Electric Cars Are Coming: But Where Will You Recharge?
In the News
They've got the only electric car in the village. Tiffany Snowden and her husband bought their second-hand Nissan Leaf a few weeks ago and love it. It's smooth to drive and, she says, "It's got quite a lot of power to it". But there's a problem. It's a pain to charge up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51678830
How is this actually going to work??
Don't think this has been thought out properly, maybe fine for people who have drives and can charge them at home, but if you live on a standard terraced street how are you going to recharge your car , you will be reliant on local charge points and in my area currently I only know of the local Morrison that has a point to recharge electric cars, not sure what they charge for that thou and whatever the charge is you can almost guarantee that will increase as electric car become more poplar. Also not sure how long it takes to charge a car I suspect it's not as quick as filling with diesel or petrol , but my local Morrison currently has only two charging points, how many would they need if electric cars were as poplar as petrol cars.
Exactly, when they are queuing around the block just to charge up, because I believe it does take some time, it's not going to work...
At the moment it's not practical to change over. Last year there was a tv programme that tested an electric car on a long journey and the presenter found it quite stressful to constantly keep checking the power gauge and realise that there was no charging point nearby. They also noted that the power levels were not accurate. The hybrid is the only way we can gradually change. Mango4 The last time I checked it out the charging time from empty is 8 hours, a refill of 100 miles takes about 40 mins and it costs Β£5. (that was last year)
I don't think it is practical, can you imagine the number of leads in any given road at night running from house to car etc.... especially where they don't have individual drives. What a nightmare. We visited our local tesco a couple of weeks ago, at 6am when they open, and they were in chaos. You couldn't buy anything chilled or frozen because the power had blown at midnight and they were waiting for the power company. The cause - they had been installing these electric points for cars. We spoke to our electrician soon afterwards and apparently it is a regular occurrence having power failures - something to do with the cabling.
tumblespots You made me see pictures in my head of black and white films where the telephone exchanges have endless wires being plugged and pulled. I think I will sit it out until they get all the bumps smoothed out. I can't see how it would work on the average terraced street either.
angemski Yes.... I refer to that in one of the other comments below when replying to kirsteyjames
No point in me having one. Parking in my street is a nightmare, i would need a really long extension lead to charge my car overnight
It sounds as though your road would become spaghetti junction with criss-crossed wires overnight and what is to stop others from taking the power point out of your car and putting it in their own?
tumblespots omg i didnt even think if that. People going out in the mornings with flat batterys cos someone else been using their electric
KirsteyJames Exactly, although I don't have one of these cars and don't know how easy it is to connect or disconnect the 'nozzel'? But in theory someone could use your supply, you could be paying for it financially and then, as you say, have a flat battery too!
They need to have many more charging points for the government plan to phase out petrol and diesel cars to work. The infrastructure needs to be in place.
As you say it is down to the government so we all know that's not going to work! They brought the plan forward by (can't remember) 15 or 20 years so no time for full implementation now! Just a rush job.
Unless new technology allows charging within a minute, maybe the newer graphene batteries will have better charging possibly but for the moment we need removable battery packs that can be quickly swapped out but that isn't what manufacturer's are currently doing they are all doing their own thing. When a standard battery pack becomes available pretty much all existing electric cars will be seen as very limited.
On large journeys you need to drive into a charging station and swop out your batteries for charged batteries and then drive on the charging station then take those empty batteries and charge them which will be used for another car maybe 1 or 2 hours later. I can't see any other way you can practically use electric cars for long journeys.
However we need to start thinking about using lighter transport like e-bikes. Lets say a car had 20 x 8kg battery packs plus a permanent battery, probably just 4 of those packs would be enough for a motorbike or just 1 for an e-bike where you also peddle yourself. We have to move to a standard battery pack that could be used for a wide range of vehicles but we need to think about lowering vehicle weight too. Single person cars should be a thing too. Cars are ridiculously large much of the time and it has been getting worse with SUV's.
I totally applaud the government's policy though. Even if we aren't prepared that means more people will use existing cars rather than buy new combustion engine cars which means more jobs in the service sector repairing older combustion engine cars.
I think you are right, the time it takes to charge a battery is crucial here as you can't have trails of cars waiting in queues around the streets. It concerns me about swapping batteries for one already charged though as someone still needs to do the re-charging and you need to be sure that the re-charged battery is fully re-charged and not just partly which could have knock-on repercussions. You have to be able to trust the re-charger and it would need to be manned.
tumblespots I would imagine the petrol stations would be ideal charging stations too so you would go there either to fill your combustion engine car, charge your car or swap charged battery packs. The battery packs would have chips on board that would know the state of charge etc. It would literally be the same companies as today, i.e. BP petrol stations etc.
Not only is the current situation poorly thought out but its often major work on a car to repair or replace battery cells with removable battery packs you can just remove the faulty battery pack and replace to restore performance. The current electric vehicles are extremely poorly thought out. It's like early motor cars at the beginning of the 20th century most of those had poorly thought out technology that was quickly abandoned and the same will be true of these early electric vehicles. Can you imagine driving to Europe and back with a E.V. constantly trying to find a charging station and spending a huge amount of time charging when you have ferry or euro-tunnel time to keep.
BonzoBanana I just can't imagine anyone going very far in one of these electric vehicles. When Mr Tumblespots was working he travelled around the country doing 35-40,000 miles pa, I just couldn't imagine him ever coming home if he had to spend all day/night recharging the car battery before being able to continue his journey. We would have been strangers! As you say, going abroad by car, well, that would be laughable
You are right the first people to buy 'new innovations/inventions' are the guinea pigs for the technology and ultimately will test everything out for the rest of us. In the years ahead (30 years?) when it is all over and done with I hope everyone will be happy with the changeover.
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