> All customers must be able to pay with cards or contactless devices ...
I find that directive/rule/law very very very nice. I wish more were like that. I don't see why I'd need to have a phone with me and even less why I'd need to install any app on it.
> (at present, some charging networks require subscriptions or app downloads).
Makes me happy to know they'll either comply or GTFO.
There’s a lot of complication involved there. Someone has to come by regularly, take the deposited money, put in the appropriate number of coins to give change, the machines break regularly, yadda yadda.
I’m annoyed by todays cashless society too but there aren’t good answers to these problems.
It makes a lot more sense for public transit, though: they’re located in dense cities with many vendors nearby. Same can’t be said of a car charging network.
However if we ignore the problem with money laundering, prepaid cards can still be a nice option for many people. If you are about to leave for a road trip you just make sure your card has enough money on it to cover the trip, then you don’t have to worry about your phone dying or your bank card failing etc. which can get you stranded.
> I’m annoyed by todays cashless society too but there aren’t good answers to these problems.
Those problems have been solved for generations. The solutions aren’t free and require some work, but it’s a little crazy to say there “there aren’t good answers to these problems.” If they mandated that cash should be accepted, the companies would figure it out and it really would be fine.
Probably the cost associated with storing, counting, insuring, securing, depositing the money. I get the privacy aspect but then why not get a prepaid credit card or something like that?
Is that an EU thing? In the US you can buy as many $500 visa cards as you want at any grocery store with no ID. You may need a manager's override if you're buying over $10,000 but that's just to verify that you're not falling for a gift card scam.
Converting >$10k from card to cash on the other hand often requires an ID
No it doesn't. I resent being asked to produce ID for every little thing. Someone tried to card me when I bought beer in a supermarket the other day. I'm 52.
But maybe not for the amounts we talk about when it comes to charging. Thinking of it, I cannot remember whem I last saw someone pay cash at a gas station. Most pay by card.
EU is broadly moving to a cashless economy. There are certainly not going to be any new laws that mandate cash payment. The opposite is happening all the time, with more and more things becoming impossible to buy with cash.
It mentions chargers, but from my quick perusal, it doesn't mention how many stalls per charger station.
EV charge stations have a slower throughput than petrol stations, and that means you require more stalls to cover the same number of cars.
One of Tesla's "killer" feature is not just the number of charge stations, but also the number of stalls per station; there are usually 8 per station, though exceptions are abound. But it increase the likely hood that you will have access to a stall when you reach the station.
Aren't those for profit infrastructure? IMHO they will put as many as needed for the region.
These legislations are not intended to design the infrastructure but to enforce minimal availability at places where there's no enough commercial reasons to build one. The idea is that regions not lucrative enough shouldn't be left behind because when left behind in infrastructure people start migrating to other places and make the problems even more severe.
So, the companies and and probably the countries will have to foot the bill for bringing the infrastructure to such places and the expenses for number of stalls is probably a rounding error in contrast to the expense of building the first one. We will end up having 1 stall where it's rarely needed and as many stalls needed at places where the demand is hight.
Imagine the situation of the company installing chargers.
They're fitting a curve between expense of (installation and maintenance) vs (profit from charges sold).
It's reasonable that a company would want to minimize their expense by installing fewer chargers, while maximizing profit by ensuring that all their equipment is utilized as much of the time as possible.
The charger company doesn't want to have chargers that are only utilized during peak moments but still need to be serviced and paid for.
This comes at the expense of consumers who will suffer longer queues.
> They're fitting a curve between expense of (installation and maintenance) vs (profit from charges sold).
Interesting, as there's clearly a high up-front cost from some of: contract negotiation/land purchase or rent/electricity infrastructure/charger parts/charger installation, and an ongoing cost of maintenance and electricity.
I wonder how big the fixed upfront costs are (especially land-related, and electricity infra) versus the physical charger itself? I have a sneaking suspicion that the chargers themselves may be a surprisingly small part of the overall cost.
This[0] suggests that Tesla may also have optimised the cost of their superchargers (assuming they weren't pricing them down for the bid discussed.)
Looking at how new motorway here was build ~15 years ago. The road and land might be most expensive parts. Ramps, and possibly bridges don't come cheap. Or then you need duplicated infra. That is separate charging stations on each side.
Next part is probably power. Transmission new substation are likely needed to supply for demand. And it is unlikely to be available. Lines might or might not be present.
Well, EU is a free market with safeguards. The libertarians hate EU because they believe that it's a socialist organisation, the hard left hates EU because they believe that EU is a neoliberal one.
None of these would be happy, EU won't let companies optimize for absolute profit in the expense of society and EU won't act as a central planner which will turn the companies into a non-profits which build to comfort the electorate.
I guess the situation on peak hours will improve as the battery tech improves. The tech problems won't be solved through regulations, EU would intervene only if the issues are caused by suboptimal market conditions like monopoly trying to milk the customers or the for-profit institutions fail to provide the services and cause issues(like not installing charger at low demand locations).
That, and the 400kW peak charging rate (most SuperChargers and batteries are only 250kW capable). With 3-4mi/kWh (7-10km/kWh) it's possible to get 100mi (150km) of charge in <5min. Even 100kW charging feels slow now (anything below 600mi/hr or 1200km/hr).
That's not quite as fast as partially filling your gas tank, but it's within a factor of a few. Of course then next 100km can take 2-3x longer as the rate slows down from peak. (p.s. there are a lot of stations in the US with 20+ SuperChargers and people tend to fill up to 80-90% when traveling. They must be pulling MW!)
It's honestly hard to pull into a highway charging station and spend less than 10 minutes there, after 2.5 to 3 hours of driving. I've noticed that Tesla's Navigation seems to be optimizing for 10-15 minute stops, and I'm never finished in the rest stop by the time the car says it's ready to continue.
This is key. People don't care how long the total process takes. People care how much time they spend standing around with nothing to do, feeling bored.
