EV Discussion thread

silvercar

michaels said:

It was a 5 minute walk from the gridserve hub at LGW to the outside of south terminal so an excellent free drop off option.  Can stay and charge for up to an hour.  The lounge with cafe and shop looks very swish but then it should do as it only opened a week ago.  Were about 6-12 of the 30 stalls occupied this morning between 11 and 12.  The 6 chademo also had CCS heads which is annoying as that means there could be no chademo even when there are empty CCS if people are not polite in choosing.  The 4 Tesla are not yet working.

Official launch website page here: https://www.mediacentre.gatwickairport.com/news/london-gatwick-becomes-first-international-airport-to-open-dedicated-electric-vehicle-charging-station-electric-forecourt-r-c7ab-40f32.html

Dave_Fowler

Petriix said:

@Dave_Fowler I hate to say it but I wouldn't ever go on a trip like that without planning my charging well in advance. In practice I simply don't drive to places that don't have reliable charging options. I normally look for places where I can charge overnight or while eating or shopping. That influences where I would be willing to stay. 

Most of us current EV owners do the vast majority of our charging at home. It's only the occasional long trips that require public charging. While it's definitely improving, (outside the Tesla Supercharger network) the infrastructure simply isn't consistent enough in terms of coverage and reliability to allow you to just visit a town and expect to be able to charge. It looks to me like the West Country is pretty awful for charging so personally, unless I could find somewhere to stay where I could guarantee a charge, I would probably go somewhere else for my holiday. 

We had planned our holiday and EV charging well in advance.  Whilst there weren't any of the best chargers nearby, there were 2 at the BP station, 2 at a nearby petrol station (which became unavailable shortly before going on holiday), and several at Frome railway station. Surely that should have been enough. Of the 14 chargers we visited only the 2 BP Pulse rapid chargers were working (and only slowly) and we couldn't extend our stay at the PodPoints at Tesco. 
Wells has quite a lot of chargers - 6 in our first carpark and many others around town. We were unfortunate that the 6 in our chosen carpark were faulty and it took so long waiting trying to get them to work. By the time we had driven round to Morrisons and then Tesco and spent ages trying to get an extended charge time, it was time to get back to Beckington to use the slow '150kW' chargers to ensure we had enough charge to get back home the following morning. 
Our holiday was mainly to see the lights at Longleat and to visit the wild animal park. We knew that there were no charging facilities at Longleat or anywhere nearby (what a missed opportunity for Longleat; there are tens of thousands of cars parked there for hours). 
Dave F

silverwhistle

Yes, there's plenty of destinations which would be ideal for even 7kW charging, which would amount to a decent top up if you are there 3 or 4 hours. Similarly charging deserts - Whitby, the Dales, central Wales? - will find people looking at them askance in the future.

On my point about improvements recently, it does take time for some of the apps to catch up: for instance Instavolt have a new 8 X 160kW hub at Weston-super-Mare which currently appears on their map but not Zap Map etc.

thevilla

I think zapmap hide new chargers for 30 days unless you're subscribed.

Grumpy_chap

JKenH said:

michaels said:

It was a 5 minute walk from the gridserve hub at LGW to the outside of south terminal so an excellent free drop off option.  Can stay and charge for up to an hour.  The lounge with cafe and shop looks very swish but then it should do as it only opened a week ago.  Were about 6-12 of the 30 stalls occupied this morning between 11 and 12.  The 6 chademo also had CCS heads which is annoying as that means there could be no chademo even when there are empty CCS if people are not polite in choosing.  The 4 Tesla are not yet working.

That worked out well. I imagine with the slow rate at which the Leaf charges it didn’t cost you much more than parking at the airport.

I wonder, though, how long before EV drivers realise it can be a cheap alternative car park. I imagine there are a lot of EV drivers within comfortable round trip range of Gatwick who, even though they don’t need to charge, might dump their car on a charger for a few minutes rather than pay exorbitant airport parking fees. It would be particularly useful when waiting for an arrival. I can see it getting very busy. 

