UK has almost 1M EV chargers, with new public one installed every 25 minutes
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My parents in the Netherlands bought an EV two years ago. They live in an apartment without their own charger in the building. Mostly my father just uses one of several public slow chargers in the neighborhood; once a week or so. He checks on his phone when one is available, drives there and plugs in. They also use chargers at hotels when they are traveling and are typically booking things with chargers available. Destination charging is a thing. Drive somewhere, plug in, do what you came to do, and drive back with enough charge to get home.
They went on a longer trip to France half a year ago. That's the first time he used a rapid charger. The most stressful thing with that is figuring out the payment systems. It's getting better but there are still way too many options for that. Recently Tesla super chargers became an option as well for them (lots of those) and those seem to work best. They drive a Renault.
Anyway, this is very typical behavior with EVs. You charge when it's convenient instead of when you have to. Mostly you are not going to run out on a normal day. It's only on longer journeys that you need to do a bit of planning (make sure the car is charged up before you leave, pick where & when to rapid charge). The worst case is having to take a 45 minute break or so when it's not convenient. That can happen but mostly you can plan to combine that with lunch or something else. And my father is 75, so he needs to have breaks more frequently than the car.
But if you don't, I can imagine there being more stress about charging times, fast chargers, etc.
For road trips, thanks to Tesla's extensive Supercharger network, they are really great for that.
But with more standards (CCS and NACS) becoming pervasive, hopefully this becomes an issue of the past (payments, etc).
My big question is, I don't understand why the oil companies haven't gotten on board. Why aren't we seeing more and more L3 chargers at gas stations?
It's a good question. I don't know for certain, but my hypothesis would be because of what you and the OP said:
> Destination charging is a thing. Drive somewhere, plug in, do what you came to do, and drive back with enough charge to get home.
> if you have a garage or driveway then your electric car ownership will be a dream where you truly stop thinking about range
No one goes to a gas station to hang out, you know? Instead you plug in at work, or the mall, or the restaurant, or just don't bother until you get home. It doesn't make sense to spend your 20+ minute charge time at a gas station.
To your point, put chargers at existing locations humans dwell at, the only other use case is highway travel chargers. There are ~110k gas stations left in the US, and I'll argue many of those will not be needed going forward as mobility electrifies [1] [2] [3].
[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/07/15/gas-stations-prices-closing
[2] https://enpowered.com/the-death-of-gas-stations-will-be-far-...
[3] https://www.urbanismnext.org/resources/americas-gas-stations...
I'm sure it wouldn't get used much (unless the UI was very front and center, and maybe recommended a time based on your previous stops at that charger), and Tesla would be somewhat disincentivized to build it anyway as their goal is to get as many unique cars through the charger as possible, but it would still be neat...
We're somewhat spoiled that aggressive volumes of fast DC charging is immaterial on battery pack health in well engineered battery packs, as well as the rate of improvement in battery technology. Don't worry too much about it, enjoy a better UX and simply charge when convenient. Batteries are only going to keep getting better.
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/14/another-tesla-with-over... ("Another Tesla With Over 400,000 Miles On One Battery")
What would be really nice is a better way of sharing a charger after you're done charging. My experience is that a Tesla supercharger is often too fast. On a road trip charging stops usually coincide with meals, but a charge takes less time than a nice meal does. The charge is done and idle fees start accumulating when you're halfway through the meal. It's rude to others waiting for the charger to leave it there plugged in. It'd be awesome if there was a way to have two plugs per charger, and a big green light to indicate that the first car is done charging so that anybody pulling into the second stall would get a full speed charge.
e.g. a 250kW charger becomes 125 when two cars are parked next to each other.
It only takes a minute to move your car, I don't really find it that big of a deal.
PlugShare shows 18 total charging stations within a 10 minute drive of my home (only one DCFS). There are none near my grocery store, gym, doctor's office, etc. And I WFH.
If I wasn't able to install a charger at my home, I would be going out of my way for DCFS a couple of times a week and making up ways to kill time.
