This assumes one thinks and can plan everything well.
We have friends (father is an academic and environmental engineer) that have a Nissan Leaf and a small ICE SUV and they have ‘range anxiety’ and won’t push the range of the Leaf to see if they get the mileage quoted in the on-board computer. They have said that being stuck with a flat battery is diabolical (would require towing to the nearest public recharge point and potential many hours of inconvenience to be back on the road again), whereby having a empty fuel tank can be fixed with a call to a local auto club (which would bring a can of fuel).
They only use the Leaf for short urban journey’s as a result and leave the Leaf at home when doing longer distances ouside urban areas to the beach (160km return), holidays or their family rural property (200km return). These are distances in the upper end of the range of the Leaf when charged.
They have also indicated that range anxiety also comes when the full charged range indicates a particular mileage (say 220km), only to get proportionally less through use (range reduces to less than 220km). Their range changes from a number of reasons from road conditions, traffic, temperature, load etc and is not fully predictable when departing from home.
They also haven’t run out of battery as a result, and also have never run out of fuel (well, haven’t admitted they have anyway).
Time the motorists organisations stepped up to the mark and started carrying a big fat top up battery with fast charger to get you out of trouble. Go Tesla!
Or would that be challenging too many of the other vested interests?
An interesting proposal, related to batteries. Sadly, it involves planning, vision and forward-thinking. None of which is to be expected from our current crop of politicians.
Incorporating Australia’s renewable energy riches would grow our wealth even faster.
Suppose I one day have an EV, and home charging is presumably best. What do you do if you don’t have a garage/ car port/ driveway and have to park on the street. I can’t imagine council/ neighbours are going to be happy with a cable running across the pavement and nature strip.
Hi, I moved your post to this topic as we are covering all these areas of debate and concern here.
It’s a lot of electricity to fully charge an EV and I would imagine for quite sometime the idea of home charging will be while not as expensive as Petrol will still need special fittings and thus a cable running across the pavement/nature strip/driveway is probably not what you would normally see.
I think it will be more common to see special recharging points being provided in carparks (eg workplace, shopping centres) and fuelling stations eg a converted petrol station or some bays in a petrol station. Once it becomes common enough I think you may see points made available in streets (something like we have hydrant points for fires now). I think most people may just top up when the batteries get lowish at a recharge point on the way home or on the way to work or where ever they are going. There is a bit of attention being paid to decreasing the fast recharge times of current batteries and some research into batteries that as well as being fast to recharge will be able to be fast recharged past the current 80% level they recommend with Lithium. When you get to having sufficient power being generated at home or in your local area to recharge a few EVs I think most people will just “fuel up” at what will be just like a current Service Station for petrol.
Currently the lack of points may create the issue you describe and in these cases I think that when purchasing a vehicle a buyer needs to consider where they will recharge as part of the purchase decision. For an example my family are looking at the next car purchase to make it an EV. The dealer we would buy from is only located about 2 kms from us and has free fast and normal recharge points for cars purchased from them, about 4 kms away is a shopping centre with fast recharge points again with free power. That means we will not be recharging at our house unless we desperately want that last 20% (which we don’t think will be a concern). The cars we have looked at start out requiring 22 kWh of power to fully recharge a battery, some have very much larger capacities. Just imagine adding that recharge quantity to your normal household usage every few days or even daily for those who commute large daily distances.
That’s a variation on the lack of infrastructure argument. Strangely enough, it was one of the arguments against internal combustion engines way back when they were new. There weren’t many places where fuel could be bought, so people said that horseless carriages were a passing fad.
If there’s a problem, then the market can generally be relied upon to provide a solution. In the case of horseless carriages, petrol stations became increasingly common.
Interesting. I guess that is what I am doing - factoring into the purchasing decision for my next car - and it seems the infrastructure, in my case, is not available quite yet.
The market will provide solutions to turn profits, but our deep thinking governments will delay it by years coming up with ways to demand practitioners be trained, licensed, but then no oversight, with the end-user being subject to a myriad of possible fines for their transgressions and non-compliance of a book of rules that could surpass the 512+ page Victoria road rules.
Such an exciting but predictable future awaits, yes?
The neighbours would love it, they would lobby on your behalf for the council to permit it. It would be like getting permission to have a rubbish skip on the nature strip. The council wants you to pay, the neighbours just want to use the skip you paid for.
I am very interested in the same issue. My son has a hybrid vehicle in the UK, but nowhere to recharge at home: he uses a charging point close to his workplace (& has to pop out to move the car when the time is up…). I am considering a wedding gift of some solar panels - originally so he could charge the car at home, but as you point out, this could well be an issue… Perhaps the s/panel output will just have to be used as an offset to his current situation.
Often we seem to grab at examples and swiftly assign them as a universal truth.
IE everyone who might purchase an BEV will not do so because you can’t charge it parked on the street. That may be a critical need for some. Is it fact for all?
With the exception of perhaps one journey each month we could quite readily charge an EV at home from excess solar PV. For that one extra monthly challenging journey a 2-3hr top up charge at the destination major shopping centre car park would be more than adequate.
For daily commuters, certainly having access to car park or kerbside charging during the day might be important. Although, even charging using off peak at home at night might be a suitable option.
Perhaps prospective purchasers of BEVs need to look at what they need to deliver 95% of trips. For the other few percent of trips looking at doing those journeys a little differently might make the BEV a whole lot more attractive.
