When are you going fully electric?

I can see in the future there will be multiple different charging forecourt providers. Effectively what are currently different brands of petrol stations will become different brands of charging hubs (with petrol / diesel offerings too until that's no longer needed).

Tesla's supercharger network will become less of a unique-selling-point as people come to assume the can stop at any service area to charge (if one is full just drive 10 mins to the next one). I wonder if Tesla will then sell the sites off to another charging network.

The big difference I expect is the frequency they are needed. If you charge at home you'll only need a forecourt offering if you are away from home or on a really long trip. Forecourts make most of their profit from their retail offerings rather than their fuel sales so that will become even more significant I think (especially if you're charging for 15 mins so more likely to buy something).

I'd imagine the reason to then choose a particular charging provider will be like choosing a fuel provider now (price / loyalty schemes / quality and reliability of facility / which coffee or sandwich shop brand they have partnered with!)
 
Jonnycoupe said:
InstaVolt have just partnered with Costa for ~200 drive thru locations.
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I guess you either turn petrol forecourts in to charging areas with coffee shops, or turn coffee shops into charging forecourts! Though most coffee places don't have big enough car parks I'd have thought.
 
Given our usage and hopefully given a vehicle with circa 300 mile range we should be able to avoid having to charge anywhere but home 99% of the time. Going to extend our current lease for a year and see what options come up though. We have no need of a 50k car and options sub that price range are a little dull.
 
blun said:
I guess you either turn petrol forecourts in to charging areas with coffee shops, or turn coffee shops into charging forecourts! Though most coffee places don't have big enough car parks I'd have thought.
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I’d imagine it will just be 2 chargers per location for now.

Didn’t they also get a similar deal with McDonalds?
 
Yeah they've got a deal with McDonalds as well, they've put a few in there so far not sure how many (know one Kettering Mcdonalds has them).

Good contracts to be getting though, get a foothold in those places and you're in position to ramp up as required. That and/or get Coca-Cola or McDonalds to buy the company when the time comes!
 
It's good to see. Of all the different charger providers I've used so far, InstaVolt are by far the most straightforward to use.

There's 3 Costa drive through within 5 miles of my house with room in the car park for at least 1 charging point, so I'm guessing across the country, there's at least 200 similar ones.
 
The obvious solution for motorway and service station charging infrastructure seems to be to make it eye wateringly expensive to rapid charge and to also charge by the minute as well as by the kWh. That way if you are stopping at the motorway services for a quick "splash and dash" fill up you do 15 minutes and only fuel up what you need to get you to your destination. If you are stopping at the same services for lunch you pull up at the slightly slower chargers further from the building and charge for 40 minutes while you eat your Whopper or whatever. Got longer to kill, then you head to a retail park and pay for a couple of hours parking with a slower charger to top you up while you peruse the next essential purchase you don't need in your life.

I'm sure this is the direction many of the service providers are looking in but the question for the EV owners is, what level of pricing will be acceptable at the three charge speeds I've described once mass adoption is in place?
 
Thing is they know you will need juice so they will charge a premium. I suspect at services it wont be any cheaper than filling up an ICE car if you have to stop to recharge.
 
Jonnycoupe said:
Thats not the case at the minute... more evident on the fuel side of things.
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Early days. We all know as more and more of the UK have EV cars, everything will go up. They wont keep £10 a year excise licence and will have to recover the lost money from the excessive tax on fuel somewhere. I honestly expect there will be a 100% tax on all public ev chargers in the future.
 
Greebo said:
Thing is they know you will need juice so they will charge a premium. I suspect at services it wont be any cheaper than filling up an ICE car if you have to stop to recharge.
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The obstacles to providing a charger is much less than have petroleum based products being stored and dispensed, and are for the most part very low maintenance. This means there will be plenty of competition at almost every junction, rather than just motorway services, so the price of high can be easily avoided, Instavolt and others are using this approach already, and others will follow.
 
lordrobs said:
The obvious solution for motorway and service station charging infrastructure seems to be to make it eye wateringly expensive to rapid charge and to also charge by the minute as well as by the kWh. That way if you are stopping at the motorway services for a quick "splash and dash" fill up you do 15 minutes and only fuel up what you need to get you to your destination. If you are stopping at the same services for lunch you pull up at the slightly slower chargers further from the building and charge for 40 minutes while you eat your Whopper or whatever. Got longer to kill, then you head to a retail park and pay for a couple of hours parking with a slower charger to top you up while you peruse the next essential purchase you don't need in your life.

I'm sure this is the direction many of the service providers are looking in but the question for the EV owners is, what level of pricing will be acceptable at the three charge speeds I've described once mass adoption is in place?
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There seems to be two markets. The folks who don’t use their cars a lot (up to 10K miles per year) and the people who do a fair chunk of driving. Most people will undoubtedly still charge at home. For the 15-30 minutes you’re in the supermarket a lot of people won’t want to be bothered with getting a cable out and plugging in to get 10-20 miles of free driving. Even on the worst tariff I’ve never met anyone who pays more than 19p/kW average through the day for electricity at home, including the standing charge. And if you can’t charge at home then if you just park up for the three hours most Tesco stores allow you could get a week or mores worth of use. And when these users go on holiday they’ll undoubtedly either book somewhere with a destination charger or get ripped off stupid at a motorway rapid.

