(electric cars) aibu to think that this won't work?

[greenacrylicpaint]

currently stuck at a motorways service station.
there is a long queue for the chargers of which a few are not working.

imagine summer holidays. how is that going to work? train long distance and then cars/bikes locally?

Housing estates built over the past 30yrs or so, would have been designated as gas and electric or electric only. The cables laid to carry the power to each would have been different capacities. There is no way on this green earth that the capacity of cabling on a duel fuel estate would be enough to charge the car batterys if every home had a charging point. The substation would blow.

And that's not to mention the rape of the land in order to extract the rare elements needed for making all these batteries. What happens to the parts of an electric car when it dies? How is the electricity going to be generated? Sustainably? I don't think there are enough wind generators to provide enough power, they are having difficulty already, hence the warnings of power cuts this winter. The generators at sea will need frequent changing as the superstructure rusts away..........

If you look at the number of petrol pumps at service stations, and reckon on a 5 min fill at a pump, if an electric car takes an hour to charge, you will need 12 times that number of charging points for an electric car takeover.
Incredibly simple maths, and ingores massive of things like range, but shows how far off we are being able to have electric cars widely used.

YANBU. Electric car technology is advancing very quickly, however there is still work to do on economies of scale before small, genuinely affordable electric cars with realistic ranges are available.

The problem is that the charging infrastructure to support those cars does not exist, and will not exist any time soon. How are all the millions of car owners who don’t have off-street parking going to charge their cars overnight? If technology advances to the point at which it takes 30 minutes to charge an electric car, that’s still 10 times longer than it takes to fill a tank with petrol, so where are we going to put the tens of thousands of extra chargers needed to meet the demand? Government, the energy industry, the car industry & retailers need to work together to find solutions but I see no evidence that this work has even started.

440 miles without a half hour break ?!

we don't own a car.
we don't need it day to day and live in an area with good public transport and plenty of bike lanes.
rent one if we need one.
even renting one for a few weeks a year is cheaper to us than paying for upkeep of one.

I can't imagine going back to owning one again atm.

Well we travelled 4 hours to Kent on one charge from home (midlands). Then did a quick charge at a McDonald’s before we travelled home. No big deal. We have the Kia E Niro

The poster said round trip

I used to have to do this in a day (470 round trip) but the place where I was going was a rural home, for a home visit, I did this once a month or every few weeks, no capacity to charge while there and the whole day took me around 9 - 12 hours depending on the traffic, no way would I add on another hour to charge the car up. I drove straight there, drove straight back with one quick fill on the way back

I think the only way it can work (other than wireless charging) is to have a small battery you can swap out, so you can charge it at home and swap while you are out and about (and have more than one spare if doing a long journey). It would also work for people in eg terrace houses who can't charge cars easily.

I even find filling up with petrol tedious, so I definitely don't have the patience to hang around for chargers!

I have a self-charge hybrid which is a good compromise for me (and cost half the price of an electric car at the time).

Another issue : One of my friends is a surveyor, she works for a house builder. Building regulations now stipulate that all new-build houses should be fitted with electric car charging points. Good idea. The only problem is that National Grid’s existing infrastructure can’t provide enough power to feed them all…

I havent seen new builds fitted with these?

Ours does around 500km.

Its easy to charge and we have done long trips on it fine. I haven’t ever needed to charge on motorway, same as I have never used motorway petrol station for petrol either.

In comparison, almost all houses and flats have off road parking here. And in small town of around 3000 people there are 30+ public chargers including at supermarket, swimming pool and school. The nearest petrol station is 10 miles away.

Our neighbours have just added 2 chargers on the side of their farm property which are open public chargers on private land. Heavily funded by government. I think many in the countryside will do this, so you can charge easily even remotely

We're the same. We signed up to a car sharing scheme, have an electric cargobike for trips with our child, and an electric motorbike if we want to go a bit further on our own.

We live in the Netherlands, which has much better infrastructure for this kind of lifestyle.

@bellac11 I think I've read that some new build firms are getting around this by installing an exterior plug socket rather than a proper charging point, which means that technically you can plug in a 'granny charger' but it's not really an EV charging point, takes forever as very low power supply and not really meant as a daily charging solution.

I get about 200 miles on a full charge. More if the weather is warmer.

I have a home charger, it costs around £1.20 for a 4 hour charge. This will charge up to 80% within this time.

If I am out and about and see a free charger I will plug in. But they are getting rarer.

The infrastructure needs to improve and companies need to ensure that chargers that are out of order are fixed far more quickly.

I am going on a 260 mile journey on Monday and I am planning my route. I intend on stopping to charge, probably twice as where I am going has hardly any workable chargers.

We need to get to a stage where almost all parking spaces have access to a charger for full transition to EVs to be viable. I doubt we'll be anywhere near that by 2030.

