UK: Fast charging EVs more expensive than filling petrol
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As others have pointed out there are real infrastructure problems, and not really difficult in cases like the above to sort technically, but nobody seems to be doing it practically, it's clearly in the power of the government and suppliers to do en masse if the intent is to encourage wide scale adoption.
I dont think every outlet in Europe can do the 20a to 30a at 240v that you'd expect for a car charger - just like most outlets here are rated for 15a at 120, most outlets in the UK are rated for 13a at 240 (and thats on a ring circuit fused for 40a, which may be shared with many other outlets) - its a difference of about 1320w (in Germany 10a outlets are common, which means even less, a mere 600w difference) in actual power delivery. Whereas a dedicated home charging ciruit in states will be 4800-7200w.
while yes, there is a difference, you dont know how many other devices that power line will pass, and it wont do in common space living situations where often exterior outlets are.. A) Shared and B) on the buildings meter, rather than the individuals.
Point taken, and conceded in my original comment - the larger issues are, to suddenly add a bunch of high amperage loads at everyones parking space requires additional infrastructure - infrastructure we probably dont already have.
I don't know about private parking, e.g. a car park reserved for residents of adjacent apartments. My building has two chargers, but it's not something I look out for elsewhere.
If you really want to it is possible to wire 220/240 to an appropriate outlet in the US and have a 240v kettle, but some will be industrial - https://www.webstaurantstore.com/13957/commercial-coffee-mak...
My friend can drive to another friend's house in the British countryside and plug an almost-empty Tesla into the ordinary socket in the garage. After a weekend hiking etc, with little use of the car, it is full or close enough.
That's something he can rely on in the UK/Ireland (13A@240V=3120W), something he couldn't rely on in North America (15A@120V=1800W), and the rest of Europe is somewhere in-between.
(Does a typical German house have higher-rated sockets in the garage?)
At least where I'm from, it's not super unusual to have a 400V socket with 16A or higher in private garages (either for tools or people preparing for an EV at some point), but you can't count on it.
I haven't heard much hullabaloo made about kerbside EV charging or such for apartment complexes or terraced housing etc in the UK.
Is this something happening quietly, or not being invested in much like rural broadband wasnt?
I do see a fair amount of quiet upgrading going on, at least in my area (in the US, not in UK, so I cannot speak to that). Having an EV charger is becoming a box you want to have checked on your rental property description, whether apartment or house. That doesn't mean we have a great solution in mind for curbside parking, mind you, but in most of the US that's a much less critical issue than apartment complexes which do have private parking lots.
Scroll around https://www.zap-map.com/live/
Density closer to home looks about the same as what I've normally seen, scattered 2-4 bays at a few businesses, some business parks with 8 bays.
Surprised at the coverage for Coventry tbh
I love my EV, and I have zero regrets the purchase. But I don't think it'd be practical for me to buy it if I was renting, and that sucks.
Right, so not fit for the massive constituency with no access to home charging then (in addition to their many other problems as a realistic transport option for many).
As much as I like the idea of electric cars, the complacency of those championing them in the light of the lack of suitability for a huge part of the population is really frustrating.
Reread the quote I replied to, and what I actually said, please.
The best part? It costs less than a typical used ICE car, so it's very budget friendly. And it has virtually no maintenance.
I'm not against public transit but it's a significant investment and towns like mine have spent the past 40 years failing to make it happen and unlike an e-bike an electric motorcycle can fully utilize all existing roadways.
I think it's time to start re-thinking transportation.
* Currently the predominant category of motorcycle riders are young males who ride like idiots (i.e. they are their own biggest cause of their own accidents)
* People driving 2 ton vehicles with their heads completely up their posteriors while driving. Fortunately those people are generally easy to spot and deal with.
If anything, more motorcycle riding will make the roads safer because you actually have to pay attention to what you're doing while riding. You can't shave, put on your makeup, or read text messages while riding. You actually have to pay attention! Also, motorcycle-on-motorcycle crashes are extremely rare outside of the context of group rides.
My biggest concern with e-bikes is people treat them like bicycles. I see people cruising around my neighborhood going 35 MPH on an e-bike without any safety gear on outside of maybe a bicycle helmet. The motorcycle safety culture of ATGATT isn't even on the radar of the e-bikers. Not to mention they don't seem to know the strategies of lane position, how to make yourself visible to others, how to swerve and brake quickly - which are all standard fare for motorcycle riders.