A 15minute charging stop can FEEL shorter than a 5minute gas stop if you have to stand there and hold the gas pump handle the entire time vs walking away from your car and going to buy a snack or (in the case of Tesla, this was a excellent idea and not just a silly easter egg) sitting in your car for 15minutes playing a video game. My wife and I will happily spend 30minutes playing with the music synthesizer in my Tesla and forget that we finished charging after 20minutes.
Yes, charging can be quicker than filling with gasoline. 15 minutes charging can be done in parallel with the rest stop. OTOH 5 minutes filling with gasoline is done in serial with a bathroom break and buying a coffee.
> Yes, charging can be quicker than filling with gasoline. 15 minutes charging can be done in parallel with the rest stop. OTOH 5 minutes filling with gasoline is done in serial with a bathroom break and buying a coffee.
I see people fill their tanks unattended all the time. Probably not a good idea, but it happens.
> It's been years since I've encountered the required latch to fill a tank unattended.
> Maybe it's country specific.
Sounds like it.
In every state in the US that I've been in in the last 20 years (which is about 1/3 of them), I've never encountered a pump without the latch. I think most people use the latch when filling up, even though they're present - it's just much more convenient to have the filling process automatically stop when the tank is full.
I've seen people jam their fuel cap in the handle to keep it latched. Probably illegal and against the rules of the station, but also probably not catastrophically dangerous.
The individual Amber II chargers are 360 kW but they can be paired to share power dynamically via a DC bus. In that configuration it can deliver a maximum of 720 kW to a single plug.
And often different charging networks deploy chargers near each other, so if one is full or expensive or performing poorly you can switch to another one.
> EV charge stations have a slower throughput than petrol stations, and that means you require more stalls to cover the same number of cars.
The thing that they say about EVs is "imagine if your car started with a full tank of gas every morning. How often would you use a filling station then?"
You can't simply compare "time to fill at the filling station, times number of stalls, is this number the same or else it's an issue". That math doesn't work. As the majority of trips are short, and the majority of charging is at home overnight, and even when on the road there are other charging options (for e.g. I usually see cars charging near my local shops on one of these https://www.sourcelondon.net/home) then the numbers are not directly comparable.
> and the majority of charging is at home overnight
Are there actually stats that show this?
What I hear anecdotally from friends (in Berlin and other bigger German cities) is that in the city it is often very hard to find charging spots. The problem is that in urban areas charging at home is almost never an option, as people live in apartments and not houses. There the parking is either done curbside (with curbside charging stations near your apartment being rare), or on the rented parking spot on the apartment building property (which landlords aren't exactly rushing to modernize).
Which is interesting because only 55% of dwellings in Canada are single-family homes or semi detached condos (where you'd be able to have a home charger).
Just goes to show that as EV adoption goes up, the percentage of people able to charge at home will go down.
No-one is disputing the growing demand for charging infrastructure, or the unsolved problems in street-side or apartment parking-lot charging. That's not motorways though. It's not the same thing.
In general yes, I see 80% of charging at home, but you can google this as well as I can.
Specifically for Berlin / inner city I don't know.
A point of denser city living is to lessen the need for private car ownership. I'm also in an apartment in London. We don't have a charger, but then we don't have a car either, we don't need one here.
This is about motorways and there I haven't seen a decrease in the amount of filling station stops just because it starts charged. If anything, electric has had an increase in fills required so far due to range limitations and the desire to avoid filling completely (for both charge time and battery wear).
Won't many motorway trips still be within EV range without a charge en route? i.e. under e.g. 200 miles.
I once had a long car commute for a while, with time spent on the M25 (a ring road around London, a major motorway / traffic jam) and that was still around 110 miles daily round trip. I could have done it daily on an overnight charge.
So maybe EVs doing a quick partial change out of "desire to avoid filling completely" which swings the numbers the other way. IDK how big these relative effects are, but this is another way in which the maths is different, the numbers are not directly comparable.
In Europe, maybe. In the USA, a 400-600 mile drive is not unusual and within the radius of what I would consider driving vs. flying given the hassle of flying here.
The topic (as opposed to the article only) includes my personal anecdote above, which you might notice is in London, UK. I use words deliberately.
Parent comment phrase "in Europe" typically includes UK as well, not just EU members. I'm already more than comfortably aware that the EU does not include the UK.
But, UK habits are at present more like those on the continent of Europe than to USA. That's why I felt the anecdote relevant.
a 400-600 mile drive is not unusual? it's not unheard of, it's not out of the question, it's not a crazy distance for cities to be "away from" each other, but unless your job is "driver", it is not a "usual" thing to do except a few times a year. You're talking about a full day driving.
Yeah, "it happens a coupe of times per year, as opposed to a commute that I do multiple times a week" is stretching the definition of "usual" to breaking point.
In context though, it was about "how many charging bays do we really need, if some or many cars don't need to charge en route, or need it much less often?" so the semantic argument around "what does 'usual' even mean?" is a ridiculous distraction. These long trips of course exist but are not the largest percentage of cars on the road.
People who live in apartments instead of single-family detached housing often have to park on the street. "at home overnight" is not near a charger. Even if they have dedicated parking they often can't install a charger into their landlord's property.
For a lot of people, it's true that they won't need charging stations. But for urban areas those stations will be more necessary than in suburban or many rural areas.
I would like to see lots of slow chargers at hotels. Being able to just plug in when you arrive and leave it overnight is more useful than a few quicker chargers where you need to switch cars between them.
In downtown metros of the largest US cities, hotels do not have on-site parking or sufficient on-site parking (or free parking), though they almost always do in the suburbs. As for Europe, I think there was one time where I found a hotel that had parking. Hotels in Central and Latin America will have you use either nearby street parking or a cramped underground lot (nothing like underground car parks in the USA).
Hoping for them to offer EV charging in light of the current parking situation is almost laughable.
Hotels in the suburbs and rural areas will start offering charging though. A lot of people on those areas drive and as drivers switch to EVs they will discover chargers is something their customers look for.
