Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map
tech.marksblogg.com
tech.marksblogg.com
Of course, live (charging) status will need to be fetched from the operator, but that can be a URL field just like we have website and menu URL tags for restaurants
And to get dynamic data you can't just fetch it from one operator. My employer's charging network (Digital Charging Solutions) has about 1450 technical charge point operators (those are the brands you see on the stations). Even just looking at the commercial charge point operators (those are less) you'd have to connect to hundreds.
Ok, there are also roaming platforms that interconnect everything. But they exist to connect, so they are never going to give you this valuable data for free. And you'd still have to implement about a dozen API connections to get reliable status data for only Europe...
Edit: AMA about charging stuff :) I don't handle the data connections etc but I know a bit
Scale of economics will make the big ones have an edge over the small ones, eventually only a few big ones will likely survive. Two examples:
- If an EMP connects directly to a CPO (Charge Point Operator) they can avoid roaming platform fees, but it requires individual integration. This is only worth for very large CPO like Ionity.
- An EMP has to sanitize and improve the raw chargepoint data they get from providers. Thousands of times CPOs have set their chargepoints to LatLng 0,0; have messed up lng and lat; have put their stations to Somalia's beach.
I'd say "wow, even Euripe". I would expect the European market, even just within the EU, much more fragmented the in the US. I may be wrong though.
It seems to me that, somewhere, there is a URL (or whatever specification) which some central server then fetches and aggregates to show on their map (probably briefly caches, too). This specification of where to fetch the data from each charging point from could, per my understanding, be an OpenStreetMap tag just like other metadata that we can already add. A client can either connect to the (e.g.) 50 nearest points along the upcoming route directly, or a third party can do it and funnel the data back to the client, but the ground truth of which charge points there are and how to get their current status could be in OpenStreetMap rather than fragmented across various siloed map operators
Edit: actually, even if that's not the case, it's still better to show "there is a charge point here with 2x 150 kW but I don't know the current status" than not having it at all. That's static information which OpenStreetMap already has. Even if the live info spec is too elaborate or divergent for an OSM metadata field, it would still make sense to show all the points OSM is aware of in one's application because it draws more people to one's app/website
This is not a one time exception. You can drive through city streets with your GPS showing multiple nearby public access chargers. With none in sight (they are iside people's garages or on their property behind closed fences).
We've definitely seen cases where intent of a law was clear, but the ruling was made according to the letter of the law. It's basically why Legalese exists. They have to try to cover every possible corner case and explicitly spell things out as much as possible to avoid loopholes that can be created by creative interpretations of the letter.
Site is quite janky on my M1 iPad Pro 12.9’’, and honestly, using a 3D globe view for this feels like form over function.
Picnic at one while we change. Nice stroll in a park coming back. Went to a restaurant I’d never go to another time.
With a long trip my preference was to slow charge overnight so as to start the day at >90%, and sometimes we'd also have a single supercharge during the day. The supercharger experience is great - you plug in and it works. When you're done you unplug and continue your journey.
The slow charge experience was less good. In France there are a lot of charging points in car parks, but to actually start charging it involves a load of faf.
1. Slow chargers typically involve using an app or website, so you need to find that, figure out how to tell it which charger you're at, enter your payment details. Hopefully you've got internet access in the underground car park that you've selected.
2. Each provider has a different app or website - they're typically difficult to use and buggy, but each in its own unique way.
3. Slow chargers don't don't come with their own cables, so you need to get your one out of the boot, and put it away again.
4. Stopping charging typically involves navigating the website/app again, hopefully you haven't closed the tab, otherwise it's going to be a pain getting back there.
5. There's no indication on how much it's going to cost until after you've gone through all the trouble. Even then it can be unclear - for example do I need to pay for parking while I'm charging or not?
6. It often costs as much or more than the supercharger - although all the prices I saw were cheaper than the UK.
7. There are typically idle fees, so you might find yourself having to disconnect your car and move it in the middle of the night (assuming you put it on charge in the evening)[^1], or you might find yourself having to rush back to the car in the middle of your sightseeing.
I want to slow charge when I'm parked, because I'm away from the car anyway. My dream slow-charging experience is:
1. Broad availability in any given car park, let me just plug in if I happen to be stopped
2. Streamlined payment process, preferably automatic and through the touchscreen of the car, rather than involving a phone or website. Don't make me enter payment card details - I want something like the apple pay experience, but "Tesla pay".
3. No idling fees so I can change my mind and have a dessert if I fancy without worrying about getting back
I don't care about speed if I'm not waiting. 7kW is more than enough.
[^1]: My trick here is to adjust the charging current in the Tesla app, such that it will take longer to charge. This way I'm never idling, even though I'm taking up a space for the same time anyway.
The chain hotels are used during the week by tradespeople, we will want them to be using electric vans soon.