For the higher mileage users the market is already differentiating. Pod-point are the cheapest non-subscription at 23p. Gridserve are currently good at 24p/kW but let’s see how long that lasts when they’re on the motorway services with Electric Highway. And then you get into the Alfa/Osprey/Instavolt prices which are in the middle ground at 35p/kW. Then you get the subscription prices where BP Pulse are currently cheapest. £8 a month subscription and free charging up to 11kW charging speed, 15p/kW for up to 150kW charging speed and 27p/kW for 150kW or faster speeds. Ionity fairly extract the Urine where they’re charging £8 -£12 per month for the subscription and then still charge up to 50p/kW depending on which manufacturer scheme you signed up with. Tesla are 23-28p/kW depending on user dwell time and location. For the speed of charge that actually feels like decent value.

It will settle down in time but at the moment it’s still very much up in the air.
 
WJA96 said:
It will settle down in time but at the moment it’s still very much up in the air.
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I imagine good old fashioned supply and demand may come into play at some point as well. Maybe even something akin to the surge pricing with Uber.

You want that last available rapid charger at the motorway services on a Friday afternoon on a bank holiday weekend? No problem but it is going to cost you!

TBH I'd actually be fine with the odd rapid convenience charge here and there costing me more than the current ICE equivalent per mile. I'd probably even be prepared (begrudgingly) to pay 25ppm or more to charge if it was a rare one off and offset by 90% of my mileage being at a fraction of that cost.

Looking way ahead if we end up shifting more towards hiring vehicles ad-hoc rather than owning them a lot of these considerations will move on to the scheme operators anyway. We need full self drive to be fully implemented before that becomes a possibility though and while I doubt I'll see that in my lifetime I'm pretty certain the next generation will.
 
I think the whole hiring of vehicles thing is a highly optimistic dream for the vast majority. If you live in central London, sure that will work for you.

If you live in a suburb or in a rural area you pretty much need a car to go anywhere, you need a car pretty much every day at the same time most other people need theirs too.

If you have kids that need car seats, the whole ride share thing is really quite inconvenient. It also massively reduces your flexibility, you can’t just walk out your house, get in your car which you are familiar with, kids in the back and go within 2 mins.

Car sharing would have to become substantially cheaper than ownership to make it worth it.

Given how cheap you can actually get a decent car for if you don’t buy new, I can’t see the model changing any time soon.

Self driving cars is a software problem not a hardware one. Once the software works it can effectively be replicated for nothing. The hardware isn’t prohibitively expensive to install anymore.
 
I think we'll see a different kind of approach from services.

Currently with petrol, you have people expecting a quick splash and dash approach and if they happen to pick your station because they're running out of fuel, you want to extract as much money as possible - so we typically see high prices on service station type fuel stops or stations on major trunk roads.

With electric though, certainly whilst charging is more than a 5 minute job and cars don't have 600 miles of range, things are different. You want to give people an incentive to choose your station as their recharge stop (in advance if possible, given plenty of people at least semi-plan their recharges on longer journeys) and to encourage them to stick around a bit, have an overpriced lunch, wander around the newsagent and buy a magazine they didn't know they needed, stock up on some sweets for the rest of the journey etc.

I think we might start to see a level of competition between services that doesn't really exist at the moment, as they try to attract people that are planning stops rather than rely on exploiting random passing trade.
 
Moto have just done a huge survey on Zap Map about what users would pay for charging and if they would pay to book a guaranteed charger slot for a guaranteed time.

So now they're thinking not just about how much you pay to charge but how much you'd pay to have a charger reserved for your use.
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
I think the whole hiring of vehicles thing is a highly optimistic dream for the vast majority. If you live in central London, sure that will work for you.
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At some point the car hire companies just won't have any ICE cars to rent to folks. Like 2036 unless you want to rent a year-old hybrid-ICE car, you'll be having electric rental cars or nothing. So the electric cars are just going to have to get better.

And if you look at where BEVs were in 2011, compared to what is available now, 2031 should be fine. Tesla are already talking about 500+ miles of range for their top 2022 models so it will be there for many more of us by 2025 and as charging moves to 800V from 400V the charging times will almost halve. Batteries are getting better all the time and we really shouldn't be projecting 2021 on the future because there is some form of (r)evolution in technology almost weekly at the moment.
 
WJA96 said:
At some point the car hire companies just won't have any ICE cars to rent to folks. Like 2036 unless you want to rent a year-old hybrid-ICE car, you'll be having electric rental cars or nothing. So the electric cars are just going to have to get better.

And if you look at where BEVs were in 2011, compared to what is available now, 2031 should be fine. Tesla are already talking about 500+ miles of range for their top 2022 models so it will be there for many more of us by 2025 and as charging moves to 800V from 400V the charging times will almost halve. Batteries are getting better all the time and we really shouldn't be projecting 2021 on the future because there is some form of (r)evolution in technology almost weekly at the moment.
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He think he was more referring to the view that most people wont own their own car in the future and there will just be strategic car parks full of auto electric cars and you just hire a car for a journey you are making rather than having all the costs of car ownership. Book one on your app and it drives to where you are to pick you up. Certainly for a lot of people who dont do a lot of miles each year (the majority of car owners tbh), I can see it working esp in built up areas.

I do honestly see this becoming a reality in the next 20 years. People having driving licences and owning their own cars will become the minority.
 
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