Busiest day ever for electric vehicle charging predicted on UK roads | Hacker News Reader

Busiest day ever for electric vehicle charging predicted on UK roads

fleetnews.co.uk

32 pointsclouddrover44 comments

I rented an electric vehicle (Polestar 2) last time I was in the UK: it was really a tale in two acts ...

I was staying at a hotel that had six or eight charging points in the car park and it was generally very convenient to do a quick charge to 80% and reasonably priced.

Hertz wanted it back with 80% charge or they'd bill us, and finding an appropriate charger near Heathrow was ridiculous. We tried six different locations: the first one was in a hotel, it had only one charger which was occupied with no sign of the driver. Two were in the car parks of office buildings to which we had no access. One was at a Tesla delivery center and didn't have public access. One was at a gas station where all five of the charge points were unserviceable. The last one was at a single-purpose electric car charging station where there was a considerable queue.

In the end, we had to drop it off with low charge and bite the bullet otherwise we were going to miss our flight.

> Hertz wanted it back with 80% charge or they'd bill us

Can you share what the cost was so I can complain to someone at Hertz? I think it's reasonable if they charge for fast charging the vehicle upon return, but it shouldn't be extortionate. Should be what a fast DC charge would be (~$15-$25) so they can cover equipment and energy costs to quick turnaround the vehicle for the next renter.

One of the benefits of EVs is that electricity is somewhat ubiquitous (including airport rental facility parking garages), so it's not great UX when an auto rental company is incentivizing customers to chase down fast charging at the last minute before return vs just topping cars up when returned.

I pulled up the receipt; I don't actually remember the battery level when we dropped it off - I think it was about 45-50% ... looks like they charged £15.71 + VAT for the shortfall.

Frankly, if I'd known it would be so reasonable I would not have bothered and spent an extra hour and a half in the Cathay First Class lounge.

Exact same car, but same company on the other side of the world. But the same experience. EV charging is cheap so you just pay for "service" that they're probably doing by default anyway.

Appreciate the time, I will get your feedback to the right folks.

FWIW as a current EV owner (and have been for some time w/ Tesla) trying to make sure to charge to 80% like that before returning the vehicle or face a fee would stress me out to the point I'd probably rent a gas-powered car just to avoid that.

Rental car companies typically charge 3-4 times the street price per gallon to fill up your gas car. They don't like people returning cars low on gas as then they have to pay someone to drive to a local gas station. Having fuel pumps means expensive EPA permits (or whatever agency in your country ensures they don't pollute) and a lot of safety systems - better to let a real gas station handle that.. So I would expect their prices are unreasonable just because of tradition.

Of course electricity is something they already have, and in theory it should be a lot easier for them to handle chargers. However it is still new to them and they don't have it yet.

They actually subverted my expectations here - the extortionate gas pricing was very much in my mind and I was bracing myself to pay maybe four times what I actually paid.

> Rental car companies typically charge 3-4 times the street price per gallon to fill up your gas car.

Not my experience with Enterprise brands or Avis Budget brands in the last 15 years. It might be 10 cents or 20 cents more per gallon, but nothing extortionate. The convenience of not having to worry about filling up your gas while on vacation or business is well worth it to me for the small premium I might pay.

The avis agency I use has its own fast-charging point out in front. I've yet to rent an EV so I've no idea what their requirements are when giving it back, but them recharging a car is literally just parking it and plugging it in.

A couple of weeks ago I rented an electric car from Enterprise in the US and they told me to not worry what the charge level was when I dropped it off, they'd just charge it overnight.

I returned it with ~4 miles left

> Can you share what the cost was so I can complain to someone at Hertz?

Its a change of policy at Hertz.

Until recently Hertz were "bring it back anywhere over 10%".

Now you are given two choices at the counter:

    - Bring it back >=80% or we'll charge you
    - Pay a fee in advance (generally somewhere around 30USD) and you can bring it back >=10%.

avis in las vegas wanted the tesla back with 70% but gave it to me at 12%. great job all around.

