When are you going fully electric?

WJA96 said:
Hotel, ground floor room, granny charger out the window.

Sorted.

My insurance also gets me free recovery if I run out of charge. But I’ve never had to use it.

Try that with an ICE car when the tanker drivers go on strike or someone hacks your pipeline. Or they’ve just shut the petrol station and you literally have no fuel left.

With the new V2L cars you can charge one car from another car. It’s just like siphoning petrol out of someone else’s tank. Without the bad taste in your mouth.

And it’s not like people don’t run out of fuel all the time with those SO easy to refuel ICE cars...
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So i do a 400mile trip in a day, and i need to get a hotel cause a charge doesn't work?

There's no need to revert to commenting about ICE when there's something bad said about current EV situation.
 
WJA96 said:
Yes, all the charge point providers show their charge points as 'in-use' or out of commission if that's the case. The issue in Buxton wasn't that the charger wasn't working. It was. BP Pulse (formerly BP Chargemaster, formerly Polar) have recently rejigged their machines to allow easy payment with a contactless debit or credit card. Which is great. Part of that has now resulted in some machines accepting the membership card on the chip and pin reader and some do it on a separate RFID reader in the centre of the charger. The one in Buxton would have happily given me 50kW as a non-member but neither scanner would accept my membership card (the one I pay £8 per month for and gets me 15p/kW charging). On the way to Chesterfield I phoned BP Pulse Customer Service who (un)helpfully said they were aware that there was a programming issue on that charger and it wasn't reading anyone's membership cards but they would fix it. But because of COVID (after 15 months is anyone really still not able to cope because of COVID restrictions?) they didn't know when. Until then I could pay with my debit card and they would refund me the difference.

I updated Zap-Map with that information and went to the BP Pulse charger in Chesterfield where I charged successfully.

And yes, ABRP and Zap Map (among others) show the activity status and functionality of chargers. What you don't get is the real-time updates to the sat nav that Tesla have. You know before you arrive there will be an available charger and generally, in my experience, they worked. I can't say too much but one of the better known 3rd party navigation apps has an EV specific alpha version in testing that shows when a user is charging and how long they intend to stay at that charger, plus whether or not they found a charger working. It works the same way you would report heavy traffic, an accident or a pothole in real-time and all other users are then updated. This information can be used to route a user to a working charge point of an appropriate brand. So it's quite like Tesla. Obviously it needs lots of users to work properly and like everything else in BEVs, it's getting better every day.
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Perfect description of charger anxiety :):cry:
 
Ron-ski said:
It's not in my head, a couple of years we drove to Marseille, stopped at Dijon overnight, which 413 miles, which is halfway, so another 400 the next day. When we go on holiday we regularly drive 100s of miles, think Cornwall, Lake District, Wakes, Scotland, all a long way from where we live near Dover.

Try doing your 500 miles in one day, it's easy when spread over a week. What car do you have? What I can afford simply wouldn't have that sort of range.
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Hyundai Kona 64kW. It averages 4-5 miles per kW winter to summer. So 256-320 theoretical miles per charge but realistically I always knock 40-60 miles off because I try very hard not to go below 20%. And it very rarely makes sense to sit at a charger for 30 minutes waiting for the 80-100% so it’s drive 200 miles, do something for an hour, drive another 200 miles and do something for an hour. And yes, most of my runs are done in one day. I go to a client’s site, do my work, then go to the next site. Sometimes I can charge at the clients site, sometimes not. I’ve stated before how I used to do ‘hero’ drives of 400-600 miles without a break and looking back I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself or anyone else. 200 miles is 3-4 hours driving in the UK and that’s plenty for me these days. Health & Safety want mandatory 2hr drive stints with rest stops but I’m resisting that at the moment.

Used EVs are silly expensive at the moment because they’re cheap to run and the retro-converters are buying up all the old Nissan Leafs to turn Morris Minors into BEVs. But as more and more drivers move to BEV the market will free up and they’ll get cheaper.

Even new ones are getting cheaper all the time. Drive the Deal have 110kW (150PS) 58kWh battery VW iD3 for £25890 on the road. They have the 107kW/45kWh battery one for quite a bit less but the 58kWh is the minimum you’d need for your described usage. And it charges MUCH faster than my Kona.

I’m not saying fuelling isn’t different. It is. It’s just not something you should be worrying about.
 
How is it BS. Your posts are so predictable. I am a EV noob, i drove a EV 400miles on a day trip where im 10mins at my destination before turning around, i need to top it up, at 20miles range i plan to stop at the 150kw didcot charger.

I get there and couldn't get it working. Fortunately the solution was easy and it wasnt the charger but the car. what if it was the charger had broke, the nearest EV charger may have been too far. How would i have charged it? YOur solution was BS, I should get a hotel and granny charge it?!

I did still had to sit and wait there 30mins watching all the ICE cars come and go as i added 90miles of range.
 
Simon said:
So i do a 400mile trip in a day, and i need to get a hotel cause a charge doesn't work?

