On street vehicle charging points

[Dave Davenport]

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[Sharky]

It's going to happen, but I can imagine it will be a nightmare for some.
We have a drive, but also yellow lines outside, meaning no parking/no charging for others during the day.
Round the corner is a narrow road and residents park half on the pavement - where will the electric bollards go? If near the kerb, then will prevent parking on the pavement. If away from the kerb edge, we will have cables sprawling the pavement with increased risk of accidents.

 

[ColinJ]

I was wondering about that yesterday. I walked to the shops and had my first sighting of an electric car on charge. Its owner had just enough offroad parking space to back the car into and had run a cable to it from the house. None of the other houses in that street have offroad parking.

There will have to be millions of charging points installed in the UK in the next decade. Where will they all go!?

 

[Drago]

Great idea, encourage people to carry on driving instead of using alternative means of transport. The council does not install petrol pumps, and neither should it electric charging points for cars.

Now ebike chargers instead would be a thing.

It's going to happen, but not as most people envisage. It not possible to construct sufficient e cars replace ICE cars due to the lack of rare earth metals. Eventually absolute numbers will dwindle considerably, and with the public and tabloid anticipated demand for chargers wil not materialise in full.

With dwindling numbers comes scarcity, and with scarcity will cone rising prices and eventually the normal joe will be priced out of the market, further reducing demqnd for chargers. 25 or 30 years time personal transport will be very diffwrent, whether anyone likes it or not, because the idea of replacing ICE cars more or less 1:1 with battery cars is laughable.

PS - Volvo fitted out charging point for free, which was nice of them

 

[Deleted member 26715]

There will have to be millions of charging points installed in the UK in the next decade. Where will they all go!?

Slightly OT, but do you think the price of electric cars will come down sufficiently enough to allow the 'common' man to buy one, I know I won't put myself in debt to buy a car.

 

[cougie uk]

I think it's going to be the self driving cars that swing things. Most of the time our cars sit not going anywhere. Its expensive to not go anywhere.

We definitely need better public transport and cycling facilities. You can't keep adding cars to the roads.

Phaeton - they are coming down in price. You just need to work out what you need your car for. How many miles a week do you drive ?

I'm saving £150 a month by using an EV rather than my petrol car in fuel alone.

 

[gbb]

Great idea, encourage people to carry on driving instead of using alternative means of transport. The council does not install petrol pumps, and neither should it electric charging points for cars.

Now ebike chargers instead would be a thing.

It's going to happen, but not as most people envisage. It not possible to construct sufficient e cars replace ICE cars due to the lack of rare earth metals. Eventually absolute numbers will dwindle considerably, and with the public and tabloid anticipated demand for chargers wil not materialise in full.

With dwindling numbers comes scarcity, and with scarcity will cone rising prices and eventually the normal joe will be priced out of the market, further reducing demqnd for chargers. 25 or 30 years time personal transport will be very diffwrent, whether anyone likes it or not, because the idea of replacing ICE cars more or less 1:1 with battery cars is laughable.

PS - Volvo fitted out charging point for free, which was nice of them

For many of those reasons, (and many others) I dont believe electric cars have a viable future in the way we use cars now....or at least for some time.
I watched a YouTube video of a motoring journo taking an Audi 200 miles, the pishing about (imo) he had to go through, including a mid journey fast charge that took around an hour, then an overnight charge, different charging systems, different apps, arriving at a charger point and theres already someone there so had to wait an hour or drive 30 miles to another point, etc etc.
Things will improve no doubt but the materials needed and cost for producing batteries doesn't convince me it's the future (which it may be but it's not going to be easy )

 

[Sharky]

One aspect that I worry about, although unlikely to affect me is the availability of petrol in the future. If they stop selling petrol cars by 2030, within 10 years, by 2040, most cars will have been replaced and the majority of cars will be electric.

Will there still be petrol stations?

But people like me who drive their cars into the ground could still be driving petrol cars for another 20 year (2050). Our Zafira is currently 19 years old and still going strong. As to would the owners of classic cars.

I will have had my telegram from the King by this time and I will be doing a 100 laps of the velodrome in support of the NHS during lockdown 42.