Of course it will start with the expensive hotels and move down the price range. People who look for cheap budget hotels drive cheap used cars and so they have not yet reached the early adopter stage of EVs (the early adopters might have a 2011 leaf, but that isn't a road trip car) while people who stay at expensive hotels have already looked at a new EV (they probably haven't bought one yet, but they have seriously considered it)
Gas stations make small margin on gas, but high margin on convenience stores;
Electric Cars upset this, because 80% of trips can be slow charged at home; But the one difference is those 20% of trips requiring charging will have longer stops (potentially optimizing for higher, restaurant margins).
*Yes, there are situations where home charging in cities is less likely possible.
There are a tiny number of gas stations that don't have a human on site. However they also don't have restrooms, or anything else for sale (sometimes a vending machine). Gas stations exist with humans because the real money is in all the snacks they sell inside. Fresh pizza needs someone to cook it and put it in the warmer.
In places like Wyoming and South Dakota, US gas stations come with slot machines inside. I wonder if having people stay around for a longer time, plus loosening regulations on gambling, means that this is the future way to incredible profits for gas stations.
Do they? As in for immediate consumption on the premises? Or packaged to-go? The latter seems reasonable, but the former seems like a somewhat dangerous idea. Maybe I'm just too US-centric
I'd guess so too, bigger ticket though, could believe they'd profit more from a meal while EV charges vs average convenience sale while nipping in to pay for fuel (that's only if you don't pay at pump anyway), which I think is GP's point.
Depends on store. One at gas station usually have high margins, probably lower volume. On other hand regular stores have very low margins. They just have massive volume. Convenience stores by my understanding are one of the lowest margin businesses. Maybe with selling gas.
I'm curious about the cost structure of a gas station relative to a charging station. I would imagine that like an unattended charging port, connected to the grid and monitored remotely, would be very different to run and fund compared to the usual attended gas station where fuel is trucked in. If the costs can be brought significantly down, but the annual consumer outlay can be kept the same, then it could be way more profitable. I have no idea how feasible that latter one is though, people with EVs- are you saving money on fuel?
So, there needs to be a power grid (electricity generation + distribution) to be able to slow charge at home for the masses and fast chargers ever 60km. That is quite a delta to what we have for our power grids today.
Slow charging is ~1600w; Which is a similar power rating as a hair dryer or single burner stove (including induction), a small 120v point of use water heater, or 16 100w light bulbs.
Surely, we don't have to be cooking all night long on every connection; but surely even historically the grid can handle 16 light bulbs somewhere in the house.
Yes; 95% was a number typically cited for trips that electric cars with <40 miles of range applied for; so i gave those without ready charging situation additional %; Along with the technology advancements in the last 30 years; like 5x+ the range.
This essentially means that gas stations will add fast chargers to their parking spaces, as there is already an European directive mandating a gas station every 100Km (I think) in highways and freeways.
This is what's happening in Canada, very aggressively. One of our biggest petrol companies (Parkland, who owns Pioneer, Columbia Fuels, Ultramar, Chevron, and many Esso franchises) has an aggressive plan to install fast chargers at basically all of their locations—and convert their retail to destinations with stuff to do while you wait[0]. They're already aggressively executing on this; where I live in BC they're already installing them up and down the highways, so I use them frequently already. One interesting thing they do is give you discounts on things like coffees or burgers if you're charging; smart way to get you inside.
I just drove from the US border to the yukon, and the amount of fast charging available in BC, even north of Prince George, shocked me! We took our diesel truck for other reasons, but we thought we could have done this trip in the model 3 with the CCS converter no problem.
Yes, this is probably what's going to happen. After all they'll want to stay in business: as they'll sell less and less gas they'll have to sell more and more electricity. I wonder if they'll buy some thick line or if they'll use gas or diesel generators to charge a big battery, plus solar panels.
It’s very hard to get the permission to run diesel generators for anything else than backup power here. And even then, it needs to be timed very precisely to be in line with regulations.
This obviously can't be allowed to happen .. but I don't think there's any sign of that, as grid electricity remains cheaper than onsite generation. On a trip last month it was very noticeable that several rest stops had under-construction chargers in addition to the one or two that had previously been put in.
I would argue it SHOULD be allowed to happen, maybe even encourage it. An EV that needs a gas powered generator for 0-1% of its life is many times better than an ICE that needs a gas powered generator for 100% of its life.
If you allow gas powered generators to complement EV stations, you will have more EV charging stations in remote areas or otherwise areas that wouldn't see EV chargers. Every extra EV charger will drive up the adoption.
> If you allow gas powered generators to complement EV stations, you will have more EV charging stations in remote areas
But you don't have to do this! You can just put them on the grid. There are very few places that are truly off grid in Europe, mostly on islands, and absolutely zero on motorways.
The power requirements for charging stations are massive! A Tesla can draw 250kW. If you have 10 chargers, that is 2.5MW. You won't get that everywhere...
If you can install a 2.5MW diesel generator to cover those areas, encouraging adoption, that is a good thing.
I am not talking about 4 lane motorways, where access to megawatt power lines might not be that challenging, but more remote areas.
Can draw being a key. Cars can only sustain their max draw for a short portion of the charging curve, so it would extremely rare (if not impossible) to actually draw 2.5 MW. 10 cars with under 15% state of charge would all have to pull in within 2-3 minutes to a supercharger that started empty.
Many charging locations are getting dedicated batteries to smooth off the peaks and valleys of fast charging, turning it into a much more constant draw. When a peak is needed the battery fills in. When the site is more idle, instead of a valley, power is diverted to the battery to ready it for the next peak.
Another strategy companies like kempower are using is 25 or 50 kW modules that can be dynamically allocated across the whole site. At the peak of the curve a car gets many modules. As the power a car can take decreases deeper into the curve the extra modules can be assigned to a different plug. If everyone pulls in at low state of charge at the same time the site hits the limits and cars have the throttle. A more typical usage pattern of cars pulling in and out at different times means cars can maximize their charge curve while capping the total draw of the site.