I hope it'll be different someday, but today is not that day. Or, as the quote goes, "the future has arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet".
I'm not sure I understand, was he complaining when they were in a parking lot, but off a road?
Personally, I see gas stations as convenient to the road, but you are also there for a short time.
If you are charging for a non-trivial amount of time, getting out and doing something else is very nice. Charging while grocery shopping is something I do frequently.
That will come. This is already happening in the EU. The US is just lagging the rest of the world a bit here with EV adoption and charging infrastructure.
But if you think about it: what happens when you remove 40% of the demand for petrol and diesel from the market? Because that's what happens when those driving the most and the furthest switch to electric: they stop buying lots of petrol and diesel. And early adopters tend to be the ones driving the most. So, demand takes a big hit fairy early in the transition.
What happens is very simple: petrol and diesel stations start losing a lot of business. Until they realize that they have the perfect locations for charging and that people will want to buy from their shops and restaurants while they are charging. So, of course they are going to adapt in a hurry and invest in charging infrastructure as this starts happening.
Long term, petrol and diesel are going to be a minor side hustle for rapid charging stations where most of the revenues come from people waiting for their vehicles to charge buying snacks, refreshments, and other stuff.
My point being, there probably never was a lot of margin on fuel. Which is why I’m surprised that more convenience stores with fuel aren’t putting in chargers because now you’ve got a captive audience for 20 minutes. They’re getting there, though, as I see AM/PM stores with EVGo chargers now in the PNW. And at $0.45/kWh versus $0.11 at home, there is profit to be made on electrons, I imagine.
She said they essentially broke even on gas (something like 1-3 cents of profit per gallon), but made all their money on items inside (she/her family was Asian, so they made a killing cuz they had an asian-styled buffet in their gas station in a small town in Indiana, the only one of its kind for miles)
I was on the north side of Indianapolis, the wealthier side of town that could afford a 30% markup on a gallon of full-serve gas.
Small Indiana town? Oh, yeah, I’d imagine they’d make a killing versus hot dogs that have been sitting on that roller thing all day. :-)
There are many chargers at gas ("petrol") stations in the UK. There are even a few stations that have been completely converted, with the pumps removed and replaced with chargers only.
For example, Shell Fulham in London: https://find.shell.com/gb/fuel/10018937-shell-recharge-waitr...
Installing high-power charging does depend on having a suitable grid connection available, of course. For some gas station locations, getting enough power to the site might be impractical or uneconomic.
Gas stations will have to adapt by installing chargers, as eventually there just won’t be enough combustion vehicles around to keep them in business.
I'd guess that in the US one factor might be that a large fraction of gas stations are also convenience stores and most of them make more money from the convenience store side of the business than from the gas side of the business.
The convenience store has two kinds of customers. One is people who are there to get gas but also pick up something in the convenience store. The other is people who come specifically for the convenience store.
Space outside not used for cars that are at the gas pumps is usually used for parking for the people who are there for the convenience store.
If they add EV chargers that are separate from the pumps they will probably have to reduce the parking space for convenience store customers. So they are replacing spots currently used by people who are there for a usually short visit to the convenience store with spots for people who are there to charge EVs.
Even if 100% of EV charging customers also use the convenience store it still reduces convenience store volume because they occupy a spot longer than the people who are there just to use the convenience store. Plus there will be people who are there just to charge and will not use the convenience store.
If they add the EV chargers where the gas pumps are, then the EV charging customers are replacing gas buying customers and so again their is a reduction in turnover because EV charging is slower. Because EV charging is slower I'd guess there is a larger chance that an EV charging customer will decide to also use the convenience store than there is that an gas customer will, so that might compensate some for the lower turnover but I'd guess that it would still be a net reduction in convenience store business.
For rare longer trips, public fast charging infrastructure is quite convenient.
A level 1 charger will add 3-4 miles of range every hour it's plugged in. Assuming you don't have some wildly long commute, that's easily enough to cover most people's daily driving in 8-10 hours of charging overnight.
