Electric cars and Blackouts

The comments make for entertaining reading too!

 

There's one near me, £5 a bucket.

Already got me coit....

 

I'll get my clubs... runnnn!!!!!

 

The quandary I'll have is likely period of the next lease. 2, 3 or 4 years. I've generally plumped for 3 years. But I can see merits of 4 (from a financial perspective... not that its the main driver, but I am northern!) and also 2, if the infrastructure is more robust in 2 and a half years time I'd ideally rather switch then and do my bit earlier.

In the short mid term (hopefully) there is also covid, and one of the positive things for the couple of UK breaks we've taken has been the ability to get around a lot and find isolated places, while also minimising stops to refuel. Shouldn't need to be a consideration for many people, but sadly it is for us at present. It could be mitigated if a cottage let had a recharging set up, though both places we've been so far didn't, and it's not been too evident on others we've looked at, but you'd hope that changes too over time. Though I suspect they may want to recharge depending on cost and usage.

Thanks for the input. There are certainly more points than a year ago. I just nipped to the local medical centre for bloods and noted there were 3 or 4 EV charging points in there. Though they have also signed up to europarks since my last visit (on foot).

I'll keep watching how things evolve in the next few months and probably make a decision in October/November.

 

I can only speak for myself DWLC, but I see it getting better on a daily basis in terms of the infrastructure. There are so many of them now it doesn't really feel like an issue with the existence of a charger when you want one, but more the worry about its reliability as some networks are much better than others. I haven't actually needed to use the public network much, which most people will find to be the case if they can charge at home, but when I do, I tend to stick with the networks that I know to be the best ones for reliability (Instavolt, Osprey) and which are also the ones that accept contactless payment rather than fannying around with crappy apps, and although we are still at the point where you feel the need to plan ahead and know where you will be charging (and have option b and c ready just in case), in reality, I haven't found an issue so far, although my driving has admittedly been well down on normal because of covid. I have done trips recently up to the Lakes and had mo problem there, and will be taking it to Cornwall soon. I thought that might be more of a problem but I have researched where I'll charge and it appears to be fine.

I have just read an interview with the CEO of Instavolt who have a target of adding 1000 chargers a year to their network each year to 2025. They have deals with McDonalds, KFC and Costa Coffee to put chargers into all their car parks and are well underway with that rollout. I see their tweets about the next one to go live on an almost daily basis (Wandsworth McD's and Southampton today). In addition, they have several rapid hubs near motorways such as at Banbury and are expanding on these.

On the motorways at the services, the previously god awful Electric Highway network run by Ecotricity has now been bought out by GridServe. They will have replaced every charger on the network by October so we can start to rely on the chargers working even if there are still not enough of them. But then they plan to ramp up the numbers of chargers at each site to 6 - 12 per location and will have done several sites this year starting with Reading, Thurrock, Exeter and Cornwall services according a tweet from today.

These are good examples but there are others. Morrisons rolling out chargers to another 100 of its sites in the next year. Another one I saw today. The speed of the rollout is now really noticeable.

I can see that this is perhaps 'Jam tomorrow' and you may prefer to wait until it's all come to pass. But it's already orders of magnitude better than it was even 2 years ago.

In terms of range, well I don't think about it. My cars range is over 200 miles. That's further than my bladder's range. The cars with the biggest batteries are now topping out at around 300 miles, which in real life is more like 270. I am not sure that it will go much higher and whether there is even a case for it to go higher because it just means carrying around an even bigger battery weight that most people don't need. The bigger advances are now to be made in charging speed rather than range - if you can add 150 miles in little more than the time it takes to have a pee and grab a coffee, and if the chargers are in abundance enough to know you'll have one when you need it, who cares if you need to charge every time you stop, it's no biggie. Plug in and head for the toilet. What is coming now is the next generation of battery and charging architecture which are the 800v systems that used to be the preserve of the fantasy money Porche Taycan but which are now coming this year on Kia and Hyundai's next gen cars (Ioniq 5, Kia EV6). To me, they look seriously desirable and when that architecture becomes the norm in the next 2 years or so, and when the availability of the fastest chargers increases (most are 50kw at the moment, these can drink 200kw), then range stops being an issue. They add 60 miles every 5 minutes and charge 10 - 80% in 18 minutes on the fastest chargers.

Every one will pick their right time to switch depending on their circumstances but once switched, you wouldn't go back. I never would.

I have done circa 8k miles now and it still hasn't cost me 100 quid yet.

A good suggestion would be to download the ZapMap app and take a look on there at the chargers in any given area. That will provide you with an accurate picture of what it looks like.

 

Thanks DSL, really appreciate you going into such detail.