiting 30 mins at a stop is going to seem anachronistic. And filling up with dinosaur juice is going to seem positively strange and actually really really weird.
 
VincentHanna said:
I'm basically saying there will be less cars needing to go to petrol stations anyway, and by the time the EV's are more mainstream, the capacity will be there to cope - even if people are taking 20 mins to charge instead of 2.
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Fair point. 40% of homes are terraced/flats, so you'd 'only' need 4x more chargers than petrol pumps.
 
whitecrook said:
Used to be that you had to wait for web pages to render. Remember loading ahem, images, back in the day, line by line now its instant,
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Like waiting 5 minutes for that high res topless/naked picture to load and then it stops half way and you had to press refresh/reload dam dial up :D:p
 
There's a lot of behaviours to account for that will impact how many chargers are ultimately necessary.

Plenty of people still faff about putting £10 a time in when refuelling because that lasts them a week until their next supermarket visit - would these people perhaps start to properly fill up if they could be 'refuelling' whilst actually shopping, not after shopping? Would they maybe then only need to actually charge it fortnightly or monthly? That's just one example to illustrate the point that there is more to it than 'it takes 10 times longer so you need 10 times more chargers'. What about workplaces too? Maybe a lot of the people who can't park in a way suitable to charge at home COULD charge at a work car park during the day?

A lot of the alternatives won't net the cost benefits of home charging as it stands but you can bet that won't stay the case long term - that'll get taxed one way or another eventually.
 
Jonnycoupe said:
Its like KFC, feels good and its fast... But it does cost. After 250miles driving I would be okay with a 20min stop.
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Yeah for long journeys I agree.
Don't agree for people like my mum, living in terraced houses, just using the car for getting around town. A 20 min charge is longer than most journeys.

Kenai said:
get taxed one way or another eventually.
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Already are via vat on higher prices.
 
billysielu said:
Yeah for long journeys I agree.
Don't agree for people like my mum, living in terraced houses, just using the car for getting around town. A 20 min charge is longer than most journeys.
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As a result though, she is presumably not going to need to charge very frequently and doing so whilst shopping etc. could end up being a workable solution?

For most people the biggest hurdle is the mentality shift that routinely 'charging your car' means going to a specific charging station specifically for the sole purpose of recharging, just because that's how petrol has to work now.
 
Kenai said:
As a result though, she is presumably not going to need to charge very frequently and doing so whilst shopping etc. could end up being a workable solution?
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She walks to local shops, so supermarket charging won't do anything for her.
She'll also be retiring soon so workplace charging won't help either.
Ultimately I think she'll end up using up the stock of used petrol cars, which is arguably green-ish.
 
billysielu said:
She walks to local shops, so supermarket charging won't do anything for her.
She'll also be retiring soon so workplace charging won't help either.
Ultimately I think she'll end up using up the stock of used petrol cars, which is arguably green-ish.
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In which case, yes, if she was to switch to EV she probably would have to go about a dedicated charging routine - I don't think she'd be competing with as many other people for dedicated high speed charger space as you fear though.

Even if the things suggested above don't work for her, they will work for a lot of other people reducing overall demand for 'charging station' style high speed chargers.
 
True. So for the sake of painting a picture of what we need....
To bring the number of chargers required from 4x the current number of petrol pumps (rough number I estimated earlier) to 1x the number of petrol pumps (what we can realistically build), 75% of people living in terrace/flats will need to destination charge. No idea how many people work at places where charging makes sense, but it basically needs to be all workplaces which can, plus all supermarkets. Pretty much every single parking space. I don't see that happening tbh because of cost, and the time it would take to do it all, and disruption/planning issues.
 
It wouldn't need to be anywhere near 'pretty much every single parking space' because you're not trying to accommodate 100% of motorists 100% of the time, just those who can't charge at home and only when they need to recharge. It would still be a lot of infrastructure, yes, but I think you're overegging it to try and reinforce your point.

People charging at work wouldn't necessarily all need to be plugged in all day every day for example - a day of charging at work might last most people 1 or 2 weeks (given average mileage is less than 150 miles per week)
 
It definitely appears charging is the biggest worry when talking about EVs! Given it is early days I think we'll see all kinds of solutions appearing to the "can't charge at home" challenge. Definitely a change in mindset needs to develop from "I got to a specific place to refuel my car when it's running low" to more of a "charge my car whenever it's convenient whilst it's parked somewhere I was going to be anyway".

As I mentioned earlier, having a driveway makes this a non-issue as charging overnight at home every few nights is easy. If we had a second EV this would still be fine as don't need to charge every night. If I'd not been able to charge at home I'd probably have waited a couple of years to see how the public charging options continue to develop

I've noticed some cities in China have gone all-in on the public charging with supermarkets and shopping malls having 100's of chargers available for customers to use. (I believe they have a large proportion of people without access to home charging)

Out of interest I might try going for a couple of weeks without using my home charger just to see what the experience is like now.
 
It's a great opportunity for Coffee shops, shopping villages and foot outlets. Offer 'free' charging and people will come - The Amazon website can't offer that perk :p
Build the cost of charging into the service / product.
 
billysielu said:
She walks to local shops, so supermarket charging won't do anything for her.
She'll also be retiring soon so workplace charging won't help either.
Ultimately I think she'll end up using up the stock of used petrol cars, which is arguably green-ish.
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Where does she go in her car once she retires? Even living in a terrace she can still charge in the street on the occasions she can park outside her house (assuming it is legal) which may work well for people who make short journeys so only need to charge once a week. We have a street what’s app group and people are always asking for cars to be moved so they can have deliveries/skips/builders it is only a matter of time before someone asks to swap spaces so they can charge an ev!
 
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