- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by 2025::The chargers must be placed every 60km (37mi) and allow ad-hoc payment by card or contactless device without subscriptions.
One of the major reasons people shy away from EV is the range. This is great to bring more people to EVs.
However, what policies is EU passing to improve the network of public transport such as buses, trams, and trains?
This is just one area of the overall fit for 55 and general EU plans. Public transport is already being looked at under different working groups (e.g. https://rail-research.europa.eu/about-europes-rail/).
The aim of the overall plan look very promising. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/green-deal/fit-for-55-the-eu-plan-for-a-green-transition/
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There are chargers now that provide 20km of range for every 60 seconds your car is plugged in.
So if you stretch your legs, get a bite to eat, go to the toilet, etc you’ve added enough range to give your car another five hours of range.
And if those chargers are every 60km along the highway… then you’ll be able to stop when it’s convenient for you. That’s an opportunity to stop every 30 minutes.
But the reality is most people will charger their EV while they’re at home or at work. And therefore it will just always be full, you will only ever need to stop on long road trips. Realistically, how many times a year do you go on a road trip? Once? Twice? Not at all?
That does kinda worry me. If I’m on a road trip, I don’t want to wait while the guy ahead of me stretches his legs and grabs a bite to eat before I can even start charging.
That sounds great! Makes me even more optimistic for EVs!
It’d be fine if there were more home charging outlets. If you have to rely on a fast charging station, you should not get an EV.
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“jUsT uSe sTrEeT cHaRgErS”. I had a conversation like this here a while back. That person just didn’t accept that no, the city won’t spend millions of Euros on street chargers for apartment dwellers.
If there is demand and they can make money off of them, they absolutely will.
no, cities will send millions on street chargers if there is a demand for them,
My city can’t be assed with proper bike lanes, who do you think will pay for those chargers? In fact, who will pay for those EU mandated ones?
That’s the fun part, it will come out of the cities budget.
and I’m sorry that you have your NIMBYism, but sometimes the needs of the many trumps the wants of the few
And I’m sorry you have your racism but not all cities are as rich as yours.
Now how does it feel to falsely accuse someone? Not pleasant isn’t it?
Agreed. There needs to be a combination of incentives for building owners and also more basic level 1 street chargers (although a type F outlet is twice the charge of the lowest level 1 US charger). They could easily be integrated into parking meters. Those would give you about 10km/h. Not huge but if you are parking for the night or are parking on the street for work, that is enough during an 8 hour stretch.
Too many people are stuck on the idea of having to go to a specific location to get fuel. Like if you had a fuel pump outside your house that cost 1/5 as much as at a station, would you ever fuel up at a gas station? Or say you had one at a parking meter down the block that was much cheaper, how often should you go to a station? Almost never.
A Tesla can supercharge from 10 to 90 in about 30 minutes if you tell it to pre-heat the battery while* driving. If you’re going 120 on the highway I’m assuming you should get ~400-500 out of it ( depending on how heavily you’re loaded and how much that impacts your aerodynamics ).
I can’t say for non-tesla cars as I’ve not driven one before.
When charging an EV it seems the last 10% takes longer than the first 90. The more throughput the car cam take the faster it will charge. Unfortunately there’s car companies ( like Skoda ) who sell higher charge throughputs separately. I think teslas model 3 can take around 150kw?
I’m not sure on the exact terms( like kw ). I always get them mixed up. Sorry if it doesn’t make sense
It has to do with a li-ion battery’s charging curve. In the main phase of charging the charger runs in what’s called constant current mode. State of charge and charge time are linearly proportional. When the battery gets to terminal voltage (about 90% charge) the charger runs in constant voltage mode where current falls off as the battery approaches full charge. You can save time and skip CV mode if you don’t need that last 10%.
Yeah, the charging curve is very tilted. From 0-20%, a Tesla will do 250+ kW, so that only takes a couple of minutes. Then the power slowly tapers off, so your typical motorway charging session will be from 6 % to 70 %, and take around 22 minutes.
