When are you going fully electric?
- Thread starter Ricochet J
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New corporate "fuel" card (well, electric) arrived this morning so I just tried it at the local Osprey 50Kw charger. Amazingly it worked first time. So that's free electric for 4 years
oH who is that with? Does it cover you for lots of different charge people?
It's with Allstar. It covers Mer, GeniePoint, Source London, Alfa Power, ESB Energy, Hubsta, Franklin LiFe, Osprey and Plug N Go
Caporegime
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In 6 weeks I've only used £16.06 of my £450 BP pulse credit, so that should last a good while.
Yeah I got my first invoice for that too this week. £45.18 in 4 weeks for me. So that £450 will last a good while. Surprised the credit worked TBH, given I ordered the car in March.
thanks will have to look into that. We have all star fuel cards already
Well top gear came to Barnard Castle today, guess they must have come for their eyes testing?
stupidly Freddie ran out of electric just outside Glaxo and cause Choi’s with the traffic on a Friday afternoon. They had to bring a vehicle with a an petrol generator on to charge it up so they could drive to to a recharge station.
stupidly Freddie ran out of electric just outside Glaxo and cause Choi’s with the traffic on a Friday afternoon. They had to bring a vehicle with a an petrol generator on to charge it up so they could drive to to a recharge station.
Soldato
Photos to the left on that reel look.... SuspectWell top gear came to Barnard Castle today, guess they must have come for their eyes testing?
stupidly Freddie ran out of electric just outside Glaxo and cause Choi’s with the traffic on a Friday afternoon. They had to bring a vehicle with a an petrol generator on to charge it up so they could drive to to a recharge station.
Soldato
They'd be pretty specific gripes by those people. I suspect the overwhelming majority of EV owners are quite content.
The ‘OMG EV charging sucks’ click bait videos attract more views, so you will always see more of those. Who wants to watch a video of everything working fine !!. Often people go out of their way to make it appear worse than it is. Like doing a 400 mile road trip and starting with 30% charge
The majority of EV owners charge with no problems.
I don’t think even an EV owners can say that there aren’t issues, particularly when it comes to customer support and dealing with chargers that don’t work. A lot of networks don’t have phone support outside of 8-8.
This video from a well known EV owner and enthusiast is probably timely given the discussion:
The TLDW is lots of personal experience of why some bits of the network are poor and that he only avoids them due to experience and owning a Tesla helps with that.
He also cited an example where he was at a charger and the networks server crashed and every charger they had in the whole country stopped working for a number of hours because the charge session couldn’t be authenticated. What made it worse is that the charger was actually free to use so the only thing stopping it working was a data collection exercise. That is an utterly horrible implementation and completely avoidable.
There’s also the Ionity £60+ hold on your card to authorise a charging session, remember when Asda got into a spot of trouble for doing the same thing at pay at pump?
This video from a well known EV owner and enthusiast is probably timely given the discussion:
The TLDW is lots of personal experience of why some bits of the network are poor and that he only avoids them due to experience and owning a Tesla helps with that.
He also cited an example where he was at a charger and the networks server crashed and every charger they had in the whole country stopped working for a number of hours because the charge session couldn’t be authenticated. What made it worse is that the charger was actually free to use so the only thing stopping it working was a data collection exercise. That is an utterly horrible implementation and completely avoidable.
There’s also the Ionity £60+ hold on your card to authorise a charging session, remember when Asda got into a spot of trouble for doing the same thing at pay at pump?
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Soldato
If you can charge at home they're not hard to own at all, I understand not everyone can charge at home and this is where the mileage may vary (pun intended) on whether they are suitable for a particular person.
As for public charging I very rarely need to use it so don’t have much experience but I think the usual public opinion is InstaVolt > * for non Tesla folk
As for public charging I very rarely need to use it so don’t have much experience but I think the usual public opinion is InstaVolt > * for non Tesla folk
The above isn’t really talking about owning an EV without home charging. It just cites instances where people have had to use the public network for those odd long journeys.
The video highlights that he only avoids issues because he has significant experience using the public network which is fine if you are an enthusiast. One of the people who turned up at the charger which down down due to a server failure was using the public network for the very first time. Do you think they’ll be in a hurry to use it again or just take an ICE car?
The video highlights that he only avoids issues because he has significant experience using the public network which is fine if you are an enthusiast. One of the people who turned up at the charger which down down due to a server failure was using the public network for the very first time. Do you think they’ll be in a hurry to use it again or just take an ICE car?
I'm subbed to EVM and caught that the other day.
Sure, there are issues which happen from time to time, which inconvenience people needing to use them. Services reliant on a wider infrastructure fail all over the world, on a daily basis, across many sectors - banking, media providers, telecoms etc...
Public EV charging is still in the early phase of development and it's improving every day. The GridServe charging forecourts are evidence that it's improving and they aren't the only ones doing it.
Soldato
I guess the answer to the question depends on how stubborn you are, in either direction. The very first public charger I went to (in a loaned EV) wasn't working, and I spent 10 mins on the phone to find out that it had already been reported as faulty earlier that day, since I had no home charger I had no choice to go to another unit which was about 5 minutes drive away, but did actually work first time. Didn't stop me buying an EV after loaning another couple, and to this day it is the only issue I have had with a public charger not working.
There are issues, just like there are still with petrol stations (see my post above), but these places have more redundancy and proper regulation, mass BEV adoption will force these changes to be made, and they will get more attention as it affects more people. Sadly that is what has to happen though, issues don't get pre-emptively fixed, they have to become an actual problem for something to move the situation forward.
Since I skimmed the video - aren't there mechanisms/apps to log regularly faulty chargers so others know the risks/likely availibility in advance - qed.
I guess most ev users are app friendly, for the payment mechansims, so logging problems seems easy,
could be a tautology that most app users already know which are broken, so they never try using them and the vendors give low priority to fixing them, too.
I guess most ev users are app friendly, for the payment mechansims, so logging problems seems easy,
could be a tautology that most app users already know which are broken, so they never try using them and the vendors give low priority to fixing them, too.
I don’t agree EV charging is in the early stages of development. There is a large range of good quality and reliable hardware available to providers. Most of the issues come from how they are implemented.
E.g. lack of customer support outside of business hours and that support taking too long to answer the phone.
Having to use a plethora of apps to start chargers.
Not fixing chargers which do fail quickly.
Poor uptime on some chargers.
Not having any redundancy for likely issues.
Single charger locations.
Pre authorising excessive amounts of money to start a charger.
This without doubt comes across as negative but there is no good reason to gloss over these issues like they don’t exist. They’ll never get fixed if nobody is talking about the elephant in the room and at the end of the day I want them to be fixed and I want to have a good experience every time someone goes to use them.
For the most part it’s generally fine but ‘for the most part it’s generally fine’ isn’t good enough for mass market adoption.
E.g. lack of customer support outside of business hours and that support taking too long to answer the phone.
Having to use a plethora of apps to start chargers.
Not fixing chargers which do fail quickly.
Poor uptime on some chargers.
Not having any redundancy for likely issues.
Single charger locations.
Pre authorising excessive amounts of money to start a charger.
This without doubt comes across as negative but there is no good reason to gloss over these issues like they don’t exist. They’ll never get fixed if nobody is talking about the elephant in the room and at the end of the day I want them to be fixed and I want to have a good experience every time someone goes to use them.
For the most part it’s generally fine but ‘for the most part it’s generally fine’ isn’t good enough for mass market adoption.
Soldato
Zap map is more than sufficient for getting a warning the charger might not be working, a quirk to get it started etc. There will be the case where you are the first one to see a failure but that should be a rare event.