10 cars filling up their tanks at an highway gas station is not uncommon, especially if you consider the cars waiting in lines. This may seem unfair but let me argue about that.
Filling up a gas tank and leaving takes about 5 minutes so even if you arrive there and you have to wait in a line it's not a big deal. If recharging an EV up to a reasonable level takes 15 minutes, either they 3x the number of stands or make customers unhappy and leave for the next station, if they can get there. If they can't, they are hostage of the physics of batteries and EVs and they'll have to wait.
So I think that each charging station will have more stands to recharge EVs than gas pumps now.
> I am not talking about 4 lane motorways, where access to megawatt power lines might not be that challenging, but more remote areas
That's a good use case for battery backed or battery integrated chargers. They can charge up the battery on a smaller grid connection but still deliver fast charging since you're drawing from the battery pack.
The European grid is much, much better shape than the US one. It is also luch denser, so I don't see a problem here at all, locally. Overall, the grid will be different when millions of EVs have to charged, but that will be done by the utilities because they will make money doing it. Expect a lot of whining to get EU and national subsidies to do so first, but that is business as usual.
10 250kw chargers are frequently only supplied by 1 megawatt of power supply.
They rely on the fact that it is common for some of the stalls to be empty, occupied by cars that have finished charging or can't charge at the full rate for whatever reason.
Some sites have batteries to provide a bit more power for the busiest times too. That has the benefit that those same batteries can participate in grid balancing the rest of the time (buying and selling power for profit, and getting paid for various technical grid services too).
> Maybe 2 chargers 50kW would be perfectly sufficient and much more economical outside of freeways?
That remains for the free market to decide....if the owner considers a generator is cheaper, then leave him be. Where grid power is enough, electricity will be much cheaper than a generator, so if the owner wants a generator, it's probably a choice between having a generator charger vs no charger.
> so if the owner wants a generator, it's probably a choice between having a generator charger vs no charger.
Possibly. But I would expect this to be a very uncommon scenario. Unless you’re running a car race* for instance you’d have to have a situation where somebody would both be willing to pay 2x or more per kWh and also prefer to not charge their car at all if they couldn’t do it in 5-15 minutes.
How is this going to be enforced?
What if there is a 70km gap in one of the highway because no private company though it was worth to build a station there? Who is going to be blamed and who is going to pay a fine?
Or peppering every outdoor surface with solar panels. What a techno-noir nightmare that will be. Otherwise, electricity generation via natural gas/coal would mean you may as well just stick with ICE.
Solar panels on every outdoor surface would look great. You don't want people walking or driving on them so it would mean a lot more pavilions and shades over the otherwise terrible heat deserts of the world's parking lots. Asphalt is a net heat radiator making the world around every parking lot hotter. Solar panels would be a net heat reducer, and with them overhead on pavilions it would make the ground below much cooler and nicer. People might actually want to start walking to places again on the ground levels.
> electricity generation via natural gas/coal would mean you may as well just stick with ICE.
I'm not sure about this. As I understand it, burning fossil fuels to generate electricity at a central facility is far more efficient than running millions of small engines.
Correct - there's an efficiency benefit, although it's very marginal in the case of coal generation. That's mostly gone in Western Europe with the sore exception of Germany.
I live in a place with exactly 1 natural gas energy plant and something like 300 square miles of solar panels.
The solar panels are placed in the wilderness and an eye sore. At least with a coal plant I can expect it.
I wish I was as delusional as most pro-EV people. Not only is EV an environmental nightmare (batteries? Where does energy come from?) the options right now for renewables are wholly inefficient and an eyesore. We'd do more to stop people from flying aircraft and driving large cruise liners. But that would get in the way of profits. Champagne socialists are hilarious.
So you'd rather energy generation needed for our society just be swept under a rug somewhere you can't see, rather than confronting the realities of modern consumption?
Homes need to be heated, people need to be transported. You can only play a shell game for so long.
Could work. And then only allow charging when they are producing power. Then the EV drivers could wait at these stations until it is sunny for their carbon-free future.
> Not forgetting other sustainable alternatives to ICEs, the European Parliament mandated at least one hydrogen refueling station every 200 km along TEN-T motorways by 2031.
As they use to say "Why buy a fax if no one owns a fax."
If we have that many charging stations there is no need for humongous batteries, they can have lighter frames and engines, be cheaper to buy and repair, less road tax.
As the real Tesla use to say: Balance the source with the load.
It remains dubious where all that electricity should come from. When making a budget and your spending is still larger than your income you look for places to cut. If most of your money goes towards transporting suitcases of money one might consider if there is a need to bring that much.
if hydrogen cant compete it will just die out. Worth a shot tho.
Hyundai always had a model, Nexo (name might have been different previously). Pricey though. Not mass marketed as far as I can tell but produced as a series so no vaporware and they had it for roughly as long as their all electric Ioniqs.
The refuel time is dependent on the pressure in the tank. There's an intermediate tank that's used to pressurize the hydrogen before it can be pumped into the car, and pressurizing this vessel can take a lot longer when the main tank is empty. I'd say that the refueling time is only as good as petrol in the best case scenario.
All cars are complicated. Hydrogen cars have an advantage of being truly sustainable, something BEVs are not. So it safe to say that it is inevitable that cars will transition to hydrogen. Personal opinions like these are just a repeat of classic anti-progress statements like "airplanes will never happen" or "radio will never amount to anything."
The fuel cell itself isn’t the problem. It’s the storage tanks and that are the problem. A colourless, odourless, explosive gas is inherently dangerous and takes a lot of work to handle and store safely.
Love to see it. I wish it addressed reliability, though. In my neck of the woods in Sweden, coverage is pretty decent, but on more than one occasion, I've had to bounce between 7+ fast chargers before finding one that actually worked.
Do they merely have to exist or do they also have to work? And if they are broken, how fast must they be fixed and what’s the consequence if they are not fixed?
Unless this is also clarified, it’s not a finished proposal.