I imagine that LGW work it out first and either price the charging at a higher rate, or apply a parking fee on top of the charge cost

JKenH

A couple of interesting tweets from Tesla watcher Troy Teslike

silvercar

Grumpy_chap said:

JKenH said:

michaels said:

It was a 5 minute walk from the gridserve hub at LGW to the outside of south terminal so an excellent free drop off option.  Can stay and charge for up to an hour.  The lounge with cafe and shop looks very swish but then it should do as it only opened a week ago.  Were about 6-12 of the 30 stalls occupied this morning between 11 and 12.  The 6 chademo also had CCS heads which is annoying as that means there could be no chademo even when there are empty CCS if people are not polite in choosing.  The 4 Tesla are not yet working.

That worked out well. I imagine with the slow rate at which the Leaf charges it didn’t cost you much more than parking at the airport.

I wonder, though, how long before EV drivers realise it can be a cheap alternative car park. I imagine there are a lot of EV drivers within comfortable round trip range of Gatwick who, even though they don’t need to charge, might dump their car on a charger for a few minutes rather than pay exorbitant airport parking fees. It would be particularly useful when waiting for an arrival. I can see it getting very busy. 

I imagine that LGW work it out first and either price the charging at a higher rate, or apply a parking fee on top of the charge cost

Depends who’s paying or losing out by people charging who aren’t using the airport.

My local train station has free (pay parking only) chargers, a situation that has been ongoing for at least 18 months. They are heavily used by non train users as evidenced that they were full on train strike days. If the railway company isn’t paying they don’t care. If the car park operators are paying, they are happy they are utilised without caring who by.

Martyn1981

Grumpy_chap said:

The idea of planning destinations by virtue of charging provision is crazy.
To be clear, it is the idea I am saying is crazy, not the individuals forced to adopt that approach.
It may well be the driver to force better charging provision - if tourist areas see reduced visitor numbers (proportionally) it may drive local business / authorities to influence the improvement of charging provision.  The reduction of visitor number may not even need to be realised if polling has an effect "XXX county voted best UK holiday destination, pushing YYY into second place because of poor EV charge provision in YYY"

That's a good point. It jogged my memory regarding the idea of installing Tesla destination chargers (7kW(ish)) at shops, businesses etc, going back 5+yrs, especially in the US.

I appreciate you are thinking larger, about tourist areas, rather than individual locations, but it's still a great way to encourage more people, or put them off. Push the info on charging facilities, and most important, ensure they have high operating reliability.

My wife mentioned recently, to a dog walker friend interested in EV's - it's not range anxiety that's the problem, it's charger anxiety (unless you have a Tesla for supercharging, but local low level charging is still a nice bonus).

Maybe tourist areas will start to get marked on their charging facilities and reliability? Maybe they already are, do I assume correctly that areas like tourist towns get a rating for parking facilities already?



Bit of a leap, but thinking about Dave's miserable time, it reminded me of the scheme to allow folk to use other people's home chargers. CW is/was part of that scheme*, so perhaps that's a fall back for some visiting towns, especially if it gets you free parking, on someone's driveway, if close enough to your destination.

*Not suggesting we all park at CW's, one hell of a detour for 99.99%+ of most people's trips . But now I'm wondering if folk living near Wimbledon, or Wembley Stadium etc, are party to the scheme?  

michaels

Seems odd that Tesla manufacturing costs are not falling given the model refresh and also reported falls in battery prices after the 21/22 hump due to supply shortages.

Europe sales I suspect were still part of the demand backlog/limited choice at the start of the year, not sure what the real ongoing level of demand will be as competition expands?

Grumpy_chap

Martyn1981 said:

*Not suggesting we all park at CW's, one hell of a detour for 99.99%+ of most people's trips . But now I'm wondering if folk living near Wimbledon, or Wembley Stadium etc, are party to the scheme?  

I am not sure about the "use my charger" schemes, but I live near to a major sport stadium and once considered the "park on my drive" type schemes as a way to make a little bit of pocket money.  The scheme I looked at would not register you unless you provided evidence of business insurance to cover the risk of a driver crashing into the house or damage being caused to the vehicle while parked.  Then the scheme would charge 40% of the total as a fee to cover their part of the service, the website, money collection etc.  Then the scheme said they would report annually to HMRC so that earnings were properly declared.  It was all too much bother frankly.