Alternately:
If we had a BEV dropping the second vehicle and hiring one for the twice a year long distance journey might be the way to go for now. The real challenge for most consumers remains the up front cost of even the most basic BEV in the Australian market. Although it is about the same cost as a city loving and oversized fat tired rough riding 4WD tray back, with all the trimmings. No offence to anyone here. I had a great V8 Toyota 70 series Ute for work once. 100’s of km’s of dirt and bull dust, and snakes the size of speed bumps.
p.s. I don’t drive over snakes. They get out of the way in their own time. It’s tough enough for them out west without some yob from the city repeatedly running over them.
As the industry hasn’t implemented a universal charging system (each manufacturer doing their own thing), even if say a car specific point was placed on the footpath to allow you to charge, what happens if someone parks in the spot you need? Will councils be approving road space for specific cars…such as rego numbers like one often sees at office buildings?
It could also result in footpaths in inner urban areas being chocked with charging points, especially if one has several cars per household) which Australian’s currently do) and there is limited space for systems to be installed (say a post with the vehicle unique charging point connected to the mains within the neighbouring household).
Knowing Counci’s, I would be very much surprised if they either started allowing permanent private street charging points (would have administrating and legal risks) and/or restricting parts of public roads for the parking of specific private vehicles.
Running cables from a residence to a car parked on a road, across the footpath, would also create potential legal liability issues…who is responsible if someone on the footpath is injured as a result of the cable placement. Covered trenches could be used for placing cables when charging, but again, what happens if someone leaved the pit open…who is responsible.
Maybe a solution would be for the road owner (Councils or State/Territory) to allow airspace above the road to be used for dangling cables which could be reached/or dropped and connected to the vehicle. This would avoid footpath issues, but possible wouldn’t look all that attractive with arms and cables extending from front walls/yards of residences.
I don’t think the long term solution for every car being EV has been well thought out as there are many issues with mass EV use, like those you have highlighted.
@mark_m Yep, like I said a Fast Charge station and 50 minutes later 80% of capacity has been achieved so a basic (eg not longish range) all electric would have about 200 or so km capacity back. So knowing where to access the Fast Charge is perhaps the most important thing rather than range angst. Top up either on way home or a little earlier on the way to work would see the vast majority not needing to use their household electricity to charge the car.
I think some of the anxiety about charging points/places, range and similar have been generated in the public by those who don’t want to see the advancement of EV potential. Is it really that dire a need to have a 100% charged up car here in Australia before someone drives it 60 or so kms per day (or even 150 kms), do we do that with petrol or diesel everytime we start the ICE vehicle up every morning. I am sure with just a little planning the charging needs can be easily met by almost everyone. For the few who can’t meet those needs yet then alternatives to remain with ICE or public transport are still out there.
As noted above most cars have more power capacity than most people use in their homes daily. They would need a lot of Solar Panels (and storage) to charge the car. Storage in particular would be important as a worker would be charging the car mostly at hours that the panels would not be providing energy eg late afternoon and night. Consider a 22 kWh capacity this means about 2 Tesla Batteries needed just to cover the car capacity if the battery in the car was nearly depleted.
Just to put some figures into the average travel vs range capacity issues in the UK is that the largest average distance travelled in the UK was for Scotland with an yearly average of 8,202 miles in 2018 (around 23 miles/37 km per day) London had the least with an average of 5,345 miles (around 15 miles/23 km per day). Compared to a range capacity of somewhere around 200 km this means an average commute would use somewhere between 1/5 to 1/9 the capacity of an EV. A fast charge (battery only to 80% of full charge) would give about 3 days travel at the largest average daily commute. Of course these are only average commutes so some will be significantly larger but others much smaller, but in general a car would get at least a couple of days before needing a recharge.
I look forward to the advancement in tech to reduce fast charging times to perhaps 5 or 10 minutes and increase the fast charge limit ie to be able to go to or close to 100% without problems.
Not really that big an issue. From the Zap site linked to below is “A key issue when choosing which EV to buy or use is the type of charging inlets on the vehicle. For full EVs, car manufacturers tend to favour one of three charging inlet options: (1) Type 2 and CCS, an option offered by most of the European car makers who include a Type 2 for slow/fast charging, and a Type 2 Combo (also known as ‘CCS’) for rapid charging; (2) Type 1 and CHAdeMO, for slow/fast and rapid charging respectively; and (3) Tesla Type 2 which can be found on all current EU Tesla models”. EVs are either supplied with the adapter for their car (so it can be plugged into a normal household point or cable or into a Type 2 power socket) or they are purchased as a separate item in the package (just itemised as another item). So all the street would need in charge points is a standard point fitting so any car could be charged with their own adapter. Councils are starting to implement these charging points in some places in the World which are embracing EVs and companies are already providing the tech.
It’s still the recharge time needed once the flight is completed that would make it not so viable at the moment I think. On these type of trips which require lots of fares to keep them financial the downtime for recharges is what will “kill” them. I see a place for H2 ICE engines here or newer type batteries that don’t have the fast charge issues of current Lithium batteries ie 80% limit and dendrites forming on and around the anodes:
It used to be thought that to only way to make steel was to use coking coal (high quality anthracite).
But making steel in a similar way to aluminum is cheaper and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Once upon a time not so long ago all rechargeables had to be recharged with plug in cables. Not so any more as wireless recharging is slowly being deployed on more and more products, albeit far less power hungry than a vehicle.
One prognostication is that eventually ‘wireless’ will be available for heavy duty requirements even if only in specific well controlled environments.
The presumption of huge cables to charge an EV will probably be valid for many years to come, but will it be over the long term?