> 1. Slow chargers typically involve using an app or website, so you need to find that, figure out how to tell it which charger you're at, enter your payment details. Hopefully you've got internet access in the underground car park that you've selected.
Yes, this can be somewhere from mildly to extremely annoying. I have also seen chargers that accept tap to pay credit cards though, no account needed.
> 2. Each provider has a different app or website - they're typically difficult to use and buggy, but each in its own unique way.
Similar in the US, though I wouldnt describe any of the apps as difficult to use or buggy. Usually the most annoying part is creating an account.
> 3. Slow chargers don't don't come with their own cables, so you need to get your one out of the boot, and put it away again.
Never seen this in the US. I dont even know what the cable would be.
> 4. Stopping charging typically involves navigating the website/app again, hopefully you haven't closed the tab, otherwise it's going to be a pain getting back there.
Stopping charging is usually doable from the app, but usually I dont want to stop charging until I am ready to physically disconnect which also stops charging.
> 5. There's no indication on how much it's going to cost until after you've gone through all the trouble. Even then it can be unclear - for example do I need to pay for parking while I'm charging or not?
I dont think I've run into a charger that doesnt display pricing info yet.
> 6. It often costs as much or more than the supercharger - although all the prices I saw were cheaper than the UK.
Wow, that is awful. In general slow (AC) charging in the US is half the price or less of fast (DC) charging. In fact, usually public AC chargers are even cheaper than charging at home (for me, very expensive kwh at home).
> 7. There are typically idle fees, so you might find yourself having to disconnect your car and move it in the middle of the night (assuming you put it on charge in the evening)[^1], or you might find yourself having to rush back to the car in the middle of your sightseeing.
This is annoying but necessary. If chargers let you idle for free, it would be impossible to find an empty space many places. I think the idle fees (usually $1-3/hour in the US) are a reasonable compromise.
The cable I have is like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MENNEKES-36213-c%C3%A2ble-%C3%A9lec...
Then the chargers (and the car) just have a socket - but the sockets have locking pins on both ends. Thanks to your response I now realise that the stopping charging issue is related - the cables are locked in place until you stop. If the charging station provided their own cables all we'd have to do is disconnect from the car to stop charging.
> Wow, that is awful. In general slow (AC) charging in the US is half the price or less of fast (DC) charging. In fact, usually public AC chargers are even cheaper than charging at home (for me, very expensive kwh at home).
That sounds lovely. The cheapest slow charger in France that I used was €0.30/kWh ($0.33/kWh). A typical Tesla supercharger on the autoroute was a comparable ~€0.35/kWh ($0.39/kWh). Still, beats the socks off the £0.56/kWh ($0.75/kWh) I pay at the slow charger near my house.
> This is annoying but necessary. If chargers let you idle for free, it would be impossible to find an empty space many places. I think the idle fees (usually $1-3/hour in the US) are a reasonable compromise.
At home it's £3/hr ($4/hr), so if I charge overnight and don't play games with my charging rate I can easily spend more on idle fees than electricity.
Almost everyone one we stopped at that had a mini-mart/restaurant also had an Ionity or Total station with 8 or 16 bays.
A guy at one stop in TX was in a huge Excursion and was walking his dog near the charger, laughed and said "you're going to be here a while." We were in and out before he was. The FUD is extremely strong still. Our drive (CO to North TX) has to be one of the least populated (and anti-EV) drives in America and there was still no range or charge speed anxiety.
Combine this with Google Maps' existing rate + review features, ability to upload pictures and all that, I can see how this will very quickly make other 3rd party services like plugshare or similar superfluous.
On a recent 800km road trip I just used Google Maps to find charging points along my route that was already planned on there. I tried using other services like ABRP or EVNavigation and found all of them pretty lacking.
Ireland is probably not representative of the rest of the world. It's very small, so with my Kona EV and it's 450km range, I can basically go anywhere with minimal stops for charging. Most of the bigger towns have at least one 50kw charger, and they are rolling out 100/200kw chargers at these locations now as well. There just is no need to have a detailed route planned out with battery SOC estimates and consumption and all that, and with charge points on Google Maps I feel we are very close to ICE convenience. I just drive, and when I'm a little low on charge I search on GMaps for a charger location, drive there, plug in, empty my bladder, get a snack, and then continue on my trip again.
The vast majority of my charging takes place at home though, so the above only applies when I am travelling further than 200km from home. Home charging provides access to more than 60% of the country I feel.
Those connectors are a fucking bear to plug in though, and you usually have to try 3 times to get the charger-vehicle-payment dance to work.
