Where do you get this idea that 7.4kW is enough to charge a car? Based on what? A Vauxhall with a 50kWh battery (say 8 hours to allow for slowing over the last 20%), a 64kWh Hyundai (10 hours fir a full charge), a 77kWh VW (12 hours), a 93kW Taycan (14 hours)? Believe me, when you get home at 10pm and you want to go out at 5am, you’ll be wanting an 11kW charger too. And newer cars with big batteries like the Taycan have a 22kW charger option for this very reason.
And that’s with just one BEV in a household. Many households have multiple cars. That’s when 3-phases starts to become very attractive. Or you want to charge two or more cars on Octopus Go rates.
Also bear in mind that at some point soon they’ll ban the sale of new-install gas boilers and you’ll want a lot more power for heating.
The discussion started with a comparison with fast broadband. 20 years ago, if I’d said I’d only buy houses with a 70Mbps broadband connection, I’d have had the same response. There are people who look for the future now, and people who wait for the future to arrive.
This isn’t the internet, grid restrictions on domestic properties are few and far between compared to the quality of FTTC and availability of FTTP/cable.
Pretty much every BEV owner in the U.K. only has 7.4kw available per charger and says otherwise. Most houses have an 80a or 100a main fuse which is plenty for multiple cars.
The point is that your describing a scenario that while possible on paper, just doesn’t really bear out in reality for 99.9% of the population.
How many people do a 300+ mile drive, get home at 10pm on 0%, get up at 5am for another 300 mile drive? In reality it’s a handful of people have that requirement out of 60m+.
10pm to 5am will get you nearly 52kwh back less charging losses, say 46kwh or another 140-160 miles range.
As above, how many of those also have a second and third car that also does that kind of mileage/use? The vast majority of the population just doesn’t drive very far and charging tends to happen outside of hours where other high power appliances are in use. There are chargers which are clever enough to load balance across multiple vehicles if necessary.
I used to live in a 5 car household. I’d have liked 5 plugs mainly for convenience but in reality only 1 would have needed to plug in every working day, two every other working day and the other two once a week if the cars had a genuine 200 mile range and just charged overnight.
I’m not saying that it will not be a reality for a few people but generally speaking, it just isn’t even going to be a consideration for the vast majority of the population because it just doesn’t matter.
