The Electric Car Thread

I’m emailing out for quotes for a charger installation, any recommendations in Surrey / Surrey Hants borders?

Also thinking where to put it – does it need to be a certain height from floor, for example?

any recommendations in Surrey / Surrey Hants borders?

https://www.earthelectrical.tech/

Andy did our solar & battery install and I’d have no hesitation in recommending him (and Harry)

250kW DC now were talkin ! and I think they’re the future rather than 3.5-7kW from a lampost

Two different customers surely.  The lampposts are for local residents who park on the street overnight, the fast chargers are for folk on long journeys who are don’t have enough juice to make it back to their home charger/lamppost.

That’s not what I meant and you know it.

Not really – what do you mean by ‘trouser’ the money? Share dividends? Perhaps, but most of these companies are fighting tooth and nail over market share so I doubt it.

If prices are already hiked why are you suggesting we give them even more money in the hope that they will give us cheaper EVs in the future

Well, they are already piling money into R&D – we know this. There are many startups working on battery tech and most of them are being funded by the manufacturers who are their future customers – makes sense. There is still a massive amount of investment needed – we need cheap decent EVs, and we need charging (manufacturers are also investing in charging certainly in the USA, not sure about here). But we need production facilities too. From memory, 1 in 5 new cars registered in the EU are now electric but that still means 4 in 5 are ICE. If they want 5 in 5 to be electric they need a huge ramp-up in production and battery manufacturing even with today’s tech, never mind having to get an advantage over the opposition with technological innovations. Hyundai just opened a new factory in the US for example – that’s where part of the UK government tax-break on new EVs went.

Two different customers surely.  The lampposts are for local residents who park on the street overnight, the fast chargers are for folk on long journeys who are don’t have enough juice to make it back to their home charger/lamppost.

Indeed. At the moment, the lack of lampost chargers (or equivalent) mean it is not viable for me to get a BEV at all.

If i did have one, a superfast charger would be a nice-to-have. But not a gamechanger in the same way that lampost chargers would be.

How would those in favour of lampost chargers feel if there were rows of 250kW chargers on the exits of large supermarkets, DIY store and places they regularly go? Every one I knew in Brum used to fill up with petrol at Tescos, filling up with leccy for a couple of weeks would take 10-20 minutes under a dry canopy?

I agree with Molgrip’s point about favouring night time charging but the population with drive ways will already be doing that. From an infrastruture point of view it strikes me as easier, cheaper and less digging to put in a few thick cables than a lot of thin ones. From a maintainance point of view too. I wonder if there are any stats on the proportion of UK households that have a driveway or private off-road car parking that could be equipped with a private socket. Every lampost won’t be enough anyhow and create parking rage worse than we have already as people squable over the (looks out of the window) 7 cars per lampost.

That is fine in principle, but atm rapid charging is more expensive than normal charging.  Do lamppost chargers require much new wire to be laid?  Also, we are currently (sic) advised that slow charge rates are better for our batteries, so using high currents for each charge should be avoided.

Eta also more no lamp lampposts aka slow charging posts could be installed if there was demand.  Of course there may be implications for the capacity of the supply in the road, but similar issues might arise for a battery of rapid chargers.

You’d better have a think about how you define hiked prices.  Yes these things are expensive, so are a lot of other things, plus prices are coming down if you compare range or some other performance metric against time.  An Audi is more expensive than a BYD – is the Audi hiked, or it more expensive to build something in Europe?

I find it annoying that most everything is described as a ripoff these days. How much are you paid by the way, for what you do?  The irony is that this forum is a hotspot for very expensive bicycles , often in steel, and e-bikes, that are very hard to justify on arbitrary  price/value grounds.

Everyone’s working on these, and they all have numbers like that. But it won’t be used for 600 mile range cars (or at least not many). They will make 300 mile range cars that are 2/3 the price they are now and smaller and lighter. The minute they put a 600 mile car on the market and people are faced with the choice of a 30k car or the same car at 50k with more range, they’ll realise that 300 miles is enough.

The head of BYD (and he’ll know) thinks they’ll appear on high end cars first , in that 5 year time frame, then creep down downmarket.  And yes, for most users, 300 miles of driving is a lot, particularly in one go

 There are many startups working on battery tech and most of them are being funded by the manufacturers who are their future customers – makes sense.

Let’s face it new battery tech will most likely come from the likes of CATL, BYD, Samsung and LG not by a startup somewhere funded by a legacy OEM. Witness the debacle that is Northvolt, bankrolled by Volvo and VW where BMW recently pulled out of a 2.2 billion contract becuase Northvolt will fail to deliver.

we need cheap decent EVs

Well they are here already without tax breaks. MG4 £27k, Corsa Electric £27k, BYD Dolfin £26k, Fiat 500e £25k. Might not be your idea of cheap but we live in a world where a new Ford Puma ICE starts at £24k.

Hyundai just opened a new factory in the US for example – that’s where part of the UK government tax-break on new EVs went.

Did you really mean UK government tax breaks? I’m assuming you meant the US EV tax credit. The US have been clever linking the tax credit to the % of the vehicle sourced and assembled in North America, especially the battery. That’s why Hyundai have opened a factory there. I’d be quite happy if we did something similar in the UK but I doubt our market is attractive enough to persuade the likes of Hyundai to build an EV factory in Europe outside of the EU. Tax breaks without conditions like that will just be used to boost profits and shareholder dividends.