Indeed. For them to work, some massive electric grid infrastructure has to be added. The directive mentions "at least 400 kW by 2026", which is probably doable mostly with existing spare capacity. They also mention 1.4MW and 2.8MW chargers 120 km apart by 2028.
This will require a number of new transmission lines, and quite some new electric generation, at the very least in hundreds of megawatts of base load. (A nice new nuclear power station providing a couple GW would be handy, but I can't expect it to spring up by 2028 anywhere, except maybe France.)
It's cool that there is a mandate for it. I suppose I'm surprised they aren't close to achieving this already, or that it wouldn't happen on its own.
I was talking to my parents, who live in a very rural area of the U.S.—the nearest mailbox is a ten minute drive—and they said "we'd love an electric vehicle, but where would we charge it around here?" and we pulled up a map and there were something like two or three suitable charging stations within 20 miles, and many more within the range of a full charge.
That's why I'd assume that the busiest motorways in the EU would already have plenty of fast charging stations within a 60km drive. Maybe they already do, and this is more about adding additional bureaucracy. Or, more generously, maybe it's about those other clauses, like the payment system and displaying the prices and whatnot, and the bit in the headline was always expected to take care of itself.
It seems funny to me that legislators all over the world think that they can change the physical world with a written law.
While I like the idea of a convenient fast charging network for EVs, there are all these details like funding, electric infrastructure, availability of raw materials, availability of labor, and the ongoing cost of maintenance.
Here in the US charging stations are broken all the time. Even Tesla supercharging stations often have several stalls down.
I would bet huge sums of money that there is no possible way Europe has this in place on schedule.
These things are always compared to other regions and I have never lived anywhere else so I can't really give a coherent answer.
But Europe is pretty big and diverse (in the positive meaning of the word) which means that making a sweeping statement such as "European governments do a pretty well job of handling infrastructure" is absurd. Do the national and regional governments of every region in every country of Europe do a pretty well job of handling infrastructure? The answer is obviously no. Some things are pretty good and some things are pretty bad. Like... everywhere else in the civilised world.
It seems funny to me that you don't think legislators can change the world. Make the incentives right and everything else will follow. This is not insurmountable technical difficulty. It's just a matter of pouring money into the problem.
Noone involved expects this to be in place on schedule. This is a matter of politics first, policy later, realization maybe eventually. I.e., have some nice dreams, give people money and tell them to build something useful, then see what happens.
> It seems funny to me that legislators all over the world think that they can change the physical world with a written law.
An EU directive is either directly binding law itself (like the GDPR) or a requirement on its member states to pass a certain matter into local laws. If a member state fails to comply with the directive, the European Commission may file a lawsuit at the ECJ which may impose serious fines until the country in question complies.
In this case, compliance can be done by governments on many levels: some may choose to construct charging stations themselves, some may require licenseholders of gas stations to do so, and some can do nothing and hope the free market does the work for them on their own.
I think NL, SE, NO, and DE are already there, or mostly.... We just need more destination-chargers / on-street / at-parking-locations slow (7 - 11 kw) chargers
I don't think anyone needs to go that far, especially when most EV owners charge at home. Can you imagine parking downtown and every spot has a cable running to a car? Seems like a tripping hazard waiting to happen.
Suppose one company has built charging stations in city A but not in city B and a different company has built charging stations in city B but not in city A and new stations need to be built between the two cities.
If neither company wants to build the stations, what happens? Does government build them? Offer subsidies to entice the companies to build them? Make building them a condition of approving permits for other stations that the companies do want to build?
Europe standardized on CCS chargers and CCS type 2 combo plugs quite a while ago. All brands of charger on all charging networks charge all brands of EV.
Standardization drives investment and development for infrastructure.
If that were generally the case there would be no need for them to legislate that there must be fast chargers every 60 km. So what happens when no company actually wants to build chargers in a place where the legislation requires chargers?
> If that were generally the case there would be no need for them to legislate that there must be fast chargers every 60 km.
It's still early days for EV infrastructure, even in Europe. They're setting the direction.
> So what happens when no company actually wants to build chargers in a place where the legislation requires chargers?
They aren't specifying particular locations, just maximum spacing. Member states can incentivize deployment however they like. And there are deployment exemptions available for exceptional cases where there just isn't going to be the traffic:
A lot of it will be as simple as adding more chargers to existing fuel stations along those routes. Circle K, Shell, BP, etc. have been doing that for years.
I'm surprised someone hasn't created the Airbnb of EV chargers. For example, you're traveling and you need to find a charger, so you open the app and fine someone with a home charger. They are willing to let you use the charger for a small fee, plus energy use etc. The app arranges the connection, then the person goes and plugs in.
If someone is not already working on it, someone will be soon
However, this is a different use-case than motorway charging. Home chargers are slow, designed for charging overnight. On a road trip you want to recharge in 20-30 minutes, and that requires much bigger DC chargers you won't find at home.
I used to advertise my outdoor plug on Plugshare (it should still be there, AFAIK). The only time it's ever been used is by my neighbors before they got their own EVSE installed, and my in-laws when they visit. No random stranger has ever used it.
This is the reason why for some time no company has undertaken to build travel service points in Poland. Investing in a very expensive charging infrastructure (motorways are often located in places where the nearest power transmission line is far away) does not pay off with contracts signed by the state for a short time.
I worked at a company who made charging points a few years ago and the consensus then was that the idea of charging on the road at petrol stations was outdated.
Chargers need to be where you park for an hour or more, so at the home, destination or basically where there are car parks.
Absolutely true for short distances (e.g. a daily commute), but not when you travel a long distance. If you want to cover say 1000km in a day, you probably need to charge twice along the way. Fast chargers along the highway are perfect for this.
We should have another go at "trolleybuses", they seemed like a really effective technology. I guess the maintenance of overhead lines was more expensive than you'd expect.
IF you are running frequent service, then a trolley bus with all the wire costs is cheaper than batteries or engines. However most bus systems have a lot of less frequent sections and so it isn't worth it.
