Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

The Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV is fitted with a 3.7 kW on-board charger for Type 1 AC charging, in addition to rapid DC capability. This means that even when connected to a fast charger with a rated output above 3.7 kW, the Outlander PHEV will only be able to charge at 3.7 kW
.

Well that doesn't surprise me and explains why the regular silver beast took so long to recharge yesterday, that I abandoned recharging the Leaf yesterday. The other slot was occupied by a large battery capacity Audi e-tron on a 7KW charging post so was going to be on most of the useful day anyway.

So back for a charge up this morning, and there's the Outlander still plugged in 24 hours later. I do have full authority to unplug it from the owner, but really they should shift it off the slot when the charge is done.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Looks like there hs been a bit of funding for a Taxi and Private Hire series of chargers across North East Councils, on Council Land to facilitate Taxi and Private Hire Fleets to switch to electric.

The one at Station Road Car Park Houghton referred to by Steve is one of them. Looks like they arent going to be available to the genersl public.

https://www.swarco.com/stories/contract ... north-east

I thinks a similar scheme was initiated in West Yorkshire with the difference being that one bay was reserved for Taxis/Private hire and another for the public at the same location.

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Gibbo2286 »

Probably government funded like this Bristol lot Neil.

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bri ... ly-2522821
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by myglaren »

Daughter said the ones in Houghton were for council vehicles.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

In the very early days the current generation of electric vehicles, that is literally only 10 years ago. The Renault Fluence was designed to allow a rapid battery swap rather than a recharge at the roadside on your journey.

That approach was trialled in Israel, but has disappeared in favour of ever more rapid charging, at the roadside.

Well NIO in China have revived it, and surprisingly it is on a pretty large scale

They already operate over 200 battery swap stations around China and plan to have 500 stations by the end of the year.

NIO have a bit of a different business model, hugely focussed on customer care and an exclusive club for its customers with "NIO houses" meeting places for NIO owners, and contrary to every other manufacturer have developed their battery swap network for the exclusive use of their customers.

Maybe a parallel with TESLA's Superchargers, but opting at least in part to offer the battery swap. 0-100% charge in 3 minutes and 500,000 swaps done last year.



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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by mickthemaverick »

I watched that video with much interest, thanks Neil, the basic concept of a battery swap is a great idea but I fear the process as shown may not be workable in a country with significantly less compliant drivers. The Chinese have a remarkable attitude to authority response and, without getting political, I think that is why such a well structured system works for them. In the UK and USA with a significantly larger proportion of non conformists, and I am one myself in some areas, I can see the swap stations being vandalised, the cars being bent so the equipment doesn't work properly etc etc. (Made me smile when he said the whole system for a Nio owner was free of charge!! Errr doesn't that rather defeat the object? :-D )

However the principle is great if you extend it to the possibility of a car with 300+ miles range and the owner having two batteries, one in the car and one at home on slow charge from a normal domestic supply while you drive the 300 miles. For me that would mean a battery swap on average every 4 days or so allowing plenty of time for the battery to trickle charge and hence reduce the load on the network as the charging current draw would be well within your normal household appliance range. eg if a 7Kw charger takes 9 hours to charge a car then in 96 hours you would only need about a 700 watt charger which is less than a single bar fire! Hence no need to upgrade the local network to support lots of overnight 7Kw chargers in a given street.

To make such a system work would obviously require designing a system where, for example, the batteries have undercarriage and docking plugs so basically you would go to the back of your car, press a couple of buttons and the rear panel would raise up and the batteries undercarriage drop to the ground. Then you would switch off a master switch roll that battery out and swap it with the one on your charging point and then roll the fully charged one back in and dock it, raise the undercarriage and lower the rear panel back into place and away you go!! SCHIMPLES!!! :-D
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

NIO are very much selling their brand, and building their infrastructure which cements their brand loyalty. Of course the cars function as globally sellable, yes luxury, electric vehicles which recharge in the same way as other electric vehicles either at home or on the road. They don't need a "battery swap" infrastructure in other countries but its a niche service for their Nio club in China which is expanding and working. Very much customer experience/service focus....including those "recharge vans" mentioned at the end of the vid.

