But it actually turned out to be a complete non issue. My usage pattern (short occasional trips around town to shops etc and regular long trips to Bristol and back) could be handled entirely by stopping off for 15 mins at a supercharger when I went passed one. A bit more frequent than ordinary refuelling but not much more. It's reasonable to assume that 10 years from now fast charging will be at least somewhat more effective and a lot more ubiquitous.
I didn't have to touch any of the other charging infrastructure in London but there is a lot of it.
If we had been staying long term we would have used the 7kw chargers being built into lampposts all over the place[1]. The council will add one in if you have a car and ask for one, but there was already one within my usual parking area.
The lamppost thing seems to be London focused for now, but they're extremely straightforward installations and news like this is going to see them pop up everywhere.
Do you take your car out more than 20 times a month?
(The High Cost Of Free Parking explores this issue in depth)
Are you arguing for getting rid of apartments?
Also, to ban all parking on public roads is also infeasible aside from the houses with parking issues. Most city centre businesses would vehemently oppose such a move without replacement parking which would cost far far more money from the public purse.
So although I'm quite happy for people to have opinions, the consequences of enacting this opinion would be a greater waste of public resources than just allowing people to park on the side of the road (in most cases).
I think this idea of electrics desperately needing to charge every time they're parked - it's not wrong, but it's getting pretty close to being an anachronism, and I expect it actually will be on in 5ish years, certainly 10.
Imagine you turn up to a charging station behind 4 other cars, and there's 2 charging points. Your 20 minute wait is now an hour. If each car took 10 minutes then you'd only be waiting 20 minutes.
Increasing the average waiting time in a queue has a terrible impact on throughput.
- everyone who can charge at home (i.e. anyone with a garage or their own driveway),
- those who change in public places like shopping malls or at work, and
- any other infrastructure (like the "charging port in street light" thing)
so the new "gas station" is likely to get less busy - depending on home ownership in the area and how many shopping malls get charging ports, most cars might only ever visit "gas station" on a road trip.
I also think there will be a lot more roadside individual charging stations rather than specialised large locations that are convenient because of the centralised storage of a physical liquid.
Sure, but that's limited by land in cities and electrical infrastructure in more rural areas. Whether there'll ever be enough charging points to make charging your car not be a hassle is something only time will tell.
Here in the UK 10 minutes is already on the upper end of acceptable, I can't remember the last time it took me that long. 20 minutes would definitely be a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people.
That can make an enormous difference to their affordability, and should also inject a large pool of electric cars into the second hand market over the next few years.
> That can make an enormous difference to their affordability, and should also inject a large pool of electric cars into the second hand market over the next few years.
Still too expensive. My current vehicle cost me £4000. It has been paid for (I got a bank loan, I didn't lease or hire purchase) for many years now. It cost me next to nothing to repair, run, tax and MOT. It has next to no fancy electronics and it just works. I can to take it to any garage in the UK and they can repair it, with Teslas, BMWs, Mercs etc you can't really do that.
There is no benefit to me in owning an electric vehicle.
It can be done, but will require massive investment in infrastructure.
There are also problems such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve and other things that can be mitigated with ADR to an extent, but it's absolutely not easy
I do however think that we would be better off funding and building massive amounts of solar that gives us enough energy surplus to do large-scale carbon capture, instead of forcing everyone to move to electric vehicles.
If you think about it, we right now have an open loop transportation system - dig stuff up from the ground, burn it and forget about it in the atmosphere. Basically, extracting easy to use energy that was captured over a long period.
But we now have the tech to extend that to a closed loop system - capture enough energy from solar to recycle the burned fuel back into burnable fuel.
This will also mitigate all the co2 created when producing electric cars btw.
Plus, having that much battery capacity plugged into the grid should be exploitable to help manage the vagaries of solar and wind power.
If it really is so simple, why when I live in London do I not see entire streets filled with chargers? Surely you'd think that'd be in place by now given the time frames?
I think it's hand-wavey to say 'oh you can just charge at low current'. And if you've ever seen a petrol station near a motorway here you'll realise the idea of parking your car for x * 10 mins to charge would simply not work, there'd be multiple mile tailbacks.
Overall the govt treats this issue like it's a smaller problem than it really is.
The govt are going to make these cars mandatory soon. London is the ideal place to do this due to infra + rich people with EVs (more than you might think, far from 'almost nobody'), yet I don't see any street that has charges along it.
My point is that it's not easy. Having to upgrade the grid and dig up tons of roads is simply not easy no matter how much people want it to be.
Here's one within 100 meters of my very run of the mill flat https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4689844,-0.1013741,3a,30.1y,...
Here's an example of the light pole chargers that are being installed in residential areas in London:
https://www.ubitricity.co.uk/b2b-local-authorities/
They deliver 5.5 kW, which is fine for overnight charging.
They are also installing a few 43kw charging points for faster top-ups.
Why pay to own and store your own vehicle, which you might use 5% of the time, when you could hail an autonomous vehicle on demand, for less than the cost of current ride-hailing services?
Owning your own vehicle will become an unnecessary luxury, reserved for the kind of people who have the space to store them.
See https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/03/01/av-safety-myths-and... and his blog in general for a more in-depth analysis of the situation. It's likely we need new AI techniques to have fully autonomous vehicles that function correctly.