The real disadvantage of a trolleybus is your are stuck going exactly where the wires are. If something is blocking your lane you can't go around. If you want to close the road for maintenance you can't run the trolley bus. This loss of flexibility makes the regular bus make more sense in a lot of cases.
If you do have a situation where a trollybus will work, you probably should just put in a train that doesn't run in traffic. A tram running on tracks that are not in a road at all isn't much more expensive, and can handle more people than a bus in the busy part of the day. I'm a big fan of the automated light metro system idea: it runs faster than a tram (because it doesn't have to worry about anything in the tracks), it is cheaper in the long run (operating costs the big cost in any transit system), is can run 24x7 (if designed for it - many are not), and you won't have problems finding crew (many transit systems have the money to expand service, but cannot hire qualified drivers). In the end though there are pros and cons to everything so you need to figure out what is best for you.
This akin to parking anxiety, where you never know how long it will take to find a parking in the city. Still, we have cars in the city.
I've had an ev for over five years now and I have so far waited on a charger once, for twenty minutes. And that was at peak hours of the spring break mountain rush (when every swede packs their cars and heads from the populated south to the mountaneous north-west).
On the other hand, I have spent accumulated hours on driving from broken charger to charger that is only for customers to one that I'm not sure if it's in operation yet.
Also hours on just installing different charging apps with the usual registration flow (email, password, verify email, register card, etc).
More chargers and standardized experience (why not just chip and pin?) would be highly appreciated.
Here in Ireland, in the motorway filling stations where the chargers are located, it is very common for me to not only have to wait, but often for 2-3 car to charge ahead of me. Very limited infrastructure here, though.
I've never encountered range anxiety myself, or the people I know. I'd have to work pretty hard to get enough miles around town to deplete the 90% charge I start every day with. And on road trips the computer just tells me where I'm going to recharge and it always works. I have yet to wait. Granted, I don't live in California.
> (guaranteed because of the chemistry and physics of battery - charge/recharge cycles, temperature and even just sitting idle in the garage will erode battery life anyway)
Please post the "guarantee" based on chemistry and physics.
> According to Tesla's 2021 impact report, its batteries are designed to last the life of the vehicle, which the company estimates as roughly 200,000 miles in the U.S. and 150,000 miles in Europe. Tesla's own data show Model S and X batteries retain about 90 percent of their original capacity on average over 200,000 miles of use.
> whereas cheapest battery replacement costs are north of 25,000 USD/EURO - sometimes 25% or more of the cost of the a new car.
You can also see 2013 Nissan Leafs on ebay, although those are quoted at 50 mile range because the battery has somewhat degraded. Honestly I suspect the first decade or so of electric cars will not have long lives, because the technology keeps overtaking them.
I think it's fair to just exclude Leafs from the discussion altogether. They did not have any meaningful thermal management for the battery, which has a huge effect on longevity. AFAIK all other modern EVs have thermal management and it puts them in an entirely different category.
The 2013 Nissan Leaf had a range of ~75 miles when it was brand new. 33% degredation is nothing to write off but like my sibling says, leaf has always been a lemon of an EV.
Tesla's claims are their to make, they can say whatever they want and what incentive they have to say something against the whole category of their main and only product. They have been saying bunch of stuff about automated driving, Tesla truck which isn't even possible under current laws of physics.
The real world mileage depletes with every usage and depletes faster. Having more charging stations along the way isn't very helpful because charging isn't instantaneous. If your battery lasts barely 50 miles, a charging station every 40 miles isn't helpful because you'd be sitting ducks there every 80 miles or so waiting your battery to have enough energy to catapult you to the next charging station.
About costs - I did inquire it myself for a German EV, battery had to be imported and I was quoted around 20,000 USD. Tesla has been quoting this much as well [0]
Whereas a full ICE engine rebuild would be 1/10th of that, easily.
It's not just Tesla. Their are enough > 10 year old EV's of multiple brands on the road to get statistics. And the only EV that regularly requires battery replacement is the Nissan Leaf, which doesn't have battery thermal management. Every EV with battery thermal management is seeing a significant majority of their batteries outlast their cars.
And if you're worried about battery life, buy a car with a LiFePo4 battery. Those batteries last 3x as long as batteries with a nickel chemistry. So instead of 200,000 miles you get 600,000 miles.
150k to 200k miles is not a lot though? Every car I've ever owned has passed those landmarks easily unless I've sold it first without being anywhere close to "end of life". In other words, if your battery only lasts that long then the battery most definitely is the limiting factor.
Prove what? The OP said it was guaranteed to fail within 8-10 years. That number is clearly made up since the base warranty is already 8 years, and we already have examples of batteries that are older keeping up just fine.
Its OP's responsibility to prove their claims. But they can't, because they are making up numbers
About range, please note the conclusion as the end of first link that you referenced:
> That said, the overall dataset seems to be pointing to Tesla’s 90 kWh battery packs performing badly in general.
Keyword here - general. And I am not talking about Tesla specifically. Just EVs in general.
Second article that you quoted contains this about the costs:
> In the event your Tesla needs an out-of-warranty battery replacement, you can expect to pay between $10,000 and $20,000 depending on the model, local labor costs, and taxes.
10 to 20,000 USD whereas I projected it to around 25,000 because I am adjusting for inflation as the article is from 2020 and we're in 2023 with massive wave of inflation everywhere.
> 10 to 20,000 USD whereas I projected it to around 25,000 because I am adjusting for inflation as the article is from 2020 and we're in 2023 with massive wave of inflation everywhere.
I would imagine the cost of batteries would go down as the technology improves, and the production scale increases. It wouldn't surprise me if this decrease was faster than inflation right now.
I won't downvote you, but if I did it wouldn't have anything to do with ideology but the fact that you seem to be presenting an ideological viewpoint yourself without accurate data to back it up.
> whereas cheapest battery replacement costs are north of 25,000 USD
A Bolt battery pack, as I recall, is 16K retail. And that's a previous generation battery that is essentially out of production now, or very close. Given the trajectory in battery prices, that number is just going lower and lower every year.
