Where is everyone going to charge their electric vehicle?

[TeapotCollection]

On the way to work I saw a car on charge, parked on the road with the cable trailing over the footpath. I’d be worried about someone tripping over it, or someone stealing the cable! But then I thought what are people meant to do?

Hadn’t thought about it before but this just isn’t going to work is it?

The main problem is - as we all know - nobody has a right to the public highway outside their house.

It's entirely possible that the whole EV scramble could see this concept overturned. However, why should the public lose access to an amenity they pay for in order to allow someone to park their MuskMobile in a special place.

Unless, of course, people have to pay to appropriate the public highway. Now there is an idea.

I wrote a paper a few years ago about EVs and IT strategy for an insurer, so have kept a weather eye on things.

We have an EV as our only car. We also don’t have a driveway. There are a handful of lamppost chargers on the street which cost 24p/kWH, so about £20 for 300 miles. They’re slow chargers but will easily fill the battery overnight. That works fine for us.

So you charge overnight. How many lamppost chargers are there on your street? How many households? How many cars to each household?

What happens when everyone in the street has an electric car and they all need to be charged overnight?

We’ve had an EV (our only car) for five years without any charging issues. We’ve driven it all over Europe, including to Norway and back, no problems.

A friend who lives in a flat with no parking outside has now bought one. She charges it in a local municipal car park. It’s trouble free.

I don’t understand why government (previous and current) haven’t legislated that all new build houses with a driveway MUST have an EV charger as standard and that any estates of more than, say, 15 houses must also have on street charging points.

Builders won’t do these things voluntarily so they need to be pushed into it.

Same should apply to solar panels and batteries for all new build houses.

Re flats, my son is in a small complex of 18 flats. There is a small car park with 18 parking spaces, one allocated per flat. No visitor parking space, and they're pretty crammed in. There's no space for any charging points at all without sacrificing some of the footpath (assuming some kind of "box" for the charging infrastructure is needed. Even if they managed to squeeze one charging space, that will sacrifice someone's space, so it would no longer be a space per flat. Then you'd have a weird situation of people having to swap spaces when one needed to charge. Just completely impractical. It's already a nightmare with visitors coming and parking in whichever space happens to be empty at that moment.

I've got a drive at my office and have already applied to the council for permission to install a charging point on the office driveway. Outright rejection because it's in a conservation area, although not listed, but they won't allow anything to be fixed to the exterior of the building. I'm not even allowed an exterior sign for my business, so I have to rely on signwritten window vinyls!

I can only see things getting very problematic as we get closer to the deadlines. EVs are fine for people with driveways or who can charge away from home whilst shopping or at work, but probably the majority of drivers won't be able to charge at home, and that's a massive problem.

Never mind where you plug it in, where's the electricity coming from?

Locally we have a gas fired micro-generation system (noisy as fcku) which kicks in just half the week. And that's because that's their legally allowed time limit.

All the new builds around here (and there are a LOT) have the wiring and mounting in place for a charger outside each property, also in the parking areas where the properties are flats.

It doesn't make sense to put actual chargers outside each property as so many people don't have EVs, so the buyer would be paying for something they don't want/need. But making it easy to get the charger fitted is a good step in the right direction.

Lamppost type things and I’ve seen the newest breed which are like mini bollards that “hide” on the curbside then pop up with a key.
they are also popping up in workplace car parks which is great as slowly charging your vehicle throughout the day is far more efficient than ultra fast charging (which also has its place. When needed I can get 300 miles range in 15 minutes at one of those).

I’m not a fan of cables across the pavement which I’m sure will soon be outlawed. But there are LOTS of alternatives.

Why would they all need to be charged overnight? We can get by with charging ours once a fortnight but sometimes choose to do a little and often

Chargers are appearing in many places and many people can charge at home. There are far fewer limitations compared with petrol stations so we can put them in supermarket car parks, hotels and workplaces very easily

I have an electric car without a charging port at home. We have lots of superchargers near us (probably 20 within a 10 min drive). So once a week I go plug in at one of the supermarket car parks and my car charges while I do the weekly shop.

No-one can steal your charging cable as it is locked in place.

It will work fine as more and more electric superchargers are introduced. I live in a city so there are loads - at petrol stations, supermarkets, almost every carpark, car sales garages etc. I appreciate this isn’t the case in rural villages….. but they will have to introduce many more across the country.

I think its a fair point, and some electricity isn't very green (although it still improves air quality around the roads themselves)

But noone ever argues against 'the cloud' and all those data centres and AI which use a lot electricity. Much if it to store pictures of cats.

We have no driveway but have a lamp post charger across the road, and other charging stations on roads nearby. There are also lots of charging stations at large supermarkets near where we live. We've had no problems so far. I think it's very much dependent on how committed your local council are on availability of chargers... ours are all for it!

I live in an apartment not in the UK. We have communal charge points in the car park and it works just fine. Most offices and car parks have charging points too. It does rely on people moving their cars when they've finished charging, but most people are reasonable

Well I wonder if the pollution caused by burning gas to make electric at this generator cancels out the lack of pollution by the cars it can power. Noise wise it is not worth it. There is a case with EH dealing with the noise nuisance but the company is not keen for their cash cow to be silenced.

I look for petrol stations and larger car parks/drop off bays at larger retailers.

Um, no 😀. An EV’s battery is significantly bigger and heavier than a petrol-powered car battery. Like, enormous. It would also be extremely dangerous to charge one of those things in your home (think of the exploding e-bike battery stories, and multiply by many).

You don't have to. An electric car can easily do a 2.5 hour journey. I reckon ours could do a 5 hour journey without needing a charge. Most people would probably plan to fill up at some point during that 5 hour journey but it only takes 20 minutes to get a decent charge. Otherwise you could charge when you got to where you were going. Unless you're doing a massively long and time pressured trip which requires you to drive through the night without stopping then with just a small amount of forward planning EV is very doable.

The most I've paid for fast charging is about £30 out and about. Charging at home costs pence per KwH overnight, or is free on sunnier days as we have solar panels.

Actually that's not right. Swappable batteries are a thing in china. You go to a battery swap station and it takes 3 minutes to swap your battery for a fresh one (so Wikipedia tells me).

We have a residential car park, no parking on street. No idea what they will do longer term, I'm sticking with petrol for now

Yes indeed. It's more like half an hour at services on a 4/5 hour journey and I would always stop half way anyway.

A previous poster had to:

We drive to visit friends 2 1/2hrs away - the car would make it there and back, but it would be tight. My parents live on the way, so we park by their house and have a cuppa for 30 mins and charge.

It most likely does, in terms of carbon. But im not sure about particulates as it should be filtered. But having greener electricity is definitely central to making this work as you say

The National grid is struggling generally. But I dont think its ev cars causing that on thier own, we are moving away from gas boilers too and the whole cloud, AI thing is a massive energy user.

I live in a flat with allocated and numbered parking. We recently had a message through from our management company asking about our thoughts on installing a couple of EV charging points. Quite rightly nobody was willing to give up their dedicated space to allow a charging point to be installed for everyone to use.