The infrastructure is going to be a big problem with EVs. It's starting to be seen here. Battery density is increasing but the charge times still remain fairly long. The equivalent of a petrol station with pumps where you can come in, completely refill (recharge) your car then drive off in minutes just isn't there with an EV.
A full charge on an EV takes hours even with a decent power supply. The idea seems to be most people will charge up over night ready for the next day or days use. 20 minutes seems to be the average time to charge to 80% for most EVs on a fast charger. For some reason the last 20% takes longer (something to do with battery chemistry?). Most people won't have fast chargers in their homes of course, the domestic supply can't supply enough current.
I worked in the UK in 1995 for a company doing EVs back then and we had the same problem. The batteries were no where near as good (this is pre Lithium) but there were two charging methods. A slow, overnight charge, limited by the 13A or so domestic supply, and a fast 3 phase charger. But not many people have 3 phase into their house.
There are fast recharging stations about the place now and I think some of them in NZ are free. But the issue is it takes time, that 20 minutes to 80%. When there aren't many people using them it's not too bad, drive up, plug in and go away for 20 minutes. Probably they go into the petrol station and buy a frappy wankachino or whatever coffee petrol stations sell now - worst idea ever by the way, I get so annoyed at going to buy petrol and having to wait in line to pay while someone else is having coffee made, a seemingly 5 minute plus process. Thank goodness for pay at pump!
Anyway, here they have started seeing issues where people are using the free charge stations and going away leaving the car there to charge. Meanwhile someone else comes along to use it and can't and are left waiting until the previous owner decides to come back. Then they presumably use it for their 20 minutes and so on.
At the moment there aren't many EVs around so it's not such an issue but it's going to be. Even all the documentation about around (
https://www.energywise.govt.nz/on-the-ro...#out-about) this seems to assume you're the only person likely to be using them, fine while EV uptake is still low.
But what happens when most people have EVs come holiday times when everyone travels (and in NZ there are quite a number of bottlenecks where you get thousands of cars passing through in peak times and massive delays) where will all those people stop to recharge? Look at any petrol station on those travel routes and the number of cars passing through in an hour (actually any petrol station on a Saturday morning) and the cars passing through is huge. What happens when you add in a 20 minute delay for each one.
Would be interesting to know how many petrol station stops are made per KM of journey for petrol cars compared to how many charging stops will be made per KM for EVs.
It's also interesting when you start comparing the actual battery capacities and range and charge times of EVs. The articles in favour of them often mix and match figures quoting the shortest charge times but with the longest ranges. Teslas are often picked out as an example but those are the high end cars and even with their fast superchargers the 80% charge time on a model S is about 40 minutes. It has a range of about 500km on a full charge. A Nissan Leaf, a more modest car mere mortals might buy, has a range of about 130km. Those ranges are based on a 100% charge too I guess, I am guessing an 80% charge gives less than 80% range?
People really don't understand exactly how much energy there is an a litre of petrol and what that in petrol engines lets us do. And I think people are just hoping that some breakthrough in battery tech will come along and give us near instant charge times.
That's not even getting into the issues of manufacture and recycling of old EVs when that starts becoming an issue. I suspect the immediate solution will be ship off old batteries to somewhere else who doesn't have the same environmental protections. We're staring to see the same issues with plastic recycling these days. It's getting even worse with the modern, upgrade cycle, mentality. What happens when your 5 year old car is now considered obsolete, no more software upgrades for you. We've already seen the likes of Apple (with older iPhones) and Tesla throttling devices over the air. With modern tech someone else has an awful lot of control over how you can use it.
It's a shame our poor little Austin 7s will start being looked upon as old fashioned polluters that MUST be removed from the roads when, as has been pointed out above somewhere, we have vastly less impact on the world now than most things on the road.
Simon
Oops, that turned into a bit of a rant