.8*120*15 = 1440w vs 230*13 = 2990w
You can only use 80% of a load on a breaker in the US, AFAIK UK receptacles are fused which allows using 100% of the listed device ampacity instead of 80%. I could be wrong about that last part though.
I don't have an EV charger, but I did have a 32A 230v power feed installed to my detached garage, suitable for a 7.4kW EVSE in the future. Parts and labour cost less than $650. It was a day's work for one man; he used armoured cable that doesn't need to be buried very deep, and could cross paved areas just cutting a 2" slit.
This was in a high cost-of-living area, a qualified and well reviewed electrician, and I didn't bother to shop around for multiple quotes.
Depends on the energy company.
Some like BP, Chevron, and Idemitsu Kosan began investing fairly heavily in renewables and battery technology (eg. ownership in solar development, owning and licensing battery and charging IP, etc) for diversification reasons.
Others did not, and don't want to end up paying competitors.
Furthermore, gas stations are themselves just franchises so the franchisee might have to eat the cost of installation.
Chevron owns Chargepoint so they were able to scale charging infra to their stations, but other competitors might not want to subsidize Chevron corporate and leave it to the franchise.
Around where I live tesla's got some co-generation going on near by where they've got natural gas -> fuel cell -> supercharger setups (bloom energy runs one and I forget the other).
Absent that you need the power company to pipe in some serious power feeds and those aren't always convenient to trench into where you've already got a gas station.
Oil companies’ involvement with gas stations is only to the extent of selling their brand to the gas station operator. I don’t think I have ever heard of an oil company itself operating a gas station, I doubt they even own a single one.
Many of them have existing oil infrastructure that they want to put value on. If they are to become obsolete, their net worth and buying power will be threatened. And so they go into fear/panic. The koch brothers.
They have the massive amounts of money to make those investments and sell them to gas stations the same way they do now.
Well, almost perfect. Being on 110V in residences is a downside.
The center tap of that transformer is connected to ground and neutral. Normal residential outlets are connected between that neutral and one of the two hot outputs, giving 120 V.
Connecting across the two hots instead of across one hot and neutral gives 240 V. Many houses have one or two 240 V outlets. Typically there is one where the builders expected you to put your washer and dryer, to support an electric dryer. Often there is also one in the garage.
It's easy for an electrician to add more 240 V circuits4 and, assuming you don't need a new electrical panel, fairly reasonably priced. Googling is claiming typically $250-800.
Including the car’s depreciation, an EV does not always pencil out versus a gas hybrid unless you do a lot of driving.
Plus a lot of states charge a much higher annual tax for EVs compared to gas hybrids.
It's something like $5-7 to fully charge an EV from 0 where I am (Washington DC suburbs), vs about $50 to fill a tank of gas.
I recently spoke to a cabbie in Madrid that was driving a Tesla, and he said the economics were a no-brainer. He charges at home overnight and once mid-day and his monthly electricity bill was 130 euros. Before that, he was spending over 1,000 euros a month on gas.
That more than makes up for the additional initial cost of having an EV.
Those of us lucky enough to have PG&E in California have a different calculation though. As of my latest bill they charge 88c/kWh and I heard they just approved yet another rate increase. We'll probably be paying $1/kWh pretty soon.
It's a bit cheaper after midnight, but still more expensive than nearly everywhere.
If you drive 5k to 10k miles per year though, a hybrid Camry or Prius or equivalent is still going to be cheaper per mile over 20 years compared to an EV due to the huge depreciation in the EV due to battery replacement cost.
Even a RAV4 Prime is probably cheaper.
Where I am in the UK, the unit rate at home is ~10p, while it's 40-50p at a public charger. I can get the home rate even cheaper (5p/kWh) with good timing.
One more things on the busy todo list - not a biggie for a retiree for sure.
There are low speed chargers available in the streetlight poles next to street parking (low cost). There are 22kw slow/medium chargers in reserved spots throughout the neighborhood (medium cost, lower to residents). There are 250kw chargers at gas stations (high cost). The local supermarket has 10+ 250kw charging spots (high cost) and at least half are always available.
