Charge your EV from home

facade

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81868554#Comment_81868554

You mean 3.5 miles/kWh 😉 but check your maths, 7kW adds 3.5x7=24.4 miles per hour, so 10 minutes only adds 4 miles.

born_again

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81868567#Comment_81868567

Yep, when you had to go to the local chemist to buy the fuel 🤣

Herzlos

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81868589#Comment_81868589

God I couldn't have flubbed that up any worse if I tried! Thanks for the correction!

Just as well I wasn't meant to be doing anything important at work.

silverwhistle

There's no doubt there will be issues along the way to wider EV adoption, and it seems like some of you on here will always find a reason that they can't cope with them. But just as transport gets people to where they want and need to go in many different ways, so there will be different ways of charging.

Some of the arguments remind me of those against renewable energy: "the sun goes down at night, the wind doesn't blow all the time", etc. All individually correct statements, but really not looking at the wider picture.

Naturally those of us with off road parking have an advantage, and that's why we tend to be the early adopters, although in my case I had to do some work to put block paving in front of my ex-council terrace. But there are people on the EV forums who don't have home charging and they manage in a variety of ways. If I were not able to charge at home I'd probably use a local Tesla charger on subscription, which is one of the cheaper ways to go. The cost of public charging is more expensive, and needs to be brought down for slower chargers, although the wizzy rapid ones on motorways are always going to be more expensive.

I really only need to charge about once every couple of weeks, but the only reason I do it more often is to take advantage of the cheaper Agile half hours as even an hour or two makes a decent dent in my mileage requirements. My fuel costs disappear into my electricity bill and I really don't notice them, which makes summer holiday trip costs more of a shock! Even there some charges I charge to my electricity bill via Electroverse and they get lost in the wash. I certainly don't charge them to my holiday budget..;-)

letom

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81870678#Comment_81870678

Whilst some of the arguments might seem trivial many are valid. EV charging is a complete paradigm shift to how we put energy into our vehicles, if we had started from scratch with EVs it probably would have worked. We are trying shove this new way into infrastructure that it was never designed to deal with.

A significant amount of money will need to be spent to make this work, money the government doesn't have and ultimately money society doesn't want to spend because EVs inherently aren't better than ICE cars. Before anyone talks about EVs being cheaper, that's the electricity price, not the vehicle, which can rise and fall. If the new mode of transport were e.g. flying cars, then as a society we'd probably been more ready to pay the significant infrastructure cost required. Right now it's pay all this money to have something which at best is the same as what we have now.

Cornucopia

Is there a significant infrastructure cost? What does that look like (both the amount and the way it would be spent).

What I'm seeing is considerable investment by commercial companies, in the expectation of either long-term returns from charging customers and/or loss-leading benefits (i.e. at supermarkets).

It's possible there might be (more) tinkering around the edges of the policy, but it still seems like EVs are here to stay - at least on a generational time-scale.

user1977

Is there a significant infrastructure cost? 

Mostly getting the power to the chargers. If you've got a bunch of chargers then it's unlikely you can just add them to the existing power supply of your supermarket etc, they'll need their own substation, so you need to find space for that and arrange with the local network operator to supply it (as well as getting consent from everyone involved).

Grumpy_chap

"A significant amount of money will need to be spent to make this work"

Why?

On what?

The electricity operating companies have said that the grid can cope.

To what extent are the commenters suggesting "it'll never work - systems can't cope" just saying that? It was exactly the rationale many companies gave for not adopting a greater amount of remote / home working. Then COVID happened and we all started working from home pretty much immediately and with no preparation or massive investment and everything just worked. If ICEs were banned from midnight next Friday, I am sure we'd find a way to keep moving.

WellKnownSid

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81872848#Comment_81872848

Or you do what I've seen several services have done, just add a battery module on-site (which may well contain recycled car batteries) which slices off the peaks and tops itself up during quieter periods.

Arunmor

If EVs were so marvelous can you explain this? They only sell through subsidies or 2nd hand buyers buying at the expense of the original owner. As for cheap electricity tariffs that is at the expense of the majority of the population subsidising you. Oh and Stellantis are not alone,