Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by demag »

So are all chargers free everywhere?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

demag wrote:So are all chargers free everywhere?


I can't imagine so Dave, but they are at my place of work... They say so on the front of them...
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

xantia_v6 wrote:About a year ago there were 8 Tesla charging points installed in a hotel car park near here (we are 2km from a major autoroute junction). There would often be one or two recharging, yesterday I walked past and there were 5 recharging, including a model X.
They are busy installing a further 4 charging points. I suppose that means that Tesla are doing OK in France.

The EU is trying to introduce new legislation that forces all newly installed rapid charging stations after August this year (I think) to include Type 2 CCS connectors - which is the EU backed DC rapid charger standard that competes with the Japanese Chademo and Tesla Supercharger standards.

Apparently this will apply not only to publicly funded and publicly available chargers but also to privately funded chargers like the Tesla superchargers which were paid for entirely by Tesla and are currently only available for Tesla's to connect to and use. (No other car can use them no matter how much money you offered to pay, so I don't see how the EU can classify them as "available to the public" to meet the definition of the legislation) If you look at the wording of the legislation I think the EU are on shaky ground trying to force Tesla to comply and fit CCS connectors on their superchargers, but rumour is that Tesla are doing a mass roll-out of all planned new Superchargers in the EU before the August cutoff to skirt this new legislation as much as possible.

Of course the Model 3 also releases in July which may be a factor as mass roll-out of a cheaper model could put a lot of pressure on the supercharger infrastructure, however its unlikely any Model 3's will be sold in the EU or UK until mid 2018 so I suspect it's not the main reason for deploying so many new superchargers this early.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

demag wrote:So are all chargers free everywhere?

Hahahaha. No. :rofl2:

Well, depending on where you live, many of them may be. About 90% of the public chargers in Scotland are run by Charge Place Scotland and currently free to use thanks to Transport Scotland funding, although to access them reliably you do need a £20 a year RFID card as the smart phone app can be a bit iffy and if you don't have 3G/4G coverage where you are trying to charge you would be out of luck without using the RFID card. (I wouldn't like to rely on a smart phone app working to not be stranded without a charge, so I paid the £20 and got the card!)

It's anybodies guess how long this will remain of course, but I suspect a few years. The remaining chargers in Scotland are generally pay to use and run by private companies. Some are laughably expensive when most of the competing charge points are free to use and vastly outnumber the chargeable points. :lol:

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland its a very different situation. There is no benevolent benefactor like Transport Scotland paying for the infrastructure, just a bunch of different privately run, for profit charging companies with very disjoint and often non-overlapping coverage (meaning you need to use several of them depending on where you travel) and wildly varying tariffs! One of the most expensive is Ecotricity with £6 per 30 minutes use, regardless of how quickly your car can charge... #-o (although that is changing a bit soon) Some have reasonable charges, some border on outrageously expensive.

It's still the wild west for coverage and tariffs for public electric car charging, but I'm sure it will eventually sort itself out! :roll: Also as battery sizes in cars increase it will reach a point where all your normal driving can be done "within range", eg from an overnight charge at your house, meaning that the only time you would have to charge publicly would be on the occasional long trip away from home.

At that point the cost of public charging becomes moot, unless you are doing long trips away on a regular basis, as the cheap regular running from your normal charging at home would subsidise the more expensive charging on a long trip.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

There is no benevolent benefactor like Transport Scotland paying for the infrastructure

I think you mean 'like the tax payer.' :)
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

Gibbo2286 wrote:There is no benevolent benefactor like Transport Scotland paying for the infrastructure

I think you mean 'like the tax payer.' :)

Indeed. :wink:

I don't expect it to last forever, nor do I rely on it, and neither should any potential new EV driver. I don't use public charging that often and I'd say 90% of my driving comes out of charging at my house anyway.

Charge Place Scotland was clearly created to help encourage the transition to electric vehicles - like many new technologies it needs a helping hand to get it off the ground and reach a critical mass. If there was no public charging available nobody would buy EV's.

