Electric Vehicle Thread!

[cheapchips]

For an EV you want to charge at home or work, and the manufacturers are running out of people who can do that.

Agree with your points on urban accessibility to charging but you're way off on the remaining addressable market of driveway owners in the UK. Even in a reasonably wealthy commuter town like where my parents live, adoption % is in the low single digits.

Lamppost chargers are my favourite technical solution for kerbside charging. Most of the wiring's already there.

 

[MfA]

Lampposts are both not universal and too wide apart, the only universals are the sidewalk and the road.

 

[cheapchips]

Lampposts are both not universal and too wide apart, the only universals are the sidewalk and the road.

I only said it's one of my favourite solutions. People don't usually need to charge every night and not all on street parking is allocated to particular properties. Curb side sockets for every property would be cool, but things could work well enough in many circumstances without something that extensive.

 

[MfA]

When you have to charge, you have to charge. Finding parking is enough of a hassle without being forced to select from a massively oversubscribed 1:5 subset, you'll be a couple streets over before you find a spot once there's majority EVs at that rate. Half measures will have to be upgraded to full measures eventually, might as well start early.

When they lay fibre in a street, even if you don't subscribe you can get a junction box free ... going in halfsies is just a waste. Same reasoning applies for charging (also they should have done the prep work for charging when laying fibre, but that boat has mostly sailed).

 

[Mariner]

A country-wide charging network would be very complicated to develop and hugely expensive to build.

Which is why governments across the world pretend that they don't need to consider such an option and that 'the market will develop it'. Short-sighted thinking, of course. Modern politicians are too cowardly to step up and commit to the investment which is required to make a step change in this area.

 

[MfA]

A country-wide charging network would be very complicated to develop and hugely expensive to build.

If you can solve the technical problem of how to make a charging connector near the ground, for the non aligned parallel parking we are used to in most of Europe, then the rest is mostly just ground work. At the multimillion scale you can make some small metal box to plug in too with some electronics really cheap, even if you need a couple million of them.

I think the cost is then roughly the same cost as the fibre rollout ... it could have been a lot cheaper if most of it was done during the fibre rollout.

 

[Davros]

Curb side sockets for every property would be cool,

if that was the case wouldnt pedestrians have to be constantly stepping over cables unless you want the sockets on the very edge of the curb and how does that work for a towerblock?
it would be a nice little money maker for those that steal copper cables though

 

[MfA]

Yes, probably on the curb. Though some type of capacitively coupled connector might even be possible by building it into the road surface.

What do you expect them to do? Pull stuff out of the ground by hand and magically pull the copper line with it? If they want to bring an excavator to steal copper wire out of the ground, they can do that already.

 

[cheapchips]

how does that work for a towerblock?

Where to tower dwellers park today? Put slow chargers there, or at least a % of those spots, since people typically only need to charge a couple of time a week (in the UK).

 

[Davros]

What do you expect them to do? Pull stuff out of the ground by hand and magically pull the copper line with it?

No I expect them to steal the charging cables

Put slow chargers there

I meant how do you charge from home when you live in a tower block

 

[cheapchips]

I meant how do you charge from home when you live in a tower block

Put slow chargers where people park their cars. If they live in a tower blocks or apartments and have cars, they must park them somewhere! That's where availability of roadside/streetlamp/carpark/ workplace chargers need to expand more.

At present, if someone in the UK doesn't have a home/work charging option then a decision to switch will be very circumstantial. Someone living near us doing a typical < 30 mile commute could get away with a weekly charge when doing food shopping.

It's a transition and things will continue to evolve both with charging infrastructure and car charging speeds.

 

[MfA]

No I expect them to steal the charging cables

That's a problem regardless with EVs/society, even if they just persist in their foolhardy plan to add streetcharging piecemeal rather than universal. If it becomes an epidemic, I expect some company will start making low speed chargers cables using aluminium (with clear indication to tell the thieves to look elsewhere).

 

[tuna]

Fast charging is too expensive, still too slow and has too much wear and tear for routine use ... it's for road trips. For an EV you want to charge at home or work, and the manufacturers are running out of people who can do that.

I had an EV without my own charging before my condo put up chargers in our garages. You can do it if you want to, especially with new cars with much better battery capacity and faster charging.

 

[MfA]

It's a PITA and it's not going to get easier as competition for chargers increases. To make it convenient you have to get so close to universal, you might as well make it universal.