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Comment by denvrede | Hacker News Reader

For me personally (I spoke to others and they mostly agree) the biggest downside is that for "public" charging I pay a 100% premium. My costs at home (I live in a rented apartment with no possibility of charging an EV) for 1kw/h are 0.30€. The average price for charging publicly here are 0.59€. Plus the hassle of having a quadrillion providers for which I would have to check first what the cheapest one at a given charger would be. I have enough inconveniences in my life, won't add another one (especially one that could be easily resolved).

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Perhaps it would make sense if electricity contracts came with a "roaming" option for a certain region. As in, get the same electricity price as at home when using a charging station on the go. After all, I think it shouldn't make much difference to the electricity company whether I use electricity at home or elsewhere, as long as I stay within the region where the company offers the contract.

This would also help people with dynamically priced contracts (the ones that vary hour by hour based on the day-ahead electricity market) to make optimal use of cheap or even negatively priced power, e.g. during the daily solar peak, even when at work. That would also help with grid balancing and reduce carbon intensity.

There would still have to be a roaming surcharge to pay the operator of the charging station of course. But perhaps it wouldn't have to be as expensive as a 100% premium, at least for AC chargers on parking lots. (For DC fast chargers the premium would probably still be substantial, because you're paying for the ROI on the high power infrastructure.)

I think that double cost is about the right price if you want market operators to offer AC charging. I don’t know exactly what we paid to install 8 Chargepoints at our office (and we offered market-rate electricity, no markup, but I’m also pretty sure we got grants to install the chargers), but it had to be $10K per 2 charging spots (and likely more, as the GW1 itself is $7200).

Making about a break-even return on that upfront expense means making $40 in markup per spot in a typical month. Thats $2 per workday per spot, meaning around a 100% markup on 10kWh of electricity or ~40 miles of range every day every spot.

That seems doable, but doing 80 miles of range every day every spot (to cut the markup in half) does not.

I don't own an EV so I don't understand... when I go to a gas station, I just tap my debit card and fill up. The price and running total is shown on a display on the pump. Why don't EV charging stations work that way?

In the UK at least, they mostly do. You park up, plug the car in, tap your contactless card and that starts the charge. Once the charge completes (or you unplug the car), the charger works out how much electricity you used and your card gets charged accordingly. In my experience there aren't too many charging points that don't accept contactless payments in this way.

Sometimes having memberships, RFID cards or apps for the different charging networks unlocks cheaper rates though, so contactless payments don't always end up being the most economical in the long run and that can make it harder to compare charging providers, hence why things like Zap-Map and Electroverse were born.

Because we live in a post-internet, post-social media, post-smartphone world. Seems like everything new requires me to sign up and pay for a subscription now.

I have no reason to believe gas stations that wouldn’t require an app if they were invented today.

Same feeling here. Given enough cars, thus given enough pressure, I'm convinced we will see some regulation coming into place. I just hope it won't become like the actual regional energy monopoly...

I used to have a bmw i3 then a model y while I lived in an apartment building. In my experience although public charging is more expensive the amount you pay overall is cheaper than an equivalent gas vehicle such that it’s probably not worth trying to find the cheapest station more than once.

For example to go “500km” in the model y charging at home with the cheapest electricity it’s about $6. At a super charger I pay about $30. 5x more expensive but for my f150 I pay $120-150 for the same distance. Between the two options charging at the super charger every time is still 4x cheaper than gas even though I could save even more charging at home

What’s the weight difference between the SUV and the f150?

F150s aren’t known for having the best mileage

Quite a bit (can't find a reliable number, but looks like 300-1000kg and yes, I realize that's a wide range)

The fuel economy is actually quite reasonable unloaded - I'm getting 11L/100km vs 13 on my 370z.

The point I'm trying to make though is that it's probably not worth it to look at saving cents/kw when you're likely to come out ahead either way.

And yes, maybe more to the point of the original article - yes, if you have no car and you're only concerned with the cheapest to operate vehicle I'm confident something like a Prius driven gingerly and only filled up while gas is historically low (over a week window or whatever) you could beat an EV. On the other hand, that doesn't describe most people with cars already so for most people even living in an apartment they'd likely save money.

Over 10,000 miles, my EV saves me roughly £1300/year compared to my previous petrol car on the basis of being able to charge the EV overnight at home for £0.09/kW and the petrol costing around £1.40/L before. If I were relying on public charging in the UK, that story would be quite different.

A typical public 7kW AC charger here would start at around £0.45/kWh, at which point the savings would only be £300/year and that is assuming there is somewhere close by that I could leave the car charging for hours at that speed.

If I had to rely on a typical 50kW+ DC charger here in order to get charged up more quickly, that would start at a much higher £0.79/kWh, at which point driving the EV would be £700/year more expensive than the petrol car.

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