Sometimes, I dream that at least half of the same effort was made for public transport between densely populated areas
Currently doing my first long trip (~450km) with my EV. Highway charging is more or less already pretty good between Germany and Austria. Faced some issues esp where a 150kw charger maxed out at 18kw somewhere in Austria , when I had only 80km to spare.
I’m a bit skeptical about it really working on large scales during summer holidays. Aren’t EV supposed to charge for at least 30 minutes 1 hour minimum to be able to get some autonomy? How is that realistic with such a high number of vehicles?
Our EV6 should be one of such newer models. We just did our first holiday trip with it from Belgium to Brittany. Some key points to note;
- it’s 20 minutes up to 80% on fast chargers. The remaining 20% is an additional 20 minutes
- sometimes there will be no free charger and other cars are NOT fast charging
- while the range was quoted being 480km it’s closed to 320 with a vehicle full for a 2weeks trip with and additional car roof luggage
- you also need charge at destination. Our last leg was on smaller roads with less chargers
In addition with 2 kids it makes sense anyway to pause for 30mins every 300km or so. For us ot was a pleasant experience all in all.
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.
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.
We have a Tesla Model 3 since 4 years, did 90K km.
Exactly same experience here, we travelled across France several times and never had issues regarding charging or battery anxiety.
As we also have kids, we stop every ~2h30 and charge during that time.
France is nice for that. Also for their food but that’s unrelated 😅
In Belgium the stupid ass decision to give tax credit to companies that installed chargers is resulting in an over abundance of slow chargers that can hardly be used while charging stations are less plentiful. It’s bugging me to no end 😩
Newer ones can charge an acceptable amount in 10 to 15 minutes. Technology is rapidly improving, and will only get better. Also if there’s lots of chargers along multiple rest stops, shouldn’t be a problem to find one.
Bigger problem is the clusterfuck of roaming agreements, apps, charge cards, and obscure rules between all these charger operators. Also how to find the chargers and their status. Needs to be regulated into an open standard.
It’s not as complicated as I thought at first. Driving a Tesla you have most routes covered with Tesla Superchargers.
Additionally, I have a basic subscription from an electricity provider including their charging card for rare cases where the app doesn’t work. There are just 3 different types with increasing rates:
- Owned by provider
- Not owned by provider
- Ionity
Yes but that depends on the car and country. I have a 2019 Nissan Leaf. Don’t have access to any manufacturer specials or anything.
In the perfect world in the future, any EV will be able to plug in to any charger, automatically authenticate, and have a clear price display, and that info would be easily findable in a central place.
I’m on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That’s about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
right now
That’s the key phrase. Consider a regular gas station where cars constantly come and go. Now, imagine if in 10 years we’ll have a similar demand for EV charging stations. I can’t see that working well with the current batteries. Solid-state batteries are not available yet and there’s no guarantee that they’ll hit the market anytime soon.
You realize you can put “electricity pumps” in any retail parking spot, right?
Putting in a gas station is a horrifyingly complex infastructure demand. Slapping 2-4 chargers in literally every retail parking lot is simple in comparison.
Thanks for your feedback! I’m just curious how it would be realistic to scale the charging stations enough to sustain a larger (let’s say 30% or even 50%) of cars being EV. Should we just have giant charging stations hubs every 50 km?
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important.
That’s very true, to be honest my personal preference would be to reassess the need to have so many people travelling so much during July/August (you see the most popular hotspots such as Venise or Barcelona trying to reduce the number of tourists) but that’s a different story
The key is that you put charging next to other amenities like restaurants and rest stops.
You should never really be stopping only to charge your car, you should be charging while stopping to do other things.
I have a wall charger at my Airbnb for a year now, with plenty of drive thru stays from Sweden, Norway an Holland to Italy, Croatia and back. I have yet have a guest need or use it. 🤷
Does anyone know what the status is on the electryfying roads in Europe? Like they’ll do in Sweden (permanent electric road
patented technology […] transmits up to 300kW of power to the vehicle through a retractable pick-up that drags along a metal rail embedded in the road.
Interesting. So that would be one lane on only?
One of the biggest issue right now is diversification. If we (try to) establish various different loading technologies will we only be able to use one in some places? Will we be able to use and need various adapters? Will we have to adjust our vehicles eventually with a tech switch?
We’re still in a diversification stage. Hopefully we’ll arrive in a consolidation phase soon, or a more structured focused international approach.
We’re still in a diversification stage. Hopefully we’ll arrive in a consolidation phase soon, or a more structured focused international approach.
We shall see which system will come out best, maybe several. I do like the electryfying road for charge up
I’m not an expert or anything, but my masters was focused on driving technology, and specifically the intersection of technology and sociology. A conclusion I often felt drawn to is that, while humans are still the drivers, the technology will always lack efficiency.
Charging highway is a neat idea but having it shared between vehicles like trucks which try to travel a consistent speed, and cars which change lanes etc, means that I think the human factor will complicate the process (and safety) to a high degree.
There are a great many advancements we can make to automotive technology if we reduce our reliance on a human driver.
