Cost of ultra-rapid EV charging increases by almost 50%
autocar.co.uk
autocar.co.uk
So even if this is true, it probably will only have a negligible effect on the total operating cost for an EV.
Over the year I've owned my Model Y, it's driven 11k miles (including three 1000+ mile road trips) and per TelsaMate[1] 70% of its charging has been on my home electricity service.
[1] One of the hidden gems of owning these vehicles is the amazing community of analytic software you get to play with.
And you need to be “bought a house” rich to be able to charge at home. I haven’t seen the newest developments, but any apartment block 4-5 years or older doesn’t have power in the garage for individual spaces.
EVs are a real luxury good still.
recently I've reasoned here about the impossibility to recharge EVs used as ICEs replacement, stating that such revolution it's doable only by a minority of the people, wealthy enough to have a home, a p.v. system or something else local to produce electricity and WFH so using cars not every day to been able to recharge, for others the sole option will be living in social housing depending on public transports etc the slave-life depicted years ago by the WEF i.e. https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... or already there in China in various part of the country.
Such reasoning ALWAYS have got some quick upvotes than get quickly downvoted, but ANYTIME such discussion appears, with less details, with less projection to the whole society same conclusion spot here and there.
I'm curious if it's a kind of silent propaganda to erase critics or really genuine actions by individuals who dream so much that they refuse to be told "hey, that's a dream" but being intelligent being without completely erasing the dream they spot here and there same conclusion without connecting dots to remain asleep...
More in-topic: IF we REALLY want a new deal where renewables can at least cover most domestic usages (because there is NO HOPE for industrial ones, beside nuclear and isolated cases with mountain hydro, not on scale for mere orography reasons) we need to de-urbanize: cities can't evolve, we can't cover them with enough p.v., eolic etc achieving good enough results. Surely we can start building new cities, but for where they will be built our needs will likely be different wasting a hyper-giant and nightmarish effort. So to say China have done that, and failed. The sole sustainable model I see is few on-purpose "hubs" (schooling/academia/research, industries by sectors, military, ...) and vast Rivieras for the rest, not too low in density, not too high, with a distributed economy where all eligible jobs are done from home and most others would be in a short distant range. Such also monster evolution probably need much initial works, the colonial way, witch means young slaves oppressed for the sake of others, than making them die, a new world for who remain IF that's work, IF who remain is still able to evolve etc so big IFs beside any moral consideration that for a whole society is a desperate and probably crazy and fatal move, not much different than classic nazism vision.
I hope a day, at least in a restricted cohort like HN, some SERIOUS debates will arrive on such topics instead of just partisans comment on one side and another religiously divided...
I'd 100% drive an EV if A) I could afford it (or want to spend that sort of money) B) I could charge it. Neither of those things are true.
Such issues are not there YET, because numbers of EVs around are not that much and generally who bought them have garages, perhaps p.v. or something else to recharge at least partially/sometimes them etc. But it's easy to guess on scale.
Also is easy to finds admissions and opinion on that very topic like https://www.motorious.com/articles/features-3/uk-eliminating... or https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go... and so on or essentially "hem, yup, we can't produce EVs for anyone so only few wealthy will get them, others will get just some public transport, and most who anyway get EVs probably get crap at a high price but that's is we can't do better"...
Every time I observe this I see reactions against BUT not data/reasoning/proof of the contrary. Personally I plan to buy an EV IF I found one at a decent enough price, since I have p.v. at home and WFH I can mostly recharge it, that just because I'll imaging in a very near future issues in finding diesel/gas and I'd like to have a backup. But I can't really see EVs on scale while all advertisement state the contrary.
Looking forward to our first e car, which will be delivered in august.
If apartment dwellers that park on the street had access to these slow chargers, for example, using power from street light circuits, they could handle 90% of their charging needs, using fast chargers for days where they drove an unusually long ways.
In Europe, or other 240V places, the slow charger is about twice as fast, so the situations where a fast charger is needed are even less.
Part of it is that Tesla levies a fee for leaving the car plugged in after it charges, so we can't go too far.
I live in Finland. No issue with charging next to my apartment block.
Before I lived 4 years in Netherlands. Also, zero issues. Plenty of people charging cars parked next to road side.
Even in the UK many terraced and semi detached houses don’t have parking especially in cities and dense suburban areas.
Then you have those who live in apartments.
You have a very skewed view of how most people live.
Pretty much everyone I personally know with an EV doesn’t charge at home because they can’t.
They either charge overnight using an on street charger or they charge the same way people fuel up their cars and that is going one a week to a fast charger.
will we see that divergence even then, as subtle collusion could prop prices to that which the market has already borne, namely fossil fuel prices?