Comparing it to an engine rebuild is a bit disingenuous, too. Buy a brand new engine and let's talk about what it costs. And then don't forget the ongoing fuel cost difference. In the future, there will be rebuilt battery packs for older EVs too.
> Aren't at this point electric cars mainly "rich boy's toy" unless something disruptive in energy storage comes along?
The TCO on a Bolt is way, way, way below a comparable ICE car right now. And I'm willing to bet the TCO on a RWD Model 3 is also better than competing ICE designs as well. And I have to tell you, I live in an area with mixed incomes and there are lots of regular people in modest neighborhoods with Niro EVs, Bolts, and no small number of Model 3s. The economics are favorable for the type of people who keep a car for at least 5 years.
> I live in an area with mixed incomes and there are lots of regular people in modest neighborhoods with Niro EVs, Bolts, and no small number of Model 3s. The economics are favorable for the type of people who keep a car for at least 5 years.
Without commenting on anything else, I can tell you that what people are buying doesn't have a thing to do with what the those same people should actually buy to be smart with their money. There would be a lot less financial problems in the world if they were one and the same.
(I'll go as far as saying that I don't believe purchasing a new-from-the-dealer car ever makes financial sense, no matter how big your wallet is. I'm not sure which forced depreciation scheme is worse: the drop in value of a diamond ring when you walk out the store or the drop in value of a new car as soon as you drive it off the lot.)
That's probably true. There are a disproportionate number of people in very middle-of-the-road neighborhoods with solar panels on the roof, and the ROI on solar in Oregon isn't really awesome. So there's some idealism going on, for sure.
But I've run the numbers enough times, and for the people who buy a car and drive it into the ground the EV math is pretty great. At least around here, because 9pm-5am every day and all-day weekends our per-kWh electricity cost is under 8 cents (all-in, including transmission costs, etc).
That's an insane electric cost if it's comprehensive of everything including delivery fees plus taxes and surcharges (i.e. your actual monthly payment divided by total kWh consumed).
I'm in Illinois and we are considered to have fairly cheap electricity (and the highest (?) rate of nuclear energy in the States) but even with time-of-use billing heavily biased towards late night and the wee hours of the morning, I still paid net just over 10¢/kWh this past month. (State law mandates the availability of a real-time pricing option by all electric providers in Illinois.)
The reason I asked if it was calculable with the simple formula I listed above is that—according to ComEd—my price was 6.809¢/kWh, but that's not taking into account the ~34% of the total bill that's taxes and surcharges.
It extends it, sure, and if you only keep cars a few years it will be tough to get the economics to be favorable. As someone who buys a new fun car every 18 months, I recognize it's not a good economic choice.
But my nearest neighbors buy a new Camry every 10 years, over and over, and the economics would be really great for them. Here is how the economics are working for me, using my most recent EV as an example:
I've spent 197.24 on electricity since buying it, and driven 5428 miles. 127.82 of that was home charging, and 69.42 was spent supercharging. $0.036/mile.
Local gasoline is $4.69/gal. A typical Camry hybrid gets 46 mpg overall and costs $0.101/mile.
An average modern car is expected to go approximately 200K miles before being recycled. Over that time, assuming fuel prices do not change (they will, of course, but we don't know how that will play out), the Camry will cost an additional $12940 in fueling costs.
The battery is warrantied for 8 years or 120K miles, and if it makes it that far without needing replacement then the odds are good it'll make it to the EOL of the car. Even if I had to replace it, by that point it'll cost less than how much I've saved on gasoline. Given the sheer number of Model 3s on the road right now, used battery packs 5-10 years down the road are going to be even more common (it's already easy enough to get used Model 3 packs on eBay for 5-7 grand).
I like the economic outlook for EVs, and it just gets better every year.
> what about the fact that electric cars just become a useless heavy paperweight in eight to ten years (guaranteed because of the chemistry and physics of battery - charge/recharge cycles
An understandable concern, considering how quickly smartphone batteries degrade.
But the batteries in most EVs are treated a lot better than smartphone batteries - heaters for when it's cold; water cooling when it's hot; and enough capacity it's easy to keep the charge level in the most durable range.
There are reports [1] of Teslas with 100k miles on the odometer still having almost the same range as when they were new.
And even if not every EV fares that well, if your EV starts its life with enough range for a 4 hour drive and after a decade you only have the range for a 2 or 3 hour drive, that would still meet the needs of a lot of motorists.
1. Car companies disagree that their batteries will all be paperweights within 8-10 years
2. Car companies don't think batteries will cost $25k to replace.
3. Car companies are not trying to be profitable. They are choosing to sell cars that will lose them tens of thousands of dollars in warranty claims. Car companies like Hyundai and Kia will go bankrupt as they spend billions on replacement batteries for cars that cost <$50k
Im inclined to think it's actually 1 or 2, and I'd imagine they have actual data to back up their decisions.
My 10+ yr old Yaris is leaking some fluid (I forgot which), and the dealer said it would be $1k+ to fix it, I didn't know if I could even sell it for $1k, so I said forget it. Thankfully the car is holding up valiantly, but if the leak becomes worse there's a very good chance I'll just throw it away because fixing it is not worth the value of the car.
So.... one might even say my 10+ year old ICE car is just a useless paperweight. One would be exaggerating, of course, but exaggeration seems the name of the game.
You are free to take your Yaris to any independent mechanic to fix that leak for a fraction of that price, probably with the option of using aftermarket parts to boot. The tech lock-in for EV batteries must not be underestimated.
> My 10+ yr old Yaris is leaking some fluid (I forgot which), and the dealer said it would be $1k+ to fix it, I didn't know if I could even sell it for $1k, so I said forget it. Thankfully the car is holding up valiantly, but if the leak becomes worse there's a very good chance I'll just throw it away because fixing it is not worth the value of the car.
I don't understand why you are comparing the cost of fixing it to how much you could sell it for. Shouldn't you be comparing to the cost of replacing it?