There's no need to revert to commenting about ICE when there's something bad said about current EV situation.
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Why? Because the chances of multiple chargers being offline is about the same as someone hacking a pipeline company. It happens, but not very often. We could theoretically have a long-term electrical grid failure as well. And then I’d be equally screwed.
 
WJA96 said:
It’s not. It’s life with a BEV that has no anxiety in it because I have planned what I’m going to do. If you like driving around terrified of not not knowing where your next charge is coming from, be my guest. I don’t do that. And it gives me several hours a week to post on here.
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Dont confuse terrified with having a thought about your journey. Surely having to plan is something as a ICE driver you dont even worry about as you know there will be a fuel station somewhere without having to rely on apps . Ironically not having to plan also saves time.
 
WJA96 said:
Why? Because the chances of multiple chargers being offline is about the same as someone hacking a pipeline company. It happens, but not very often. We could theoretically have a long-term electrical grid failure as well. And then I’d be equally screwed.
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Rubbish
 
Simon said:
How is it BS. Your posts are so predictable. I am a EV noob, i drove a EV 400miles on a day trip where im 10mins at my destination before turning around, i need to top it up, at 20miles range i plan to stop at the 150kw didcot charger.

I get there and couldn't get it working. Fortunately the solution was easy and it wasnt the charger but the car. what if it was the charger had broke, the nearest EV charger may have been too far. How would i have charged it? YOur solution was BS, I should get a hotel and granny charge it?!

I did still had to sit and wait there 30mins watching all the ICE cars come and go as i added 90miles of range.
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Don’t tar all BEV users with your simplicity Simon. And yes, if you needed a charge, that would get you a charge. Or you could just do what you do when of petrol/diesel - call the AA and they’ll get you some charge. And I’m sure you know perfectly well the chances of multiple chargers in a 20 mile radius around Didcot all being offline is zero. Just BP Pulse has 26 chargers (5 of them 150kW rapids) within 10 driving miles of Didcot and I genuinely couldn’t count the number if I ticked ‘show all’ on Zap Map.
 
Jonnycoupe said:
Amusingly after this post and did you on availability I went to a Bp pulse yesterday on way out of Leicester, a Kona and 308 were parked up, charging and waiting. :o
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Just to add the Genie point i then drove passed at a Shell garage had a Uber Leaf charging and another Leaf parked up next to it waiting.

Then as a final 'experience' i tried a Morrison's Geniepoint which was just crap - slow connection and dropped out.

I didn't need EV energy but could appreciate the concept of charger anxiety to simple mortal muggles.
 
WJA96 said:
Don’t tar all BEV users with your simplicity Simon. And yes, if you needed a charge, that would get you a charge. Or you could just do what you do when of petrol/diesel - call the AA and they’ll get you some charge. And I’m sure you know perfectly well the chances of multiple chargers in a 20 mile radius around Didcot all being offline is zero. Just BP Pulse has 26 chargers (5 of them 150kW rapids) within 10 driving miles of Didcot and I genuinely couldn’t count the number if I ticked ‘show all’ on Zap Map.
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don’t patronise me.
Maybe if you planned a bit more rather than assuming everything would be ok you wouldn’t have put your Tesla on its roof?

wouldn’t know about running out of fuel. Never done it. My point was obviously lost and again you revert to ICE comparisons and discrediting people’s experiences

can we just remind everyone that you think getting a hotel to granny charge a EV is an actual solution
 
Ron-ski said:
It's not in my head, a couple of years we drove to Marseille, stopped at Dijon overnight, which 413 miles, which is halfway, so another 400 the next day. When we go on holiday we regularly drive 100s of miles, think Cornwall, Lake District, Wakes, Scotland, all a long way from where we live near Dover.

Try doing your 500 miles in one day, it's easy when spread over a week. What car do you have? What I can afford simply wouldn't have that sort of range.
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630 miles in a day without thinking about it, I wasn't hanging around on the Autobahn either.

That's with an extra charge than I should have needed as my FIL was being a pain so left with 42% charge rather than the 100% I would normally have left with.

Model 3 LR. Appreciate it's an expensive car but shows what can be easily achieved today and should be mass market in the not too distant future.

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Nice, but it's the purchase/monthly costs that will be the killer for a lot of people. Yes I'd love an electric car, but just couldn't justify the cost, maybe when I retire in around 7 to 14 years time I might but be able to. Obviously they are cheaper second hand, but being in the motor trade I do wonder how well they're going to age.
 
I’d worry about some of the cars being launched now with small batteries and slow charging not ageing well from a technology and capability perspective but not from a reliability perspective.

The cars that have similar capabilities of a Tesla I wouldn’t be worried about at all. They already meet the needs of most people.

I don’t really see charing speeds going past 350kw peek, there just isn’t a need for cars. Also the faster you stuff the electrons in, the more difficult and expensive it is on the grid side.

It’s those cars which are limited to 50kw-100kw which will not age well from the tech standpoint.

I also wouldn’t expect them to stay expensive. Manufacturers are holding prices because they can despite costs of batteries dropping dramatically. Supply generally isn’t meeting demand on most desirable models. If cost is an issue as it will be for most, just wait for it to mature and there is proper competition.
 
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