I wanted to like the 3 but the seat position relative to the visor and headliner didn’t work for me as a tall person. I had to slouch to drive the car with the seat all the way down.
I see folks at charging stations for a whole lot longer than I think I would be willing to wait. Seems to me you have to be ok with sitting in your car for 90 mins of time in my observation. That would likely drive me crazy. Where I live its a tropical climate and in the summer months sitting around in a car while it charged would be unpleasant if I couldn’t run the AC (or if running the AC slowed that charging process down even further).
The newest cars combined with the best DC fast charge you can buy will fill the car up in about 10-20 minutes. The next tier down of charger and car battery is more like 30 minutes. This is from this video on the subject of EV roadtripping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOuz_laH9I
I've also never charged for 90 minutes. The Leaf doesn't take that long for a full charge with rapid charging, not sure about other cars.
If we ever go back to a commute—we will revisit the EV option.
We're stuck using 1970's technology & artisinally handcrafting each reactor. We're afraid & unwilling to try.
Oh plus we're unwilling to do common sense things like fuel-reprocessing. Projects like Integral Fast Reactor were incredibly safe, and had amazing fuel-reprocessing capabilities that also avoided most enrichment concerns. But were just politically unpalatable, because an ignorant & tense world wouldn't get that you couldn't make weapons this way & everyone was in cold-war mania.
For comparison, an average convenience store uses about 250k kWh a year. One dc fast charger at 20% utilization can consume over 600 kWh per year.
https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm...
At EPA specified 33.7kWh equivalent per gallon of gas, that'd be 21.56$/"gallon" of electricity. On average!
Yikes. We direly need to invest in scaling up environmentally friendly energy generation, in delivering it.
I don't have huge sympathy for drivers per se, but civilization needs energy, and we haven't invested enough effort into scaling out alternative energy.
That's such a roundabout way of saying "fast charging in the UK costs the same as gasoline in the US"
Depends on how much more efficient the electric car is than the gas-powered car.
$20/eGallon is huge. My cost at home to charge is $4.10/eGallon, regardless of the efficiency of the car using it.
If your energy input is electricity, this conversion has already happened at the power plant. If your energy input is gasoline, it happens in the car.
It's sort of like comparing your salary pre-tax vs. post-tax if the tax rate is 70%. There's a big difference. Most of the other energy conversions like electrical->mechanical, mechanical->electrical, electrical->battery or battery->electrical can be done at 90%+ efficiency.
I think this is intensely backwards & wrong a way to look at it.
In my view, all EV chargers should be mandated to express a $/"gallon" equivalent on them. So consumers know the real actual physical reality truth of the situation. Hiding this, making EV buyers unaware of their own efficiency, is making the market blind. The market should be aware of the truth.
Edit: your EV should also make it clear that it has 2-3 gallons of capacity. Because it's awesome & the future & we should all do it. But that doesn't change the fact that the dude in the F250 over there is paying 1/4th as much for the same energy you're getting, and that matters and should be seen.
At $0.63/kWh, assuming a car like the Mustang Mach-E - it'd cost $44.10 to "fill up" the 70 kWh battery. That gets you ~250mi of range, for ~$0.18 per mile.
For comparison to ICE cars - take a similarly-sized crossover like the Toyota RAV-4 which gets ~27 mpg. At current gas prices in my area of ~$4.50/gallon that works out to about $0.17 per mile. In the UK the petrol option is considerably more expensive: at ~$8/gallon the ICE option is closer to $0.30 per mile.
So the fast-charge EV option is either tied (by US prices) or significantly better (by UK prices) than the ICE option? It's certainly a far cry from the $21.56 equivalent measure you've got. Obviously the math changes somewhat depending on what your benchmark EV/ICE cars are, but at first glance this doesn't actually seem like a bad deal. It's certainly a far cry from the >$20 "gallon" measure.
[edit] I was inspired to do the math on what the non fast-charging option would look like based on household electricity prices in my area. At $0.13/kWh the Mustang Mach-E would run about $0.037 per mile. Wow. Even in a state with much higher electric prices (say MA, at $0.24/kWh) that'd still work out only to ~$0.07/mile.
Really hard to beat that for gas prices.
It’s going to take a lot of ~$0.10 miles (like 50k/yr?) for a $170/yr registration, $25/mth insurance 10 year old Prius to cost as much as an EV.
Granted: new vs. used car, and used EV will become cost efficient in a few more years.
I think the value of the MPGe equivalent is glaringly overwhelming, in that it provides a real, truthful, honest & physical equivalency that can grounds understanding & give us a common scale to measure with.