I don't have any problems with paying for public charging as long as its at a fair rate that isn't too much more than what I pay for electricity at home. Currently that's not the case, as some providers (mainly in England) are charging so much that it's not really any cheaper than paying for petrol or diesel, which kind of defeats the purpose! They know they have a captive market so they can get away with it - either pay, or you can't get where you need to go.

As batteries get larger the market will no longer be captive though as for most journeys a charge on the way won't be needed, or you'll be able to just drive on to the next competing charger that has a more reasonable tariff rather than being forced by limited range to accept one that is within range at a key location but expensive.

Subsidies will go away eventually and everything will work itself out I'm sure. I'm pretty optimistic. I'd compare it to electrical suppliers - once upon a time they were profiteering companies that could do what they like with no oversight however these days the electricity grid is recognised by the government to be so crucial to the nations economy that although they are private companies and still have some leeway it is relatively heavily regulated. The same kind of governmental oversight and regulation will happen for public EV charging I'm sure, once it too becomes an essential infrastructure.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

I think you're being a bit unkind to those private providers with the 'can get away with it' comment I'm sure that providing the set up doesn't come cheap so I'd guess they need to recover those costs before they can offer a reduced cost.

I think it's along the same lines as private cash points (ATMs) that charge £1:50 for getting your own money out of the bank when the banking groups do it for free.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

In answer to the thread's question "Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?"

precisely none at the 45th Scottish Borders Historic Vehicles Extravaganza at Thirlstane Castle at the weekend, but maybe for the 95th in 2067 the show field will be littered with Leafs! not to mention the exceedingly rare Fluence.

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by RichardW »

860 miles over the weekend, Scotland - Guildford and back. Saw a few Teslas on the road, and a couple of Leafs. Most Teslas were seen at the charging stations on the M-way; an S (on Belgian plates) and an X at Keele and 2 S's at Oxford. There may have been others, but I didn't spot the charging stations at the other services we stopped at.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

RichardW wrote:860 miles over the weekend,
Good thing you drive a Diesel and not one of those new fangled short range EV's then. :rofl2:

Couldn't resist. :)
Saw a few Teslas on the road, and a couple of Leafs. Most Teslas were seen at the charging stations on the M-way; an S (on Belgian plates) and an X at Keele and 2 S's at Oxford. There may have been others, but I didn't spot the charging stations at the other services we stopped at.

I'm noticing a lot of Tesla Model S's around lately all out of proportion to the approximately 4000 in the UK at the moment.

I saw a black one parked just along from work on the way to my car last night and have seen a white Model X in the same area twice this week. I'm having about 3-4 sightings a week lately. The white Model X was just pulling out as I was crossing the road so as I reached the other side and stopped to pretend to look at my phone to see whether I could hear it pass me by at low speed from behind and I could not - it would have only been doing 10mph but it was deadly silent. :twisted:

The EU is not happy about that apparently as new EU regulations come into force in 2019 that all new EV's sold after that time must have a noise maker below 20kph and while a temporary defeat switch is allowed its mandated that it default back to on every time the car is "started"....

On the one hand its good for numpty pedestrians that don't look before crossing the road but do we want to live in an EV dominated future where the annoying noise of ICE's are replaced with the annoying noise of artificial noise makers when everything could just be nice and quiet ? :? It's only really when you have a mixture of EV and ICE that you need artificial noise makers IMHO, if all cars were quiet the overall noise level would be far lower and individual EV's would be easier to hear.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by white exec »

In the early days of the London Omnibus, huge numbers of pedestrians were struck by them - because they didn't expect them to be there! Things can change, thankfully.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Hell Razor5543 »

I can see an issue with EVs, in that visually impaired people may not be aware of them approaching. I wonder if it might be possible for the PSV EVs to play music as they travel their routes, and for this music to be route specific? One route might, for example, have Beethoven's 5th Symphony playing, while another route could have Holst's "The Planet Suite".
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

I reckon Chris Rea's 'The Road To Hell' would be most appropriate for most journeys ;)
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Hell Razor5543 »

CitroJim wrote:I reckon Chris Rea's 'The Road To Hell' would be most appropriate for most journeys ;)

Mainly around the M25, as that song was written with the M25 in mind;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Hell_(song)
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by CitroJim »

Never knew that James :D It's a good track though...
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