My largest frustration is, we're charging into electric cars in such a way that will leave the poor behind, and create a larger wealth gap. I genuinely worry that the poor will be priced out of automobile access in the states, and before anyone says "well, they shouldnt need a car" - the realistic truth is.. they do and there is a massive amount of capex and opex that must be spent to make it not so. In America, we have structured our world around personal transportation, and while we can change that, it will take a concerted effort and lots of money to do so.
Other than the possibility of fuel price increases as time goes on (which, as a net exporter, the US has some amount of control over), how are electric vehicles making the wealth gap larger?
The poor are certainly priced out, but considering EVs currently have constraints and are expensive, what benefits would they bring outside of reducing externalities to the environment?
I'd then also mandate charging access in every apartment with two or more units and put together a government fund to help fund building it out. You also offer a rebate to homeowners (with the rebate covering up to 100% of reasonable costs the lower income they are) so they can do the needed electrical work (which might involve a whole new load center and service to the house - think 10-15k in work).
Once say, better than 90% apartment and condo dwellers have access to electric charging and there is an ongoing program in place to ensure that everyone else has access, then its pretty safe to mandate a ban ICE vehicles.
Meanwhile the used car market will be full of ICE vehicles forever.
Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything.
Several European cities have low- or zero-pollution zones, and these are likely to increase once the disruption to normal people is limited. Currently, it's generally old diesel trucks and buses that are banned or restricted.
The grid already exists everywhere. Getting it out to the parking spots is mostly a tedious exercise in construction, not even much of an engineering problem. Yes let's encourage this construction. Incentivize it, even.
If people would aim more for that kind of infrastructure - really slow but "too cheap to meter" - it would be more widespread. No need for the expensive upgrades to the electrical system, no need for cabinets with cooling systems, no internet, no computers at all.
You could put all the EV slots in one part of an apartment or shopping center parking lot, like now. It'd be nice if there was a proportional circuit breaker, so that if every EV was charging they'd get half charge instead of tripping the breaker.
Not so for actual electric cars (you can plug one into a block charger but you won't get that many miles per hour) - especially on high-speed chargers that are 220 or 440 and many amps.
Remember that you don't necessarily need to charge AT HOME. If you drive yourself to work and sit there for 8 hours, your employer should be encouraged and subsidized to set up 15 amp charging for some of their employees.
This make sense but I think it's a deal breaker for many. It would be for me, anyway.
I don't want to depend on my employer to keep my car running. Just the idea is depressing; it'd feel like an admission that I'm "living to work".
Not to mention the fact that it would limit my options for switching jobs.
There's another massive constituency that has access to home charging, but can't afford the EV itself.
E.g. I can afford to pay the mortgage on my home, but not a $50,000 EV car, because I don't want to pad the pockets of dealerships and greedy manufacturers.
I want my $200/kWh car or I'll keep using the car I already have.
But some of the commenters seem to be unaware of those constraints and how significant they are, or at least, use a tone that conveys those assumptions.
Whilst I think QR codes are maybe the wrong choice for this because of the security implications, I think the idea of integrating chargers into existing public infrastructure is quite a good one, and applicable in many places where you'd otherwise have issues with EVs.
This of course doesn't solve apartment buildings, but new apartment buildings should be required to provide EV charging infrastructure, and grants to implement it in existing apartment buildings would go a long way, too.
For EVs we need to run some wire, its way simpler, its already happening, rapidly. It doesn't even put more net load on the grid, since it takes the same amount of electricity to refine a tank of gas, as to fill a "tank" of an EV.
And then there is just range anxiety which is always gonna be there. I've driven from Scotland to East Anglia and it took long enough with the awful traffic, put a slow charge into that mix and it would have been a multi-day trip.
I just don't get why people are so ready to blinker themselves to some of this stuff. EVs are still in early adopter stage, IMO, but we are fast tracking whole nations into forcing them to be the only option. And they are just not fit for some people's usecases.
Where? Tell me one place that you know of in the foreseeable future that will prevent the use of ICE vehicles?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/25/california-bans-the-sale-of-...
It's still not a ban on the continuing use of ICEs. If ICEs still represent a desirable choice for enough people/purposes, the support for them will be there.