We should absolutely think about filling up with electricity in an equivalent way to thinking about gallons of gas. That most electric cars only have ~3 gallons is a feature of them being so efficient. But when a gallon costs as much as it does, that should also be visible and notable.
I don't want consumers having two totally decoupled notions of usage. There needs to be some way to think-laterally across electric & gas cars. Being able to understand that gas prices are way lower than electricity prices- as they are- should set off alarm bells. Justifiably. Energy is God's Honest truth. Value is imaginary, a far far downstream happenstance of infinite cofactors. The gallon-of-gas equivalent is absolutely a brilliant move, grounds us to something truthful, & is how we should think of things.
Shout out (again[1]) to the Technocracy Movement, which in 1937 proposed an Energy Distribution Card[2], to represent energy consumption embodied in the products & items & work of the world around us. Having a science-oriented, grounded frame of reference to begin to approach reality from is a win, is an opportunity to get humanity thinking straight, able to actually understand a complicated world, simply. Because it's true & honest & real.
Only when things are comparable are they real. Money hides, not enlightens the impacts & comparability.
Edit: it's been slow for me to accept, but I realize the truth might dissuade people from considering EVs, based off the $/"gallon" idea. I guess I'd say it's important to emphasize the reciprocal end as well: that their 68kW car only has 2 gallons of "gas" capacity. (That's where all the people up-talking MPGe/efficiency circle back around into being right!) Still, I think the uniform scale is incredibly important, makes real something we otherwise could never understand- it emphasizes how massively more efficient E's are. But the prices also could dissuade. But I don't want to dissuade people. Electric cars are awesome. But we need a ground-truth to compare across.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31525240
[2] https://www.technocracyinc.org/the-energy-distribution-card/
Friendly reminder that British gallons are not the same size as American ones ;)
I'm on the waitlist for the F150 EV as my first, and I'm certain the operating costs will be a fraction of the gasoline version. I'm really excited.
Looking only at work obfuscates vehicular performance. It ends up compounding a bunch of different factors. If we just told people how much energy- how many "gallons" of electricity- are going into their car, they'd understand much better.
It'd be up to them to find out how polluting their grid energy was. But it should be much more efficient than the gas car, which still has yet to do most of it's energy conversion & is about to throw 66%+ of the energy input away to heat.
As others are pointing out, this analysis is assuming that the EV and the ICE vehicle are using the same amount of input energy to travel the same distances, and that's not true at all. A median EV is 2-3x as efficient by this measure, because even a cheap motor gets you to 90+% efficiency, where even a well-tuned piston engine running in its sweet spot is going to be around 30-40% due to thermodynamic losses.
Basically: car exhaust is really hot, that's all waste energy, and EVs don't have exhaust.
Why should you a consumer think in any other terms? Why are gas users getting energy at 1/3rd the price you are?
It's wrong-headed to factor in your own efficient usage against yourself. It's idiotic in extreme. There's a physical real truth about the price of energy you are getting: spinning any other yarn to consumer is just that: fakery & deception. People need to stop proposing anti-truthfulness.
What is "energy" then? Are you trying to compare effectiveness of EVs vs. combustion engines as... building heat?
No engine exists under the laws of physics to deliver useful work with that "energy" you're getting cheaply in gasoline. That's a ridiculous point. You buy gas, just like you buy electricity, to move your car. So measure the motion, not the heat.
Do we really need to regress to 7th grade science class? Go read wikipedia if you need to[1].
> Are you trying to compare effectiveness of EVs vs. combustion engines as
I'm trying to prevent energy-efficiency from being bundled into the cost of energy. I'm trying to make the price of energy explicit & directly comparable, because it is & it should be, & is a ground truth provided by physics and science that is directly comparable.
By doing so, I'm hoping consumers realize just how remarkably efficient EVs are
> No engine exists under the laws of physics to deliver useful work with that "energy" you're getting cheaply in gasoline.
This truth does nothing to convince me that we should remain oblivious to the comparative efficiencies of our systems. Knowing how much energy we put in, and seeing how far it gets us: that is the real truth, that is how we understand our impact in the world. It also is useful for helping us assess & appraise the energy we get: knowing the price/kWh is directly comparable, tells us how comparatively & competitively well our energy delivery pipelines are doing, which is yet more important & vital information to understand.
Trying to bundle all the factors together breeds naught but stupidity & ignorance. Highly dislike. No one learns anything without shared frames of reference. Energy is the common frame physics provide. Science lets us celebrate & appreciate the gains (& let's us also understand weaknesses we ought improve on too).