Do you buy a NIO car, or do you subscribe to a NIO service and join the NIO Family :?:

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Gibbo2286 »

Had a little chuckle about that '3 minutes' battery change, he quickly skipped over the fact that he had to kill an hour of time because there wasn't a battery in stock ready to fit. :? so the change actually took an hour and three minutes............at least.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by mickthemaverick »

NewcastleFalcon wrote: 02 Mar 2021, 11:52
Do you buy a NIO car, or do you subscribe to a NIO service and join the NIO Family :?:

REgards Neil
I think that largely depends on your view of the world and conspiracy theories etc. If you believe in the IT dark arts then it is perfectly possible for all the Chinese produced cars to be pre installed with tracking and bugging software etc to be used by Nio or maybe political bodies as they see fit. That concept does of course apply to all manufacturers in terms of the ability to do so which leaves the consumer to make a choice. Who do you trust? Are you bothered? Would you rather lay yourself open to one company or country over another? Or should you just get a horse? :-D
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

mickthemaverick wrote: 02 Mar 2021, 12:25
NewcastleFalcon wrote: 02 Mar 2021, 11:52
Do you buy a NIO car, or do you subscribe to a NIO service and join the NIO Family :?:

REgards Neil
I think that largely depends on your view of the world and conspiracy theories etc. ....
You may have read something into my little sentence which wasn't there Mick :-D

It was just a simple point of creating brand loyalty through top notch customer service and creating a family of customers who once they "buy" NIO always buy NIO.

Of course the battery swap isn't free, the NIO "club" houses aren't free, and the little emergency charge up vans aren't free. All be wrapped up in the service fees/contract hire monthly payments or the selling price to outright buyers.

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

In Other Battery Swap news, this time on the two-wheel front...
Honda, Yamaha, KTM, and Piaggio cooperating on swappable batteries for electric motorbikes
The founding members of the consortium believe that the availability of a standardized swappable battery system would both promote the widespread use of light electric vehicles and contribute to a more sustainable life-cycle management of batteries used in the transport sector.
https://electrek.co/2019/09/23/check-ou ... -scooters/

Not a new idea..in Taiwan the company Gogoro Electric Scooters already operate over 1,000 "Gostations" for swappable batteries across the Country.
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Mandrake »

One of the myths going around about EV's is what I refer to as the "long tailpipe fallacy". Essentially its the argument that an EV just moves the pollution from the tailpipe to the powerplant generating the power and it's just as bad if not worse than what comes out of the tailpipe of an ICE vehicle. I've even seen a few dear French Car Forum members believing in and/or propagating this myth... :wink:

There is a fatal logical flaw in this argument though in that it usually compares only the tailpipe emission of an ICE car with the entire energy generation and delivery chain for an EV, conveniently ignoring and glossing over all the pollution produced to get oil up from under the ground, refined and delivered to your car before you even turn on the engine, as well as the enormous amount of electricity involved at all stages of this process that would be better used to simply charge an EV directly instead of doing all this hard work to drill, refine and transport petrochemicals.

An absolutely brilliant animated video has been put together going into the true details of this refining process to give a bit of needed perspective. Robert did the voice over for this video but it's actually the work of someone else. You can skip to 1:35 if you just want to see the video. Enjoy. :)

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by Gibbo2286 »

An interesting video Simon but it skips over the fact that not all oil production is used for transport, although it has risen to almost double in recent years.

When I was a youngster it was the case that petroleum was a waste product of the oil industry and they were happy to find a market for it with the rise of the motor car.

So currently just short of forty percent of the oil produced is not for transport use.

So do we stop oil production altogether and find alternatives for all of its uses? If not what happens to the waste product i.e. petroleum.

The video is interesting but was clearly intended to give only the bright side of the EV story.

https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/39/
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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

This is where the oil companies will make their last stand, and attempt to make e-fuels, synthetic fuels, blue hydrogen, with carbon capture and storage.

viewtopic.php?p=671610#p671610

The new Energy Companies your Shell's and BP's, will increasingly become more Energy and less "oil", but will continue to produce it and supply it in developing countries.

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Re: Electric Vehicles-Infrastructure

Post by thorter »

Consider if we scrapped one million IC cars, and replacing them with electric. Where is the extra electrical power to run them to come from? Not from wind, solar, hydro or nuclear, which have preferential grid access, and so already run at capacity. Instead, coal or gas generation must increase to fill the demand. This will persist until such times as there is a surplus of “zero carbon” electricity, so not for many years yet.

As regards vehicle manufacture, there would seem to be little in it. Either might be produced using renewable or nuclear energy eventually, but at present the major energy input is fossil for refining and manufacture of (primarily metal) raw materials, and when the batteries are included it is hard to see how electric vehicles can be better than conventional IC cars.

Here is the National Grid generation graph for today. How many electric cars might be charged from wind energy?
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