Such a charging session will typically yield another 2-2.5 hours of driving at 120 km/h, depending on model and conditions.
I highly recommend abetterrouteplanner if you want to play around with very accurate travel planning for almost any EV on the market.
AFAIK it’s usually pretty fast up to about 80%. It’s only slow when the battery voltage is close to the maximum.
People worry about range too much. Over 95% of trips are under 50 miles and less 1% are over 100 miles in the US. I imagine Europeans cover even less distance on average. Every new EV out there will be able to cover 99% of trips. Most newer EVs have at least a 250 mile range which you should probably stop and take a break in that time period anyway.
In the US, our problem is number of home chargers is horrible. A level 1 charger will get you 35-40 mile range each day. That would be perfectly fine for people in apartments and most people in general. Apartment buildings and condos largely do not even have that though. About 14% of people live in apartments and about 5% live in condos. That means a large chunk of the population does not have easy access to charging. A little over a third of Americans rent (houses and apartments). There is not much incentive for am owner to install a level 1 charger let alone install a 240v outlet. That means those people will currently have to give DC fast charging stations. Those are much more expensive, take a long time, and because Electrify America was only done to satisfy VW’s legal requirement, many are purely maintained and broken.
That situation is even worse in Europe because there is a higher percentage of people living in flats at about 46%.
With the 99% number If you drive every day that’s still 3-4 trips a year when your car will be unable to get you to where you want to go. And with electric cars still being very expensive that is not a good look when a much cheaper ICE vehicle has essentially no such limitation.
It doesn’t help that I have zero trust in the charging infrastructure in Europe at the moment, so completing this proposal is actually what would make electric cars fully viable in my eyes.
Obviously they are already great if you have 2 vehicles in a household where one can complete the longer trips with ease. You really get to enjoy the many upsides during your daily commute where range isn’t really a factor.
99% are under 100 miles (161km) . Most EVs have a range of at least 250 miles (~400km). Even if you are going more than that, you are not stuck on the side of the road. You just have to find your way to a DC fast charge station and hang out for a half our while your car charges. ICE vehicles also have a range limitation. As for cost, yes, EVs are pricier but are cheaper to operate (electricity is cheaper than gas and maintenance is much cheaper) and are cost equivalent after 6-7 years compared to an ICE.
As for trust in the infrastructure in Europe, I can’t speak to that. It just got much better here in the US because most auto companies decided on Tesla’s plug as the standard so now all of those are open to most cars. Before that, you were likely using an Electrify America station. VW was required to build those for chatting emissions tests and they have invested very little in maintenance.
The EU is likely better, to be honest. From what I can find, there are over twice the amount of fast charge stations in the EU compared to the US.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2022/trends-in-charging-infrastructure
You make it sound like DC fast chargers are everywhere, when they most certainly are not.
In the EU which has twice the number that the US does? You can certainly find one within 400 km. In the US it is certainly more difficult if you are off the beaten path but if you are going down pretty much any interstate, you will find one. On my way to my parents house 225 miles away in BFE Washington, for instance, there are four cities spread out along the way that have multiple DC fast charge stations. None of those cities is over 30k people and only one of them is on an interstate.
Imagine a world where people don’t just live in the US of EU. What about other countries? Rural vs Urban? Of course large cities aren’t the issue, it’s what do you do when you don’t live near charging stations? Driving in town isn’t an issue. It’s driving anywhere else that’s the issue.
This article is about the EU…
As for rural vs urban, the charging locations I mentioned were in rural areas. One of the towns has a whopping 1500 people. The other towns are not much bigger.
As for where you live, you can check out PlugShare to see how many fast chargers are near you. It really is not much of an issue in developed countries outside of maybe trying to go from eastern Australia to Perth but no sane person does that drive. The other places I could see being an issue would be Yukon, Nanavut, and Northwest Territories in Canada.