People would just need to continue owning electric/second-hand ICE vehicles and, in the case of electric vehicles, find ways of charging them away from their homes.
When autonomous vehicles become widely available (2030, 2040, or whenever), I think many would decide owning an expensive, depreciating asset they only use sparingly is more hassle than it’s worth.
I think "find ways of charging them away from their homes" does not scale given how long a charge takes and the numbers involved. If you've ever seen a petrol station at peak time you tend to get an idea of just how impractical that is.
I don't see any way round a truly colossal investment in infrastructure in order to move to fully electric in the UK (or any country), which maybe is necessary - but govts need to openly say this and then start actually taking action on it, not haughtily act as if it's not the case.
A lot of people have driveways and can charge at home. Those that don’t are likely those in cities who typically make shorter journeys and will need to charge infrequently.
If you’re one of the strange people who commute long distances out of a major city, you’ll just need to make a personal decision whether it’s worth the hassle.
I’ve been quite impressed at the rollout of charging infrastructure so far. If my quick Googling is anything to go by, there are roughly 30k public charging points for approximately 160k all-electric vehicles in the UK. Both numbers are growing rapidly but that ratio feels high right now.
The tech is already there. The incentives are there for energy companies to charge for the electricity. The political will (i.e. to permit installation of charging points in public spaces) is there.
Appears though that electric cars are likely to be far more durable than gasoline powered cars and cheaper. In ten years a EV will probably cost 80% what a gasoline powered car would and will last 30 years not 15. Cost of ownership over the life of the car would then be 40% of a gasoline car is today. Less considering maintenance and fuel.
Consider also it’s unusual for people to own cars for even 10+ years currently, for reasons that apply just as readily to electric or autonomous vehicles.
People want the latest and greatest. Many value the warranties they get with new vehicles. Over 30 years the odds of a vehicle being stolen or involved in an accident and being written off are also pretty high.
High mileage Tesla's show that the batteries last somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 miles. Which is 25 to 40 years based on the median number of miles people drive per year.
> People want the latest and greatest.
Lot of people just want an affordable way to get from point A to B with a minimum of hassle and expense. The game changer with electric is if the batteries and motors last 25 to 40 years then the rest of the car needs to match that.
Perhaps in 2030 we'll have them. Most likely not.
https://www.fleeteurope.com/en/new-energies/europe/analysis/... is one example - very relevant, as it's from London.
but this isn't to say i disagree; quite the contrary, i agree completely that it's a huge problem for EVs in dense urban areas, perhaps the biggest.
A typical oldschool sodium lamp pulls approx. 400-500 W. If you replace it with an appropriate LED - and that's critical, there are so many "superb" LED installations recently: yes, it pulls less, yes, it's more whiteish, no, you can't see s... Take two steps away from the very narrow cone and you are standing in total darkness, somebody can mug you and the person looking from the window in the building right next to you would see nothing. So, if you replace it with a proper LED, you save let's say 400 W per lamppost plus any extra the original design left for voltage losses, impedance loop, etc.
Now, this is all fancy schmancy when you install one charger per street and one car uses it occasionally, but when making bold claims like "all electric within few years", you take 4 lampposts x 400 W for 20 cars and you can charge each car with 0.08 kW. That may not be even enough for standby consumption (battery lifesupport - cooling/heating).
So, back to the original question - does London have some kind of special supernetwork running through streets with megawatts to spare, or is it just capitalising of having just few percent of cars charging from it. What's the plan to get to 100 % load within 10 years?
Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.
My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full.
Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right by the supermarket - where the power is already available), and also potentially an upgrade to the local power network.
If each of those cars is fast charging at 50 kW, the supermarket carpark will suddenly be consuming 10 MW. Assuming a constant cycle of people, that's equivalent to the average power usage of 20,000 houses.
Just in one supermarket car park.
Fortunately it's unlikely everyone will charge every time they pop in, but it's something that has to be considered carefully. The electric grid has to be sized for peak load - most of the time it's not near capacity. If we're going to slot electric cars into the existing grid we have to manage demand very carefully - which means only charging cars when electricity supply is high or demand is low. Everyone rapid charging whenever they feel like it (eg during the Saturday shop) will cause huge stability issues.
The most straightforward way to manage it is to try to get as many cars as possible charging overnight (or charging whenever they're idle) and then manage when they actually draw power centrally based on electricity supply. That means extensive kerb side charging points.
For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/four_year_delay_for_s...
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/16/national_audit_office...
In some parts of Japan, when you buy a new car the dealership has to get confirmation from police that you have a designated parking spot. They come around and measure it, then get back to the dealership who then gets to sell you the car. I'm sure now they sometimes have records and stuff they can go off but the gist is the city won't be providing space for your car, it's up to you.
Edit: To evaluate the scale of how difficult it is to implement on street parking - go and have a look out of your own window in a built up area and count the number of lamp posts and the corresponding number of cars. Right now (9:35am), in a pretty built up area, I can see three lamp posts on my own street, and eighteen cars parked on the road. One of those lamp posts is located where it's illegal to park because of double yellow lines. I currently live in a rented flat at the moment, and that has another 25 car parking spaces. To get charging points located there would require a number of disparately located and willing landlords to agree to wire up the car park for electric charging too.