This means that of the people who want ICEs, a select few people with money will be able to afford it while those without money are told to make do.
Sure for daily driving a EV has the range, but without good charging it doesn't work for vacations. That is a few weeks every year.
If home charging is a necessity to use an already twice as expensive electric car, I can't be an EV customer realistically.
Another option is to charge at the office and/or at the free chargers at the supermarket car parks.
EA -> 31¢ / kWh (increasing to 36¢ soon)
PGE -> 33¢ / kWh upto baseline, 41 ¢ after (and if you're charging your car, you go above baseline)
https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
> they made it clear that it’s always cheaper to charge at home
> Fast chargers are convenient but resellers of municipal electricity are not going to be the most cost efficient option.
not necessarily true.
[0] Euro-cent, but the conversion is pretty much 1:1 right now anyway.
Even cheaper at my local electric rates of $0.15/kWh during peak demand.
Now I just need the price of EV's to come down.
There's like an entire order of magnitude from the high end to the low end
The problem is that all U.K. energy costs are pegged to the most expensive option - gas - in the most expensive way - taking the highest future price in the next six months - and with the government focussed on… not much in particular… it’s hard to see any improvement in the near term, excepting a continued fall in LNG prices.
> For each half hour, known as a Settlement Period, companies can trade up to 1 hour beforehand that time period is closed.
If you're referring to the consumer energy price cap, then that's not even relevant to this discussion, since the price cap applies to households, not commercial charging stations...
The intent was good - it was supposed to ensure stability and certainty of supply, and by using the highest price for the cheapest source (gas, at the time) they guaranteed a stable price and supply of energy. It was also intended to prevent arbitrage and profiteering.
The outcome is still somewhat true - except the price is sky-high, and stably sky-high for at least the next few Qs.
So we have gas, wind and nuclear, and that's it.
In the government's infinite wisdom they decided to place a moratorium on on-shore wind generation for stupid NIMBY reasons. Fortunately we have plenty of offshore wind capacity, but when the wind isn't blowing, all we have is gas turbines plus whatever scraps of nuclear France is willing to throw us.
Further investment in transmission from snowdonia and expansion of pumped storage facilities could go a long way.
It would be entirely feasible to distribute production to where most consumption happens.
Imagine if all the cars used a set of standard sized battery packs, engineer an interface where they can be easily replaced, size them so they can be easily manhandled(about 10 kilograms 20 pounds). Then you could stop at the service station, pay the fee, pull your empty packs, and replace them with charged packs. you would be on your way and the service station would charge the packs for a future customer. Something like the batteries for power tools.
The main point is that battery packs would become a commodity, easily acquired interchangeable and everywhere.
Much easier to do with scooters https://www.gogoro.com/ but I don't think it would be too hard to engineer a connector/robot that basically did the heavy lifting/swapping from underneath the vehicle
I don’t want to be personally responsible for the initial capital cost, maintenance/repairs/replacements, and knock on cost associated with their general presence.
Some of which could be leaks due to bracket punctures, reduced access for roofers, gutter cleaning, hanging lights, clearing tree debris, etc., and any reason a contractor needs to do work on the room. Or, something that I could normally diy on the roof becomes something I have to high a pro for.
The field makes sense except in the US at least we have tons of land where this would actually be the highest and best use of the land. If it’s not being farmed/used for some sort of ag purpose right now, there’s probably a reason, it’s not suited for it.
Further, nearly every house has suboptimal positioning to create an optimal layout. Given this is a mutually exclusive decision (I would only want to ever own one set of panels), it makes sense for me to put them in a field that has optimal conditions and transport the electricity over the grid for my consumption. It also means I can change houses and my generated electricity follows me without much effort.
Parking lots I support. I actually tried this once as a quick customer feedback test, they didn’t want covered parking due to “safety” concerns of their guests and employees. Also, I’d be concerned the solar stuff would get stolen in an empty parking lot.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/inside...
Batteries are big and heavy. However they are made up of lots of individual cells. So as a car designer you really want to place individual cells around other parts of the car that cannot go anywhere.
You cannot put the front wheels of a car in the trunk - no matter how much better you think the car would look, there are physical reasons for where they go and how much space they take up... Place the cells around all the big things where they fit, and you can get a lot more in.