Avis in Las Vegas signed me up for the top-tier insurance without telling me or having me sign off on it. I went to another office and had it removed.

Not sure what the situation is in the UK, but in France (which is really a developing country when it comes to EVs, similar to Italy), high-holiday season in 2022 brought very little charging delays. Autoroutes (toll roads) have very few EV chargers to begin with (although that's starting to change), but having to wait more than 20 minutes or so for a plug-in spot was a rare occasion. (In Holland, Belgium and Germany, fast-charge spots were available literally everywhere along major road networks).

Source: have not driven a combustion-powered vehicle in the EU since 2019, despite very frequent road trips.

I was quite amazed at the difference in charging spot availability on French auto-route rest stops between even 2022 and this year.

Last year: 1-2 charging spots, every other stop that had gas.

This year: 6+ charging spots, almost every gas stop.

In case anyone didn't know: most charger manufacturers are terrible. Terrible software, terrible hardware. Like, we hired a kid out of high school and he's googling what HTTP is bad. Basic features of common standards just unimplemented. Seems like they have no tests at all. Gas station pumps are more advanced. You buy a charger and try to get them on the phone to get technical specs, and they literally ignore you. Rolling out new charging infrastructure is being delayed for months and months because they can't get some basic features implemented.

Given the almost exponential growth curve of EVs at this point, wouldn't almost every weekend be a new busiest day ever (maybe with holiday spikes keeping the title for a few months at a time)?

This weekend is when the schools break up for Summer holidays. People are going on vacation starting today.

No because there are some weekends where significantly more people travel. This weekend (beginning of school summer holidays) will be one of the largest travel days of the year, so you would get similar metrics for most cars on the road, or most petrol/gas sold.

The sale growth of electric cars will not outstretch the fluctuations of sessional traffic.

That's kinda what they are saying though, no? That busy weekends will set and hold the record for a few months to a year and then they will be broken again as the number of EVs is growing in the steep section of the logistics curve right now.

Yeah similar to how each summer is the "hottest summer on record" :/

Keep in mind we are in a super el nino. We shouldnt expect the next several summers to be hotter.

We are just entering the high side of the ENSO cycle so we should indeed expect at least the next 1-2 summers to be significantly hotter than 2023.

For however long the el nino lasts is what i mean. Usually they are 1-2 years.

This should be taken as a sign that the UK needs to build a better train network so less people feel the need to drive. Electric cars are better than gas/diesel, but they are still much worse than trains for safety, cost, and environment.

Trains cant do last mile, even in a small country pike the UK

They can get close enough when paired with a good bus system and bike rental. Most people are not going to rural farms, they are going to places that could have transit.

I always wondered what the queueing situation is at chargers since most locations aren't physically set up for it. You'd be really annoyed if you were waiting nearby for ages for a free charger then someone else swooped in. Or they were waiting too but you weren't aware so now you're both mad. The chargers should have ticketing built in.

Someone like Tesla could ensure that queues never happen. Not by building an infinite number of chargers (clearly impossible), but by telling users to continue onwards with their journey early as soon as someone else shows up who is more in need of charge.

Using that technique, and relying on the fact different users are going in different directions, demand can be shifted to other sites hundreds of miles away and many hours into the future.

You can also shift demand onto users home chargers (make them arrive home with less charge).

"Please leave now" sounds like terrible UX, especially if you've gone off to eat somewhere while your vehicle charges.

Most of the time, the vast majority of your charging should be at home. For edge cases like this, well, it is pretty cheap to build out charging infrastructure at any highway rest stop.

Longer term, there are plenty of possible solutions with an SDV public transit system.

You don't say "Please leave now".

You say "Recommended charge time: 15 minutes. Any stay over 25 minutes will be charged an extra parking fee, or you can move the car to a non-electric parking space for free.".