It's finally hit the point where there are always multiple charging options easily available nearby and the number of EVs parked in the neighborhood is rapidly multiplying. I see more EVs on my local streets daily.
It's a different world outside of London. Less densely populated areas of the UK can still be a bit of a nightmare for charging, especially during big travel periods. Looking at you, Cornwall.
It was a total nightmare, we had to think days ahead to any big trip to make sure we had enough charge to get us through and if we needed to charge en route it was expensive, slow and difficult to find a working charger.
We are back with an ICE vehicle now and it’s so much easier.
It’s great that we are moving toward an EV future but right now you need a dedicated charger and also be prepared to massively pay over the odds on a per mile basis if you have to charge en route somewhere.
Also every charger needs to be tap and pay and every charger should be usable by any EV, screw those Podpoints in train stations that don’t appear in the app and clearly need you to be in some secret club to access.
EDIT: I'm based in the UK
Google tells me the Polestar 2 has 330 miles of range, so you could do the 5h30m drive from Swansea to Norwich on a single charge - if you leave home with a full charge.
But if you can't leave home with a full charge? If you've got a complicated schedule, like using a charger at work but only working 1 day a week? I can see how that would be a lot more hassle. And public fast chargers cost 4-5x as much as charging at home too.
(Currently thinking of getting a Peugeot E208, if anyone has any experience with those?)
But, I do agree with you. Driving 400 miles here from Edinburgh to Southend is not a straight 400 mile motorway drive at 75mph like it would be in the US, it's practically guaranteed to hit standstill traffic at one point or another. I'm sure you technically _could_ do that journey in one sitting in a car, but the vast, vast majority of people will be pulling over to break, even if it's just to the bathroom.
I drove from Edi to Cornwall , which is about 550 miles. We stopped twice on the journey, once for a coffee/toilet break (15 minutes by the time the coffee was made and we had queued for the toilet), and once for food (45m). Adding 1 hour onto a 9 hour drive was not a deal breaker, and if it was then we wouldn't have made it on time because we were also delayed by numerous breakdowns, accidents, lane closures, horses on the M6. We lost more time to all of that than we did to rest stops.
The downside is that it charges at 60-80kW, and it's not especially efficient car either. Purely from BEV perspective it's a low-end performance for a mid-range price.
I've heard that e3008 is better, but the first gen EV powertrains from Stellantis just weren't good.
ID.3 is a bit better with charging speed, and Hyundai/Kia's e-GMP platform runs circles around them with 2-3x faster charging for not much more money.
The Ioniq series look amazing and are very popular, but are significantly larger cars (disadvantage for me, maybe advantage for others).
Edit: on.to? oh.no more like:
> "On 11 September 2023 Jonathan Lees and Gavin Maher of Teneo Financial Advisory Limited were appointed as Joint Administrators of Onto Holdings Limited. On the same date, Gavin Maher and Ian Wormleighton were also appointed as Joint Administrators over Onto Tech 1 Limited, Onto Tech 2 Limited, Onto Tech 3 Limited and Onto Tech 4 Limited, each a subsidiary of Onto Holdings Limited (together "the Companies"). "
:(
Ioniq's worst case is better than this (~2.1 in bad weather, 3.1-3.3 at highway speeds in good conditions), and it displays accurate range based on real usage. Ioniq is indeed a bit too fat for UK's parking spaces.
on.to was great. I think they took advantage of tax breaks when leasing for a business, and during lockdowns they couldn't buy new cars fast enough.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V6ucyFGKWuSQzvI8lMzv...
So in reality the comfortable working assumption should be 230 in my experience. We had the car in winter, perhaps didn’t help.
Yeah, especially if it wasn't the higher end model with a heat pump. Winter is definitely the biggest challenge for EV range at the moment (if you live in a place where heating is necessary for any significant part of the year a heat pump is pretty much a requirement).
Were you taking a lot of big trips without thinking about them before the Polestar?
Gas: get in car, drive until light turns on, pull into next gas station and get gas, keep driving.