Why does swapping out a battery pack cost more than the cost of the car? Seems like a simple maintenance step and I doubt battery packs are sold at below cost in new cars. Do you have a good citation for that? If so that's news to me.
Edit: Ohh you're comparing the price of swapping out a battery on a luxury car with getting a small and frugal ICE car. That's apple to oranges.
As an EV owner I am concerned about the eventual battery death of my car, but the two Honda Civics that I owned prior to my Tesla both started breaking down and were more expensive to repair than to replace after ten years. The vast majority of ICE vehicles built today aren't designed to last more than ten years.
On top of that, your numbers literally don't add up. If a replacement battery costs >$25K, and that is "sometimes more than 25% the cost of the car", that would mean EVs cost well over $100K, which the vast majority do not. And if you can point me to reputable repair shop that can "totally rebuild" a 10yo Ford or Honda for <$2K, I'll go jump off a cliff.
You are implicitly assuming zero progress on battery and or car technology. This is not entirely unfounded as the combustion engine has stopped progressing much for decades. As for Electric Cars, this is a whole different ballgame. The battery you are going to get in 15-25 years when you replace yours, will be a significant upgrade.
Also, an n=1 story: My girlfriend's parents bought an electric car in the mid 2000's with a range of 120km for short trips. 15ish years later, it still works perfectly.
Finally, Air Pollution is easily one of the most lethal (can it be THE most lethal?) thing in the world depending on how you measure. A significant part of this comes from cars. My guess is that for most of us, the gains in air pollution are personally significantly more important than those in climate change
“How often does a Tesla battery need to be replaced? There haven't been many electric cars that needed battery replacement, but according to Elon Musk, your Tesla batteries last for 300,000 to 500,000 miles, or 1,500 battery cycles. That's around 22 to 37 years for someone driving an average of 40 miles a day.”
That’s the top answer from google but wouldn’t be surprised if that wasn’t true?
I'm so tired of this electric car bashing. It is so exhausting. How long is this nonsense going to keep going?
Electric cars last somewhere between 150k-300,000 miles - that's about the same as a gas car - slightly more. Yes, the number of cars we go through is wasteful, but these latest attacks pretend like it's never happened before and is brand new with electric cars.
It's not like we're all driving around 1970s Oldsmobile Cutlasses and Buick Rivieras while someone is advocating for disposable cars.
It's talking points from right wing propaganda machines funded by the gas and coal industry - the same ones that have been attacking climate change science for 40 years.
> whereas cheapest battery replacement costs are north of 25,000 USD/EURO sometimes 25% or more of the cost of the a new car.
You know that not all EVs cost 100k+ as you seem to be implying. For a perfectly adequate 50k car the battery would be 50% of the price. Really?
Anyway.. even if this were true how are you so sure that battery prices won’t continue going down in the next 10 years?
Also an ~8 year + 70% warranty seems to be pretty standard nowadays which would make no sense if manufacturers expected most batteries to become useless in 8-10 years?
Enough people are willing to defect for money in this particular Nash game, that we have to solve the problems rather than just point to the happy case where we all cooperate and compare it to the unhappy case where we all seek our personal best interests.
Cars in Europe are really more like appliances. Most people don’t really need them and will inevitably find some other solution if they become too expensive.
As opposed to the fuel of ICE engines which is literally just burned away into the atmosphere causing the earth to warm, and people to die from heat?
I think there is a back of the napkin calculations you can make here. How many ICE engines are actually rebuilt after they die? How much fuel does the average ICE engine spend? How does this compare to a battery ending up in a landfill?
Also worth considering—since you are giving the ICE engine the benefit of being recycled/rebuilt—batteries can be recycled, whether they will be is up to your government’s policy. You should perhaps include that in you back of the napkin calculations.
The median age of the average car on the road in the US today is over 12 years. Independent mechanics everywhere are buying and installing rebuilt ICE vehicle engines on a daily basis; you will face no particular difficulty in sourcing one for pretty much any vehicle more than a year old.
I'm not saying this can't be - someday - true for EVs, but it's disingenuous to try and throw mud at the fact that this absolutely is the case for ICE cars today.
It won't matter because in 8 to 10 years (even sooner) we're all going to be conditioned into seeing our personal cars as enablers of the climate apocalypse (yes, even the EVs) and as such we'll be kindly asked to travel less.
Because, of course, public transportation won't be able to compensate for the sudden and very big demand caused by people being forced to give up personal transportation en masse.
And all this (including the electricity grid upgrade and new power plants required) are going to be financed with loans at a 5% or more interest rate. Sure.
That's the point of the policy. You drive an ICE car, you pay extra for EV infrastructure you don't use. You drive an EV, you get subsidized infrastructure you don't fully pay for.
Perfectly fine example of a government aligning the incentives towards its goals (EV adoption), rather than ensuring absolute fairness.
Then it would depend on the nature of the taxes. If the government is smart, they would only use taxes related to motor vehicles to finance this infrastructure. Think vehicle registration, fuel taxes, sales taxes on vehicles, sales taxes on automotive parts, etc.
Whether or not it's fair enough depends on how much your government tries to make it fair.
(As a fellow cyclist I am also cognizant of the fact that roads are mostly paid for by gasoline taxes where I live, and I also enjoy subsidized infrastructure that way.)
In light of the last 2000 years of history, what do you think is more plausible? (A) the government being smart, or (B) the government spending more than it makes and then raising debt and taxes for useless projects?
This is a defeatist attitude. Because the government is not smart, so we should abolish taxes and government incentives? Preach your anarchism somewhere else.
I am not following, often debt enables growth if it is used wisely. I don’t know about Germany but often the poor are not paying taxes at a significant level, and those without ev cars will start paying for some of the externalities.
I find that directive/rule/law very very very nice. I wish more were like that. I don't see why I'd need to have a phone with me and even less why I'd need to install any app on it.
> (at present, some charging networks require subscriptions or app downloads).
Makes me happy to know they'll either comply or GTFO.