We have an electric car but only because we have a driveway to charge it on. Can’t understand why you’d have one without your own charger or very reliable use of one at your workplace - who would want to spend hours out of the house sitting around waiting to charge it or possibly not being able to charge it as the charging points are broken or in use? We are also fortunate enough to have a regular diesel car too for long journeys…

@junglejane66 - that sounds really interesting! What kind of time scale are we looking at?

We currently have a hybrid that will do 40 miles in summer, 25 in winter - so fine for nipping to parents, running kids about etc. but then goes into petrol for long journeys
I wouldn't consider full electric yet until the infrastructure improves vastly

Thought this yesterday as diving in opposite direction past a 17 mile traffic jam on m6
taking 2and 1/2 hours to get through

There are also apps like co-charger where you can find people who allow public access to their home chargers. You do pay the charger owner for it through the app but it can be really helpful in a pinch.

We nearly bought an electric car last year but decided on a full hybrid, mainly for because of the lack of facilities. We do have a driveway and our next door neighbours have gone electric, but they have a petrol car for longer journeys. Of our friends who have gone full electric many have had a nightmare trying to charge on longer journeys or plugged in and the charger has failed half way through etc. give it 10 years and it will be the norm, but for now we aren’t there yet.

YANBU I drove my electric car on its first long trip this week. It’s usually fine for local journeys as I charge it on the driveway at home. However, this longer trip was so stressful.

It took me six hours in good traffic to get from Bristol to Worthing via no less that five charging stations (needed to charge twice).

It took me two hours just to get from the hotel to the motorway outside Bristol due to the fiasco of charging in the city centre. And we had tried a few times to charge before arriving in the city two days before but ended up arriving with a low battery due to failing to find a fast charger (we gave up on the slow charger as it gave us only six miles in 20 minutes!)

This was all with planning and use of zap maps and with a passenger helping to navigate.

To all those saying ‘just plan’ it’s not that easy if you arrive to find the chargers are either out of order or in use (with a minimum 30 minute wait).

I would definitely get rid of my EV if it didn’t save money on tax (company car).

They said it was a 440 mile round trip.

But you can't guarantee that it'll only take half an hour to charge a car. What if there are no chargers available? Or half of them are broken and you're stuck waiting for ages?

Whereas with petrol/diesel, you can just fill up and go. Even if there's a queue it doesn't take half an hour (or more) to fill up a car with fuel.

Exactly @thelobsterquadrille . My car would take 40 minutes to reach the max 210 charge and then would only achieve this mileage if I kept speed below 56 mph. So a 200 mile trip will involve charging twice. Don’t forget that things like using the air con or driving over 70 will reduce the range to well below the max of miles indicated on the dash (IME)

Exactly.

Around here it's just not viable. Even if you have your own drive and a private charging point, it's too far between public chargers to make it possible.

on the plus side if forces a break every couple of hours.

That sounds good, but it's far too prescriptive and constricting. That might be a good average to kind of work around, but people aren't robots and it's much better when the driver/passengers can decide when they need a break rather than having to fall into line with the car's demands or when an algorithm insists on it.

I remember once printing out an AA route which involved a trip on a ferry. It very matter-of-factly told me where it was 'time for a break' after two hours of travel time had elapsed, except that the ferry journey took about 1h45m, so it was ordering me to stop for a break after nearly two hours of arduous relaxing in an armchair with a drink and sandwich and reading the paper!

I also had an Audi that would 'helpfully' and distractingly flash up '2 hrs' on the dashboard after the engine had been on for two hours. In doing this, it prevented it from communicating other important information for the driver, as the screen had now been hijacked. Of course, it had no idea if you were sitting in a gridlock unable to go anyhere, were only 5 minutes from your destination anyway or indeed had been swapping drivers every two hours without turning the engine off.

I think there are two possible solutions to the issue in the OP, though. I believe that one of the longer-term goals of 'smart' motorways is to facilitate wireless charging, so you won't even need to stop at all. I imagine this will also be the case with home/public car park charging, where there will eventually no need to actually connect the vehicle to the charging point, thus you could get loads of cars parked around one 'hub' within a reasonable range.

The other one, which I personally don't like the idea of at all, but I can see may be around the corner before too long, is to get out of the mindset of owning and being responsible for YOUR car and separating the two distinct needs of the travellers and their luggage with the provision of transport for them. Once cars are all driverless, they will be able to take themselves off empty to a charging point whenever they need it and then a replacement car will be able to bring itself over to where it's needed to transport people. They may even develop a way of automatically moving your bags from one boot to the other. Thus, as long as you don't mind/care/have any choice over which car you travel in, A car will serve you at every stretch along the way.

When they're properly here, driverless cars will have as much to do with eliminating the need to own cars as much as the need to drive them. Of course, that does rely on there being plenty to go around; otherwise, instead of sitting around waiting an hour for a point to charge your car, you'll just be sitting around waiting an hour for a replacement care to arrive....