EV(tesla): get in car, enter destination, car will route you to superchargers as needed
EV(!tesla): get in car, consult web sites like a better route planner, verify car's charge, verify that you have the app for each of the fast charging destination payment methods, drive to the first location and it's broken in some tedious way and now you have to hope you've got range to get to your b site.
With an ICE we just fill up the night before or morning of and we’re good to go with 500 miles in the tank.
- visiting family, 2 lots, both over 3 hours each away
- mountain biking, 2 to 5 hour each way
- friends wedding, 3 hours
- airport run, 4 hour round trip … twice
- overnight work trip 5 hours each way
That’s a pretty common 2/3 month period for us. Oh and when we had the PS2 there was a daily commute to one of two office between 30 and 60 minutes each way.
In some places 3-phase power is very common (e.g. my small apartment in Copenhagen has a 3-phase supply), though in the UK it's less common. The upgrade might be £1000, or considerably more.
With 7kW (1-phase) it will be OK for a lot of trips — charging in 11-12 hours. This is more power than a normal domestic socket provides. In some countries there's a higher-power socket in the garage already, otherwise it's something the electrician needs to install.
A normal domestic socket is around 3kW.
Seems like a nasty issue with that polestar or with whatever you were using to charge overnight. With an actual charger you'd get to 100% overnight.
With tesla you'd also have car adding detours for you towards fast chargers when needed, so much less to worry.
If we’d spent the £1,500 on the dedicated charger I’m sure my view would be different.
Either way I can get 500 miles out of an ICE and refill it in 2 minutes. EVs are great but for longer drives that convenience is hard to beat.
Sure, but typically refill would be 30-40 min with a Tesla in a supercharger for long drives, which I usually need after driving 500-600km.
On the other hand, they're very fun to drive, the acceleration is insane. ICE cars that come close are twice the price and with much higher maintenance costs.
I'm not sure why you went with a polestar though.
No, for longer drives multiple times per week with no return home in between them, an ICE is hard to beat. If you're driving 250 miles a day and returning home then it's a no brainer - you don't even need to stop for petrol.
Well, yeah, that's the issue. Without an "actual charger" you only get ~25% range overnight with a standard wall outlet. It's not a problem for most driving usecases, but for people who do a lot of long trips, it still an issue.
It's not ideal, however; it's 66 hours continuously to add 200 miles of range to an older S; for more efficient cars (that get 4 or 5 miles of range an hour) it's still going to be 40 hours.
Such a setup is totally untenable if you're hanging an electric cord out your window and over a sidewalk or through trees or whatever, if you can even get a parking space within extension cord range of your car...
Also, broadly -- running a random outlet at 12a continuously for 60 hours may break things in unpleasant ways.
The article does not break down the 65K public chargers or the added chargers by charging speed.
In our city (~100k) alone I have spotted over 10 chargers that have been defective for at least half a year, some even longer than 1 year. And that's only those that I regularly drive to.
As long as there are no requirements to actually service them and have them in a working condition, the raw numbers of installed chargers are meaningless
Is a requirement really necessary? I'm not aware that any requirement exists to keep your petrol station running (well, maybe there is one). And I'm sure it's not necessary to have one, because if your station does not work you go out of business very fast.
So why are these companies still in business if it's profitable to have non-working charging stations?
Pretty sure the government pays them the cost of installing the charger + profit. So they're just in the business of installing chargers.
While I don't think anybody pays you to just build gas stations so you'll need to operate it to recover your initial investment.
Why is this?
But the built environment is against us; too many people rely on on-street parking. And the recent spike in electricity prices last winter has badly damaged the cost competitiveness argument.
I don't know if this is still accurate but it was top of my mind 5 years ago when i last changed one of our cars. Ill consider EVs again next year when one is due for replacement at which point ill need to total up the additional home infrastructure in the price.
Additionally, batteries are getting cheaper and more energy dense, so when it's time to replace them, you'll probably get an upgrade for cheaper. Leaf started with 24kWh batteries, and now you get 40kWh for the same price, and a 64kWh upgrade option.