There are a lot of other design considerations for a car that are helped by the ability to put cells where you want.
For the average person the engineering advantages of not having a standard pack are better handling, more cargo space/legroom, and longer range: this is more valuable than the ability to swap batteries.
On the subject of replacing them, while I would not mind shifting a couple of hundred pounds of batteries 20 pounds at a time, I can see how that would be hard for many people, I expect there would be many station attendants who would go home at the end of the day complaining about their minimum wage job shifting batteries.
My Volvo XC40 Recharge has a 2-year/20,000 mile maintenance cycle, the only work it needs is a check of the coolant and brake fluids and replacing cabin air filters.
Having suffered through broken engine mounts, torn exhaust flex pipes, painful spark plug replacements, coolant leaks, pump failures, and countless other issues with ICE engines, the simplicity of electric is a breath of fresh air.
Of course there’s the question of what happens to the battery over the long term but i’ll take that trade over what ai had before any day.
Your car doesn't have an engine mount, but it has a motor mount that could fail. You have already admitted to coolant, which implies it could leak and it has a pump that could fail.
Most people who complain about how bad EVs are seem to be comparing a new EV to a very old ICE, or memories of their parent's generation which wasn't as good as modern ones. New ICEs are reliable and have been for a few decades.
100,000 miles for spark plugs is extremely rare. I just pulled up a 2022 A4 and it’s 30k. Transmission fluid is 40k miles. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the heat, vibration and weight from an ICE engine wears down parts faster. Add in complexity from turbochargers and there’s even more parts that can fail.
The coolant system on an electric vehicle is extremely simple. There’s no radiator even. An ICE coolant system is far bigger and more complex.
This doesn't mean that the assertion is wrong, but the data provided seems less relevant than one might hope.
I'll also note that as an EV owner, when I bought a home charger I didn't even consider a rapid charger, because I don't need it -- charging at medium speed is just fine. In retrospect I could have done OK with a standard outlet and slow charge, but the thousand or so it cost me for the charger and installation was worth it for convenience. I think I'm the norm. That would mean the graph showing high prices for rapid charge at home is not terribly important -- the key metrics will always be standard charge vs. petrol for at home charging.
Some people don't charge at home, even if it would save them money long term
"Topping up the e-Corsa’s charge by 80pc on a slow charger at peak times results in a cost of 16.18p per mile.
"The AA said: “A continued fall in the pump price of petrol now places the running costs [of a petrol Corsa] at around 14.45 pence per mile, meaning that a petrol combustion engine vehicle is cheaper to run per mile than an EV.”"
Some more info here (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63029226) from 2022.
"The RAC said its research showed the cost to charge an electric car on a pay-as-you-go basis at a publicly accessible rapid charger had increased by 42% since May to an average of 63.29p per kWh.
"The hike in price means drivers who only use the public network to charge vehicles pay around 18p per mile for electricity.
"That is just 1p less per mile for a petrol car, based on someone driving at an average of 40 miles to the gallon, the motoring group said.
"The cost per mile for charging electric vehicles at home is around 9p per mile for the average-sized car. The BBC has been told most EV drivers charge at home overnight."
I guess our cheap prices for both oil and energy (in the us) might make us an anomaly.
I just don't see those rosy predictions about BEVs filled future to ever become a reality. And I own Skoda Enyaq, if somebody would like to slam me for being anti-BEV.
It cost at the most expensive 40% to charge my model y on superchargers (approx 500 km range in real terms) compared to my 2018 gas car (citroen c4 space tourer) that drove approx 600 km on a full tank
On the other hand, an industrial user of electricity might pay 22p/kWh [2] so these fast chargers have a big profit margin.
[1] https://www.gridserve.com/our-pricing/ [2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Sjælland's overnight price last night dropped to about 0.75kr, but in Britain it was 2.10kr! The peak prices today were similar, 2.70kr and 2.80kr, but Britain had that for most of the day, and Sjælland just 4 hours.
Britain also has buildings with worse insulation, fewer people living in apartments, and much less use of district heating.
https://andelenergi.dk/sel/timeenergi/
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/GB (40% gas right now for GB vs 4% for East Denmark and 2% for West.).
Consumer, however, are paying 3/4/5x what we were in 2021 thanks to - well absolutely no idea.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/electricity-pric...