You don't measure cars in "energy transfer", you measure them in work: the rated brake horsepower of an engine isn't the number of joules of chemical potential energy that it consumes, it's the amount of energy transfer it can effect by turning its shaft. If you did, the numbers would be much higher and more efficient vehicles would oddly look "less powerful". No one does that.
So why do it here? That's not a useful number, and I suspect you know that.
Comparing only output hides how efficient ev's are.
And consumers should be aware of the price of energy, in a comparable way. Not in terms of work, but directly comparably in terms of how many kWh they get per $. This is the simple, actual, material truth.
Your snark is tiring. I dont know what your agenda is (unlike you who claim I specifically am up to something?) but you are sabotaging & undermining this discussion in manipulative ways. Play it straight, & disagree, but dont connive against me so rudely, please.
You're still misunderstanding, and I don't get why you're interpreting snark in my genuine attempts to explain this. "Work" and "Energy" are terms of art, you learn them in school, they have wikipedia pages[1]. Telling you that you're conflating the two (which you are) is a point of logic, not snark. So I'll try once more:
If you have a task to do (plow a field, maybe) and you have two motive engines: an electric motor and a piston engine, and I offer you "100 kWH of energy" with the choice of getting it over a 240V AC cable or in a 3 gallon bucket of gasoline, which would you choose? I mean, the choice is obvious, you'll get three times as much plowing done with the motor.
And that's the point. And that's why comparing energy outside of context is wrong.
If we also include work in what we show consumers, consumers have minimal ability to assess & understand the comparative advantage of their vehicle. It's an implicit factor.
> which would you choose? I mean, the choice is obvious, you'll get three times as much plowing done with the motor.
And it should be clear to consumers to. But it's not, because we use different unit-scales for EV's & gas & consumers never get to understand how obviously much better EVs are. There's a lot of people who wouldn't know what to pick. They wouldn't understand the relative energy consumption of the two picks. Trying to make that clear, trying to establish a clear frame of reference is exactly why I'm arguing for using "gallons" of electricity: to make the efficiency clear & obvious to everyone, not just us two geeks.
And because we should understand what the market delivers, and learn to set expectations for the grid. If people understood what $0.63/kWh electricity was really asking, I think we'd been more likely to demand & drive green energy investment.
Your scenario feels like a clear case of why we need to do exactly what I'm saying, & find common, portable frames of reference we can use to talk about what we put into our cars. Not just what we get out. This idea has a lot of resistance, so I want to re-emphasize the other part: most EV drivers would also quickly see their vehicle has <3 "gallons" of energy in it, and it'd be much clearer just how much less energy it uses.
It's insane to me that truth is so heavily downvoted. What in the frak do you people have to object to?
Are ya'll thinking I'm anti EV? Anything but. The reciprocal measure is that your EV should also count "gallons" of gas. That your car only has 2, 3 gallons of gas should make it clear what a wonderful contribution EV drivers are making to the world. Truth & physical reality are wonderful. Don't be afraid. It feels so vicious, the bitter bitter absurd downvoting! I don't get it.
Can we please find sanity, by accepting physical reality & science in to how we think about things? I wish I had some idea why truth was so objected against, but the protests here are just so pitifully wronghearted.
In the UK such comparisons are typically done in pence per mile. EV efficiency varies, but it's typically somewhere between 3-4mi/kWh. At 57p per kWh (the current InstaVolt rate) DC fast charging is 14p-19p per mile.
At UK's current 170p/l petrol price, to pay 14p-19p per mile, you need an ICE car with 34-46mpg.
Home charging is about 20p per kWh, which is roughly 6p per mile. An ICE car with equivalent per-mile cost would need to have over 100mpg. People who are lucky to have a fixed-price tariff with off-peak rates can still get 2.5p/mile.
> That's a weird way to calculate it.
Why? Why would you ignore that you are paying 4x as much for the same energy? Why would you count your own energy-efficiency against yourself at the pump?
EV owners should be proud. They should take pride that their vehicle goes so far on 2 "gallons" of electricity. But the world should also face that gas prices are absurdly stupidly cheap, and that we are bad at electricity still, that electricity coming from the grid & through a charger is preposterously expensive. We should optimize & work on this, but right now we can't even see what a glaring absurdity it is that charging prices are so absurdly stupid high.
Having a uniform way to compare energy usage makes all the sense.
The efficiency difference is so dramatic, that it makes up for the price difference. A unit of energy for an EV may be much more expensive, but it also makes it go farther.
Utility of cars is in movement, not in being an energy sink, so it makes more sense comparing directly based on utility rather than the energy they burn.