People often extrapolate from their experience with cell phone batteries, but these "lithium" and those "lithium" batteries are very different. There are different chemistries, different conditioning with active cooling/heating, different rates of discharge, and a big difference in redundancy when you have 1 cell vs 7000 of them.
I mostly drive within a few miles, or at most 15 of so miles of where I live. However, I occasionally go say 200 miles without a convenient chance to recharge (have done so twice in the last month). I know people who drive much further - e.g. one regularly drives from the Midlands to the North of Scotland.
There are also people who do not have a car at all (I never did when I lived in London, nor in Manchester till I had a child) or who drive very little. If you do low mileage the case (financial and environmental) for using an EV is a lot weaker.
A lot of houses have no where to put a charger - lots of on-street parking.
I do not have the data for a proper answer, but I think it has to do with patterns of usage and housing.
While I do drive below the UK norm, the the mode miles per car is only get about 3500 miles per year and the median about 7000. Last time I looked into it (which admittedly was during COVID crazy car price era), when comparing cars lb for lb, it only really made sense to get an EV if you plan to drive it more than 10k miles per year. High electric prices don't help.
That being said, I'd imagine for most people the decision as to which sort of car to buy is more about emotion and presentation than it is about cold hard logic.
Octopus gives me 7.5p per kWh at night, working out about 3p/mile for me vs about 12p/mile for my old diesel.
Not sure how you got 10k miles, but every mile is cheaper if you just look at fuel and can charge at home.
The main difference is the depreciation of the car itself and, surprisingly, the insurance which for me was quite a bit higher on every EV I looked at. For an EV that's equivalent in spec to an older efficient and ULEZ-compliant petrol car, the EV is more expensive and has higher depreciation costs.
Since I only drive a few thousand miles, I only spend a few hundred pounds per year in petrol, but even at 10k miles I'd only be spending roughly 1200 GBP with my decently efficient engine, compared to 400 GBP with an EV, which isn't a huge saving. That also assumes I always charge at home, which would not be the case as my driving pattern is usually 1 or 2 miles a week locally with the occasional 300+ mile trip.
I assume you're probably using Octopus Go for that price, so you'd have to account for the fact that it makes your electricity more expensive through the rest of the day too for it to be a fair comparison. That being said, I personally use Octopus Agile, which makes it really hard to figure out precisely how much it'd end up costing me.
That's probably the slightly higher incomes in Germany.
I used to be annoyed that signs for highway services don't show which ones have chargers, but they've fixed that by installing chargers at every one of them (at least along my routes).
It's even better in western Europe, where Ionity and Fastned have a pretty dense coverage of 300kW chargers.
I've been road tripping around the UK and Europe for the last three summers, and it's been easy peasy.
Hyundai has a universal charging card that works with the majority of minor crappy charging networks, which solves the pain of having to install seventeen different charging apps.
Same with parking. Most car parks around here accept only coins (and I stopped carrying coins about 5 years ago) or pay-by-phone, which always charges more than the advertised parking price and is usually conveniently located in a mobile phone dead spot. Parking meters used to accept contactless card payments - what gives?
Where? Because here in Austria public EV charging infrastructure is next to non existent.
Ironically it's best in Vienna where car ownership is lowest due to excellent public transportation but next to no existing in the other smaller cities where car ownership is highest.
It's bonkers.
Austria looks less dense than Germany and Switzerland, but still good – DC fast chargers along highways, and over 100 fast chargers in Vienna.
Austrian Alps have poorer coverage, but that's not surprising — there aren't many roads there either, but still there are enough chargers to cross them in an EV, so at least as a tourist I don't think I'd have major difficulty.
And what's the point of highly dense cities like Vienna having much better EV charging infrastructure, when most of the people there usually use the excellent public transportation so car ownership is low anyway. EV infrastructure Investments should happen precisely in the places with lesser density where cars are a necessity but those are the ones with the lest EV infrastructure precisely as you pointed out.
There are close to 30m households so only about 3% of households have a charger.
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/standing-st...
Lots of potential there. I guess some might just slow charge from a socket too.