EVgo and Electrify America routinely fail at the payment-charging stage for me. The Tesla is expecting to get charge as soon as it is plugged in; the charger on the other hand wants me to plug in BEFORE payment, and payment takes FOREVER by the time I open the app, inevitably have to re-log-in (for some reason ChargePoint keeps me log in but the others routinely log me out), forget my password, reset my password, then locate the goddamn charger stall ID zooming in from a map of the US and then have to search some stupid IKEA-like name of the actual charge station. By the time I finish this the car has already given up and when the charger catches up to telling the car "hey I have charge now", it's too late.
The real workflow should be either
(a) tap a EMV credit card, approved, THEN plug in, no app needed
OR
(b) scan a QR code, Google/Apple Pay, THEN plug in, no login needed
The charger should facilitate immediately delivering charge as soon as it's plugged in to the car.
The connectors themselves aren't usually the cause for the perceived difficulty of plugging in. It's instead the weight and flexibility of the cable. Try this: plug in a CCS connector at Electrify America, and then plug in a CCS connector at ChargePoint. The latter feels much heavier than the former. Yet both are CCS connectors. Even though the former is rated for 350kW and the latter usually only 125kW.
The CCS connector itself doesn't dictate what kind of cables manufacturers use and what kind of cooling. Tesla designs cables with less cooling and they replace them more often; other brands want long-lasting cables with fewer field visits so they add more cooling. And some brands use liquid cooled cables, others simply opt for thicker copper without liquid cooling. All of these have nothing to do with the connector.
Also, some connectors have nasty white plastic, while others have really nice and usable handles.
Google Maps has this information for the ESB network in Ireland. It even shows which connections are currently being used, and which are out of order. Next step is to show information on the current in-use plugs, like when the session started. On the ESB app this information is available and it helps to estimate when a point might become available, if there is congestion.
This is a massive UX issue. With gas cars you can use any gas station you want and you don't have to pay additional fees other than the gas.
I'm not sure what the state of the chargers being installed at local businesses is. My local grocery store has four chargers now, but I don't recall seeing any signage about them being for customers only. They share the parking lot with the church across the street, though, so that may complicate things.
I don't see what would really motivate businesses to change their mind on this. Since the barrier to entry for an EV charging station is many orders of magnitude lower than a gas station, it's pretty easy for a business to just add one in to an existing parking spot as an extra revenue stream or another way to draw customers. But they might reasonably value having available parking for customers over the revenue they get from EV charging.
I things will probably move more in this direction as EVs become more popular and the average customer is more likely to drive one.
IMO, the long-term tendency will be for every parking place to have an electric vehicle charger (or at least a standard power socket which can be used for a slow charge), the same way every parking place has electric lighting.
> This funding opportunity is made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s signature EV charging investments: the $2.5 billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program and funds from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program that are set aside for strategic grants to states and local governments to deploy EV chargers.
https://driveelectric.gov/news/new-cfi-funding-released
And as a part of this, federal standards were established for qualifying chargers. There's a bunch here to insure physical and electrical compatibility. But one of the excellent requirements is real-time API availability information, on how many chargers there are, what their charge rates are (per charger), and what chargers are presently open.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...
This should be a great help to EV owners/renters in the US!
- https://github.com/ev-map/EVMap
I only use OCM when I want to add a picture or read/add a comment.
Having an EV requires charging at home. People that can't charge at home don't buy an EV. People that would charge in a parking lot don't have an EV.
Public charging has really stagnated in the last 5 years.
If it were me I’d even try to sell them washer fluid and other road supplies.
I think there are also a significant number of EV owners who almost exclusively use public DC fast charging. If there are enough fast chargers around, you can treat an EV similarly to an ICE car - drive it til its mostly empty then fill it up.
Relevant article from today referencing a recent MIT study.
As someone who owns multiple EVs, it's about the fact that you are much more likely to go to a business within probably 1000ft of the charger. The chargers are also frequently very busy. I 100% go to a ton a businesses that I wouldn't otherwise simply because they are located near the charger. Convenience is king
I’d never stopped in one of those places in my life.
For example, in Australia, the largest supercharger networks are Tesla and Evie. For reasons I won't even pretend to understand, Plugshare refuses to allow either name in their labels, so if a town has both, they're called "Town (1)" and "Town (2)" at random. Not only does this make searching a pain, but people just select whichever pin happens to be on top and then submit their charging reports for the wrong charger. Gar! Typical example:
"Oliver's Gundagai (1)" https://www.plugshare.com/location/205861 (Chargefox)
"Oliver's Gundagai (2)" https://www.plugshare.com/location/76887 (Tesla)
I also really appreciate the images and comments people have posted in Plugshare to help find out of the way stations or stations that might not be reliable. If OSM took off it would get there, but none of the stations I checked had any comments or images.
I'm not a big fan of the OCM station formatting. There's a bunch of useless information above the fold and a bunch of useful information below the fold.