TFA is about cost, and "cost per distance travelled" unit is the most appropriate one to answer relevant questions like "how much a 1000-mile road trip costs in an EV vs ICE".
Car engine energy efficiency needs to be compared using other units, like kWh/100km (J/m), or percentage of input energy converted to force, or something more comprehensive like well-to-wheel ratio that includes losses to production and transportation. EV owners definitely know their car's efficiency very well, because it determines car's range, and is typically prominently displayed in the car.
Someone filling up their EV and seeing their 75kWh car filled up with 2.2gallons of gas could not be a more obvious, honest, simple way of making the efficiency of their vehicle obvious, in the most direct & clear parallel way possible. Using terms & expressions & scales already well known makes it clear.
> TFA is about cost,
The article is about cost & I'm proposing we be able to compare costs. And you:
> and "cost per distance travelled" unit is the most appropriate one to answer relevant questions like "how much a 1000-mile road trip costs in an EV vs ICE".*
Are making up complete nonsense unrelated to cost that expresses only your own biases about how you want things to be displayed. And you're doing so in a way that hides & makes us unable to directly compare gas vs EV.
This insistence that consumers have completely different ways of viewing the energy inputs- kWh versus gallons- is fragging bizarre. The EPA themselves provides a factor to convert between the two, it's not fake, & it tells a very real story. And it should make everyone feel really good knowing their EVs sip energy, which would be more apparent if we could see how few a "gallons" we fill up with.
I'm pretty sure that "cost per distance travelled" unit is directly related to cost. I know you're trolling, I'm just debunking you for the benefit of others who may stumble upon this nonsense.
EV users have no reason to measure anything in an archaic USA-only unit for a dying technology. If you want to unify measurements to make them comparable, you should be converting gallons to Joules (e.g. 4GJ per tank of gas) or kWh (e.g. 1000kWh per tank of gas [this is a realistic number, BTW]). These are world-wide standard units of energy. kWh is used because appliances report their energy usage in kW, so it makes it easier for consumers to judge battery sizes and estimate energy costs when they're in kW per hour.
Insisting that USA-gas-gallon-equivalent approximation is the right unit for electricity is as trollishly anachronistic as measuring gasoline in bales of hay. How many e-bales-of-hay does your tank hold? How expensive is gasoline in dollars per bale of hay? If you fill a tank with 5 trusses of hay, does it mean ICE engines are more or less efficient than horses?
> I'm pretty sure that "cost per distance travelled" unit is directly related to cost. I know you're trolling, I'm just debunking you
It's not though, not without a host of other later factors. Knowing what the inputs themselves cost us, being able to compare what we pay for energy, is the point of this article. Not just calculating work done.
And it's especially important given the radical range of efficiency different EVs have. Everyone should have a common understanding of what they're paying for, but that's much much harder when the ranges of efficiency are so vastly different for different EVs and across different EV driving conditions.
I'm not trolling. You're being a jerkwad to me, & rude, & you can't argue a single point straight & misdirect again and again.
> EV users have no reason to measure anything in an archaic USA-only unit for a dying technology.
In most countries, we'd show "liters" of electricity. The point is to use a common frame of reference that's already known. You're once again ignoring the obvious to try to win cheap points & create disbelief, & it's still misdirection & cheap & detracts the sense that you are arguing anything earnestly.
> converting gallons to Joules (e.g. 4GJ per tank of gas) or kWh (e.g. 1000kWh per tank of gas [this is a realistic number, BTW])
This is reasonable, except three things: 1) you're measuring tanks not actual units people know, 2) your "realistic" tank of gas (at 20g) has 50% more energy than the EPA says it does, and 3) perhaps most problematic, no one frigging has any intuitive sense of what a kWh is and BOTH electric & gas drivers would be totally clueless. I generally like the idea, but it's just not practical or helpful to unify on the thing almost no one has any real grasp of.
> is the right unit for electricity is as trollishly anachronistic as measuring gasoline in bales of hay
Please, by all means, disagree, but you needent result to personalizing your insults. Anachronistic, sure, whatever, but you have repeatedly personally demegrated me by calling this trolling, and it's inciteful, rude, crass, obnoxious, unproductive, and low. Flabbergastingly rude. I am being quite serious & have elaborated again & again a simple understandable virtue that i want: understandability & comparability. You don't seem to have any interest in trying to meet the population where they are & to try to make what we already have a grasp of useful & helpful in explaining where we're going & now new things work, fine, but I dont insult you over it.
You haven't debated as single point, you've just asserted your own beliefs & mocked me. I desperately wish you would stop.