this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Interesting, thank you for your feedback! I guess my main concern is about having enough chargers to be able to charge all the vehicles at one. Having so many cars stuck for 20 minutes isn't the same deal as filling them all in 5 minutes or so.
At least here in my region, most charging parks have somewhat between 10 and 40 chargers. Small stations 4 or 5.
I never had any issue finding an empty slot - the trick is to plan ahead a tiny bit and to have enough power left to drive to the next charger, worst case.
Also, chargers post their status online, so my car knows ahead if there is a free slot - and can change the route accordingly.
I’d say that charger state and availability isn’t exactly up to date consistently at least in France and Belgium. We found a lot of degradations on even newer stations and sometimes we had to skip to the next one. You’re absolutely right that one needs to be cautious a out being able to reach an eventual next charging station.
Imho that needs to be ironed out before we can hope to convince the general population of the feasibility of the transition.
Yeah, right now, EV driving is 100% feasible on every route I have ever taken - but it takes a bit of effort and planning over long distance & unknown routes. So, fingers crossed the EV charging network will grow as promised.
I love my EV, wouldn't go back to ICE ever - but I'm not sure that I would recommend my 70+ y/o parents an EV.
Thanks to apps like ABRP or, my app of choice, EVMap (+goggle maps for the navigation) it is easy to see the status (empty, full, defect) of a station way ahead - but if your expectation is just to drive like you did with an ICE, just go and if the car is empty start to look for a random fuel station - you might be annoyed pretty fast. Or you drive a Tesla, they do this pretty well without extra apps.
Maybe the charge cost is the one thing I’d bitch about. It seems quite more expensive. So far my employer pays for it but it looks like I could easily exceed my yearly allowance. Which is a luxury not everyone has so thinking about those who pay for their fuel it might be the 2nd blocking point together with the cost of the vehicle itself.
But yeah I wholeheartedly agree that I don’t wanna go back to ICE. Even my wife who was fiercely against (for no fucking reason) is now stealing my car on any occasion.
The only case where this is true is if you use DC-Fast charging all the time. AC charging is usually around 40ct/kWh in Germany, which with a modern EV with 16-20kWh/100km is between 6,40€ and 8€ per 100km. A bit more due to charging losses, but thats not that much on modern cars. 7-9€ is the maximum. 16-20kWh is for a car like an Kia EV6 though, which is a higher-end car. If you compare that to a similarly priced ICE car, e.g. an Mercedes C-Class which uses ~6.5l/100km, you pay 11,50€/100km with the current prices of 1,75€-1,80€ per liter. For your daily business where you only drive from home to the office it's totally feasible to use AC-charging 99% of the time.
DC-Fast charging is more expensive with ~70ct per kWh, but only useful if you do long distance trips. On long distance your car needs more energy than in the city (due to regenerative braking not doing that much), so at least 14€/100km with 20kWh/100km, probably ~16€ realistically. Compare that to Autobahn gas stations with ~2,30/l-2,40€/l and you get 15€/100km for the C-Class though. So even then its not drastically more expensive, if you directly compare the prices which most people pay on long-distance trips.
HOWEVER! You can of course drive your gas car to gas stations a bit further away from the Autobahn and save quite a lot, filling up the car for the non-Autobahn gas prices again. Thats not possible with EV fast charging, since DC-Fast charging costs the same everywhere.
HOWEVER AGAIN! If you don't drive long distances regularly, which most people don't do, you will save a significant amount of money since charging is cheaper than gas.
Admittedly I haven’t ran the numbers yet but based on my budget consumption I am clearly burning it faster since I switched to EV. I don’t know what you got wrong but in my particular case it is more expensive. I will run out of budget. Top of mind I can already say that before I topped up twice a month while now I charge every 3 days. And I didn’t change my driving behaviour.
With you not changing your driving behaviour that also doesnt make sense. If you topped up twice a month, thats ~1400km a month of driving? So ~50km per day, which would mean your EV has to be charged every 150km?
The tank was about 800km so slightly above your estimate. The EV6 reports an average consumption of 19,58kwh/100km. Slightly above your very conservative estimate. In addition we went on holiday as mentioned so that affected my average.
Can’t say for sure but this is my measurable experience…
so.... certain countries in Europe do trains AND EV charging better than the US - love that
Yeah I wondered about the current throughput of a gas station and how would the charging time affect road congestion even given full charger availability. Also the room needed for stations will likely be much larger to account for the increased parking time during charge.
An interesting side effect would be that drivers would have forced breaks from driving, potentially resulting in less crashes due to attention exhaustion.