OCM doesn't appear to have any pricing information while PlugShare at least tells me if the station has a charge and if the parking itself has a charge.
I hope that open services like this can get station data from more direct sources for more accurate information, but the data isn't quite there yet for me to want to use it when I'm actively looking for a station.
Surprisingly, the above map is just charging infrastructure from one company. There is a lot of infrastructure from Tesla and other companies as well.
I see it coming up in the top 10 for 2023, but not 2024 [1]. Just not released yet?
[1] https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/electric-vehicle...
To replace an incumbent product, a new competitor has to be at least two of: cheaper to buy, more convenient, and cheaper to use in the long run. EVs are running at 0.5 for 3, at best.
Yeah, that probably won't happen for a long time.
> more convenient
If you can charge at home, then for daily driving, they're more convenient than ICE. Road trips aren't bad if you have access to Tesla Superchargers. If you're CCS only, then it's another story.
> cheaper to use in the long run
If you can charge using residential rates in an area that doesn't have absurd energy pricing, then in the long run, an EV IS cheaper. The cost to replace a battery is a popular talking point, but it's just not relevant on any EV that isn't a first generation Leaf. It typically takes over 100,000 miles to see even 10% degradation.
EVs are cheaper to maintain. No oil changes, your brake pads last forever, no transmission fluids...your only maintenance is tires, cabin air filter, and wiper blades/fluid.
> EVs are running at 0.5 for 3, at best.
If you charge at home, I'd say they're 1.75 out of 3, with 0.25 taken out just for road trips.
I actually prefer this over refuelling, because filling up takes 5+ minutes of my time, while recharging is unattended, so I can plug in in seconds, and go get a coffee/break in the meantime. Chargers also tend to be next to nicer places, near food courts and other retail, which is handy, and doesn't need to be a separate stop on road trips.
I hate having to rely on bathrooms inside businesses to relieve myself during road trips while charging. Sometimes they need a code and the business won't give it to you unless you buy something.
Agreed. But again, taking a pee isn't a long enough break to charge on a long trip. I'm assuming people will charge at home without the middleman fees, and only need public charging stations on long trips. You certainly can take a longer break a rest stop, I just tend to have longer stops for food.
I had one time during COVID I was on a trip and had to charge at like 10:30 PM. All the fast food places nearby were drive-through only. There was a Safeway, but apparently they closed their bathrooms at 10 PM. I was just lucky I didn't have to go urgently and was able to hold it until I got to my hotel an hour later.
Is this demonstrated?
Visiting the gas station is an across-the-income-strata chore with recurring economics. Wealthy EV owners, on the other hand, charge at home--"the economic burden of installing home chargers" being unfeasiable "for many living in multi-family housing or renting" [1]. It's unclear whether electric trucks will charge en route, and if so, whether they'll have many people on board for long hauls. So you’re stuck, as a base case, with road trippers. An intermittent, lower-volume and presumably pro-cyclical market.
Put simply, the economics of gas stations don't map cleanly to EV charging.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
This is largely a function of needed to charge in a garage.
I don't charge in my garage, I charge in my driveway. My garage is stupidly small. My previous car, a small Subaru BRZ, barely fit in my garage. It doesn't help that there's a pillar right in the middle of it, preventing anyone from opening the passenger door of any car parked.
If I parked my Model 3 in my garage, I'd have about two feet between the front bumper and the back wall of the garage.
I guess "Garage" is just shorthand for owning a single family home.
My guess is that eventually there will be fewer but larger charging site. Built beside major routes and close to a big grid connection. Have a few hundred MW's of charging all in one place. Much easier to maintain and more investable for large companies.
That's still a dollar/day including CC fees. Seems reasonable.
Some of the very oldest chargers in Europe are just normal power sockets, but I don't know what happens if you connect a small appliance.
needs an easy Type I/Type II ... filter. easier than a kw slider
That works pretty well, though it's not entirely up to date yet. Shell ReCharge spots aren't listed consistently.
But what surprised me the most is that the Tesla map doesn't do a good job of alerting you to clustered Superchargers. For instance, in Quartsize, I've usually stopped at the only Supercharger I know about -- the one behind Carl's Jr. But across the highway there are new Superchargers, and behind Terrible's, there's a new one too. It's almost a year old at this point, and Terrible's has restrooms, and in 110F heat, the walk from the original Supercharger over to the Terrible's location is definitely something you'd want to avoid.
Tesla could do a better job of letting you know that when it's routed you to a Supercharger, there are actually alternatives/ options in the immediate vicinity. It pretty stubbornly just points you to whichever one it chose.
I wish there was a federal rule requiring all parking to have 240V. Every building spends millions of dollars on adding handicapped parking and making the building accessible -- these features are rarely ever used, but EV parking spots will be used every day and forever.