 

[gbb]

Then there is the problem of streets like mine.
I dont even live on the street, I live in a block of houses between 2 streets so have to walk 30 yards to get to my car (which is no problem for me as it stands).
So if they put charging points up the street....there's 50 houses, many with more than one car many like mine, offthe road. Getting enough charging points simply couldnt work....as it stands now.
But I suspect 'pay as you go ' car use would be the thing of the future, car ownership may never be the same as it is now...which may be a good thing.
You could have local ' pay as you go' car points where there are perhaps 20 or more cars ready for use, you pay, use them and bring them back, plug em in and go home. You could do that in my local shopping centre, it'd serve hundreds of local houses.
Whatever happens it's going to change car use and ownership if electric cars are indeed the future...and given peoples desire to have the freedom of a car, I still think hydrogen as a fuel will be pushed more and more.

 

[DRM]

I've said this before, car manufacturers have gone about EV's all wrong, they should be designed to accept a removable standard design of battery that is hired, you pull into a battery charging station, open a panel on the car, unplug the battery, they bring a fork lift & remove the battery, stick it in the racking to charge up, bring a fully charged battery back, put it in your car, plug it in & off you go, would take 10 minutes tops, there's also no need for charging leads all over the floor, place an inductive pad in the parking space, the car has one underneath the floor pan, park over the inductive pad, the cable to it is buried under the path, there's a charger at the side of the path, you would have an account that covers the cost to charge up, put your password in to the charger, go do what you have to do whilst your car charges up.
All this is available now for use on electric fork trucks, so they can be used on a 3 shift pattern without stopping for 8 to 12 hours to recharge.

 

[byegad]

I suspect we will also see hydrogen becoming a go to fuel once green or nuclear electricity is the major fuel. Using excess capacity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and recombining it, not necessarily in an internal combustion engines, but more likely in fuel cells may yet be the 'saviour' of the car.
As I'll be close to 80 by the time petrol and diesel cars are no longer for sale in the UK, if I'm still driving my hybrid will see me out.

 

[cougie uk]

The battery pack is part of the structure of the car. You'd need technicians employed just to recharge the car if it had a removable battery pack. Plus what size battery pack would you need ? They're all different capacities.

 

[cougie uk]

For many of those reasons, (and many others) I dont believe electric cars have a viable future in the way we use cars now....or at least for some time.
I watched a YouTube video of a motoring journo taking an Audi 200 miles, the pishing about (imo) he had to go through, including a mid journey fast charge that took around an hour, then an overnight charge, different charging systems..

Sounds like a hatchet job to me. My EV hasn't got a huge battery but took me on my holidays 150 miles away with just the one short stop. Wife went for a wee and to get a coffee and the car was charged and ready to go by the time she got back. We could have gone another 90 miles without a charge too.

You can get EV cars with a real world range of over 200 miles anyway.

You'd have to be doing things deliberately wrong to make a 200 mile journey into a saga.

 

[DRM]

The battery pack is part of the structure of the car. You'd need technicians employed just to recharge the car if it had a removable battery pack. Plus what size battery pack would you need ? They're all different capacities.

And that’s where they have cocked it up totally, by not using a standard design of battery, that fits all cars and is not a part of the chassis, these things are already available to go in lithium ion fork trucks, only one car manufacturer makes material handling equipment, that’s Toyota, the rest have gone about making EV’s in the most ridiculous complicated way possible, the battery should not be part of the cars structure, battery changeover works well, there’s no need to build the battery into the cars structure at all, it’s plain bad design, and would instantly remove range anxiety, it would be just like filling up with petrol or diesel

 

[cougie uk]

DRM that's crazy. Change your mindset. It's not the same as petrol and the game isn't to match the filling up in a few minutes.
Imagine the cost of all the technicians and forklifts to swap batteries in and out.

I can charge my car anywhere there's electric.

If you do a lot of miles then you need to fork out for a big battery car. If you do a normal mileage then a 40kwh is ample.

The average car drives 10,000 miles a year. 200 miles a week. Some cars would only need a charge once a week.