Cars (all fuels and electric)

Ah yeh the key ring or the RFID card or the correct apps or the type2 cable, all things you don’t have and have no idea about if you get an EV as a courtesy car while yours is in for repair.
It’s worse than flying in for fuel and finding you have a Total card and the pump is BP only. It’s incredibly stressful and puts one off EV ownership for the near future.
Ended up with an extra night in a hotel using chargers meant for electric bicycles.
It would normally take 20 to 25 hrs for a full recharge so a night in a hotel got about 200km. Okay to get home provided I didn’t use the autoroute even on eco mode.🤪

And as such they’ve managed the nearly impossible task of making these chargers an even worse retail experience than a petrol station (which is already my least favorite retail experience!)

The problem is the obsession with possessing a lot of your personal data for marketing and other purposes.

No new business (concept) allows you to be a customer without sharing all this data with them. Gas stations only allow an (essentially) anonymous cash transaction because they pre-date this obsession.

I wonder if this is ever going to hit a tipping point of irritation? The words “set up an account” or “download our app” immediately put my back up and make me determined to avoid doing business with that company if I can.

Particularly irritating is purchasing clothes in a shop these days, where whilst paying one is invariably asked “can I take an email address for your receipt?” No, you absolutely cannot. Print it out.

Indeed; today I was in a bike shop and refused persistent attempts to get my mobile # and email address

So went for the printed receipt

But is the car charging issue mainly about data collection, or just stupid billing systems? There is a lot of money involved; the public charging points are charging about 3x to 5x more than the wholesale electricity cost (except in Sweden apparently). And from what I can see most electric car buyers have not yet realised this because most people don’t know what a kWh is…

And I wonder if the charging points have 3g/4g/5g connectivity? They certainly do not have ADSL/FTTP internet. The two at the pub across the road from me also do not have any mobile data because … there is none in the village! But then how do they monitor the charge when the customers are also without mobile data? Did the pub run an ethernet or wifi connection to them?

I think it is simply a matter of people needing to make a profit out of installation of a charger. Remember if you take a city and it’s surrounds, the electricity all comes down the same grid system. The owner of that charger has to pay for the electricity it uses and therefore has to find a way for you as the end user to pay them for the electricity you take on to charge your vehicle. Stupidly IMHO they have chosen a system of apps and RFIDs and key rings etc which are a bit like loyalty cards with the supermarket. Many supermarkets went into banking so alongside the loyalty card, the card also served as a credit or debit card.
Most have rolled back on this now and have dumped their banking business.
Following this system for EV chargers if not changed.and not changed soon will certainly put the brakes on the EV market for travelling. Use of bank cards or even a universal RFID or key ring is the answer.
I am not driving an EV now but because I had one as a courtesy vehicle I have 3 apps each with a credit card cleared for online payment. 2 of them are with charger companies so there is still a €50 deposit clearance on each of these although they don’t use the money unless I charge my car on one of their chargers. The other is the supermarket chain Lidl which have a lot of chargers and I can use the €50 deposit in their stores for food or whatever.
It’s a total mess and I still didn’t get the car charged by any of these and had to book into a hotel and rely on their good graces to charge overnight.
On the positive side fro EVs I was able to fully charge at home over a 20hr period, with some of that being free from my photovoltaic panels. The total cost of charging was less than €10 for around 320km. The Zoe is advertised as 395km range on a full charge. The reason for this discrepancy might have been because this car was 4 years old. On the other hand it might well have been the marketing dept taking full advantage of the regenerative braking on urban driving. I will say I took the car into the town about 40km round trip and the gauge showed nearly the same on my return as when I left.
On the other side motorway driving really uses up the kilometres. I did 110km on the autoroute using the ECO setting. That limited the vehicle to a governed 100km/h and I still dropped 200km on the countdown meter.
Again on the plus side some supermarkets allow you to charge on 7kw chargers with the first 2hours being free. So good to top up when going shopping. However, again a downside is that in many large cities you have to pay for parking if their for more than 1.5hrs these days, and the charger is inside the parking area.
So would I buy an EV? Probably not, at least not in the next couple of years. My wife and I both actually enjoyed driving the Zoe and it had many good points but if they don’t get this paying for charging away from home sorted then I will not be buying. It’s not through lack of charging points, France has loads of them, although here again the administration and one’s own knowledge has to improve.
A 52KW/h electric Zoe can be charged with an domestic wall socket. It takes 20 to 25 hours to fully charge.
You can get 3kw and 7kw domestic wall chargers. The 7Kw dominate at hotels and supermarkets. For that as well as your electric charger lead you need to buy a Type 2 charger connector. The supermarkets and hotels don’t supply the connectors. The charge time will be reduced, depending on charger to 17hrs to approx 8hrs. This is full charge or as full as your battery will take.
Type 2 connector chargers can go up to 22Kw and then if your EV charging system allows you can fully recharge in about 2.5hrs. Some cars like the Zoe can be charged using Combo CCS? chargers. These rapid chargers come with their own cables like your petrol pump comes with the fuel pipe. These rapid chargers are DC (the others being mostly AC)can charge at rates from 22Kw up to (I have been told) 365Kw. The most rapid I saw was at Lidl and was a 120Kw charger. Of course you can only take this speed of charge if your car charging system allows for it. IIUC the Zoe can only charge up to 52Kw per hour (I have not thoroughly investigated this as the charger didn’t work) so although I could use the 120Kw charger, the car only being capable of taking 52 Kw at a time, it would have taken 1 hour to charge the vehicle.
Not a problem as we could have gone into Lidl? and got a drink and a sandwich as by then we needed something having gone straight there from RyanAir and then spending more than 2 hours trying to get electricity🥵 Only to be thwarted by some failed internet connection between the Lidl website and the charging machine.😱
Teslas have a different charging connector which means that in charging a Tesla on a rapid charger, you first need to find a rapid charger with such a plug.😏
In truth it is not range which will hold me back from buying an EV (although more range would be nice) it is the whole complexity of the system and its administration. There is little point in a country like France having more than 200,000 charging points if you can’t use them when and where you need.
BUT I still like the idea of EVs.

This has been regulated at EU level. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1804/oj

At publicly accessible recharging points deployed from 13 April 2024, recharging on an ad hoc basis shall be possible using a payment instrument that is widely used in the Union.

From 1 January 2027, operators of recharging points shall ensure that all publicly accessible recharging (…) comply with the requirements

Some countries solved it earlier. In Portugal there’s one card from your electricity company. Works with all chargers. I’ve used mine yesterday at Ionity between Lisbon and Faro. Got well over 200kW charge rate. Love it.

That EU reg uses wording which is meaningless.

Norway clearly has a really distorted market due to very cheap electricity.

The biggest money is made from the kWh markup. It is amazingly profitable if you can get high utilisation.

We are seeing interesting car marketing here. Adverts are almost entirely for EVs but reports from the trade say most people come in to look at an EV and come out with a normal car.

It would be interesting to see how the UK compares with the more southern countries in Europe which seem to be mostly disinterested for simple economic reasons.