You don't need every user to obey - just ~half of users following your recommendations should keep enough spots free for more incoming cars (which Tesla can predict pretty accurately ~an hour into the future)

Idle fees and parking fees are a solution. Say $1/min after charging has finished. Feel free to eat elsewhere while your vehicle racks up huge parking fees.

By the way, I think with how fast DCFC is becoming, we are currently in a weird situation where there's still time for people to have a meal. In the near future, charging would be so fast that you basically have to stay with the vehicle.

> Idle fees and parking fees are a solution. Say $1/min after charging has finished. Feel free to eat elsewhere while your vehicle racks up huge parking fees.

Well, that assumes people leave the vehicle.

What more frequently happens is there is someone in the vehicle doing work, watching Netflix, sleeping or whatever.

When the charge is done, they take 10 seconds out to unplug, and then go sit back in the vehicle.

That makes the problem even simpler. Every charging spot I've been to has signage that says if a car is parked but not plugged in, it will be towed. Sometimes management has hesitation calling the tow truck if a car is plugged in because they might not know if charging is in progress. When the car is clearly unplugged, call the tow truck.

I believe both suggestions exist and are active within Tesla' ecosystem today. Even if they don't actually enforce or penalize, the incentives and nudges happen.

When using Tesla nav and needing an SC mid journey, Tesla notifies on screen and notifies via the phone app to leave as your state of charge is enough for next leg of journey. Likewise when using built in nav and catching a last SC leg of a trip, it by default has you arriving at low SOC% too.

Likewise, it's advantageous to have a home charger and use it purely on cost in my experience. I haven't encountered any daytime SC cost that was cheaper than my home power cost.

[edit for clarity] Tesla does penalize for sitting on a charger, plugged in, after you've reached your charge limit set.

Yet there are still queues at superchargers... I'd say they need more algorithms work to make sure they never get to overfull.

It would be great if all the newer charging networks would expose an API with enough information to guide charger strategy. Although I do think it might be hard to make a "keep going, someone else needs it more" strategy work. Someone will certainly try to hack it and make sure they never have to wait for a charger by lying about their state of charge. Might be more straightforward to just build out enough capacity so queues rarely occur. Unlike gas stations which always need tanks, electricity already exists in some quantity pretty much everywhere so we can spread out the chargers.

Or an express queue with only 10m top up allowed, higher rate if you go over that.

Or dynamic rates so some areas get cheaper and peak areas more expensive? Might get accused of profiting from surge prices. But might allow people who can shift where they charge to help spread the load.

Or create a secondary market. Rent out your home charger. Booking app.

It's entirely ad hoc per location at Telsa SCs in my experience, even as every Tesla using nav gets notified to leave as soon as they have enough for next leg of trip.

Usually queues are obvious where it's 1 way in/out of a charger block. I've found it's up to the first in queue to establish and 'defend' the queue though. Many times folks charging know and nudge / wave / flash lights at the actual next in queue while slow rolling out for them to get in.

Very common for those queues to be obviously double park or line up idling if there's enough room but again depends. The worst locations are where there's back to back rows and both row ends have entrance/exit. Common at Target or other SCs in very large but not long lots. Where, I've seen a queue form on both ends.

This sounds like a nightmare to me. With petrol, you just pull into a spot. Rare that you even need to queue. Extremely rare to have to queue for more than a few minutes. Once you're in, you're back on your way in a couple of minutes. No conflict.

Having to fight for a charger spot, and potentially queue for 10s of minutes, and then wait tens of minutes for your car to charge, and be ready to leave when you're told to... Nightmare.

Hopefully the situation will improve quickly. If not, my next car will be a plug in hybrid.

I doubt it. It's pissing it down all weekend and everyone I know has cancelled their plans.

Ah, the traditional start to the UK summer holidays We'll miss it when France has turned into the Sahara desert.

Are you a southerner?

It's England. If you cancel plans because it's raining, you won't do anything.

Plus the weather will have changed next week anyway.

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