“Battery EV” vs “Hydrogen Fuel cell EV”

[nctnico]

Not to mention, EVs don't need to charge at 6pm, like when you might put the oven on, which creates a lot of demand. EVs can charge at 2am, parked on your driveway,

Can you please get me a driveway? And while you are at it, thousands of people that live in my neighbourhood would like one as well. And make it two driveways for the households with two cars.

[tom66]

Can you please get me a driveway? And while you are at it, thousands of people that live in my neighbourhood would like one as well. And make it two driveways for the households with two cars.

Well, I addressed that yes there is an infrastructure issue for street parked EVs right now - so yes, probably not the best time to buy an EV if you don't have off-street parking of some kind.  But, about 50% of people -do-, so they should have much less of an issue.  Besides, charging at 2am would still be perfectly possible for on-street parking: delayed start is a thing. 

And, why would you need two driveways for two cars?  They don't need to be charged at the same time.  You don't need to fill your petrol cars at the same time. 

[MadScientist]

This idea that future EV will be charged at home , is entirely misplaced , firstly increasingly powerful chargers will not be available at home and range and recharge tine limits , will limit the useability of home charging

Residents of apartments etc or those without “ driveways “ will simply use high powered fast charging stations which will replace filling stations.

Nobody needs a driveway to use a  EV.

[tom66]

A 7.2kW home charger (230V, 32A - standard 'level 2' charger)  is enough to charge at around 30 miles of range per hour.  So parked from 6pm to 6am, 12 hours, it adds 360 miles of range, if you use every minute of that to charge and have a battery big enough to store that all...

In what world are you doing 360 miles - or 131000 miles - per year?  There's absolutely no need for a home charger to top up more than your commute plus a bit extra. I do about 50 miles per day when commuting and a 2.3kW (230V, 10A) granny charger would be enough in a 6 hour period.  I only have a PHEV, so about half of that is electric and the other half is petrol, so my car is done in 3 hours.  Fits nicely in the off peak period so I haven't bothered increasing the charging power.

If anything one of the huge benefits to owning an EV is it frees you from the need to charge up in public, it charges just like your phone does... overnight, while you sleep, you need to do nothing but plug it in.

[SiliconWizard]

You think people will just give up the fact that someone took away cars from a half of population?

Yes.

[MadScientist]

A 7.2kW home charger (230V, 32A - standard 'level 2' charger)  is enough to charge at around 30 miles of range per hour.  So parked from 6pm to 6am, 12 hours, it adds 360 miles of range, if you use every minute of that to charge and have a battery big enough to store that all...

In what world are you doing 360 miles - or 131000 miles - per year?  There's absolutely no need for a home charger to top up more than your commute plus a bit extra. I do about 50 miles per day when commuting and a 2.3kW (230V, 10A) granny charger would be enough in a 6 hour period.  I only have a PHEV, soo about half of that is electric and the other half is petrol, so my car is done in 3 hours.  Fits nicely in the off peak period so I haven't bothered increasing the charging power.

If anything one of the huge benefits to owning an EV is it frees you from the need to charge up in public, it charges just like your phone does... overnight, while you sleep, you need to do nothing but plug it in.

Again you can charge at centralised high power charging stations , while home charging is “ nice to have “ , a driveway or home charging is not required to own an EV.

[nctnico]

Can you please get me a driveway? And while you are at it, thousands of people that live in my neighbourhood would like one as well. And make it two driveways for the households with two cars.

Well, I addressed that yes there is an infrastructure issue for street parked EVs right now - so yes, probably not the best time to buy an EV if you don't have off-street parking of some kind.  But, about 50% of people -do-, so they should have much less of an issue.  Besides, charging at 2am would still be perfectly possible for on-street parking: delayed start is a thing. 

And, why would you need two driveways for two cars?  They don't need to be charged at the same time.  You don't need to fill your petrol cars at the same time.

Who says I don't need to charge both cars? First you say delayed charging is a thing but how to charge two cars when only one can be parked on a driveway? I surely don't want to get out of bed in the middle of the night to swap the cars. I'm also not very fond of needing to have to plug a car in all the time (which actually is a nuisance to many BEV owners after a while).

No, the whole 'charging in front of your doorstep' is just a temporary crutch. Just like people had gas cans at home to fuel the early ICE cars. Think about how low the utilisation is of the chargers to do actual charging. It means a lot of hardware is sitting idle for most of the time but that hardware still needs to be paid for in full. My estimation is that a street level charging point costs between 5k and 10k euro over the time span of 10 years (installation, maintenance, power delivery, administration, etc costs) while it serves only 2 or 3 cars. Those costs need to be recouped from the people that charge these cars. An 'at home' charging point is cheaper but including installation it can easely hit the 1k euro mark. Not to mention the grid upgrades needed to feed enough power into residential areas; these will need to be paid for and overnight charging won't work if everyone is doing that due to limited capacity. Charging an EV is not the kind of load you want to have on a large scale in residential areas.

If you look at the bigger picture you'll see the current crop of the BEVs and 'at home' charging will be obsolete in 10 to 20 years. Better (solid state) batteries will allow fast charging (like 700km of range in 3 minutes) at what we call 'gas stations' nowadays and those either have storage in the form of batteries / hydrogen OR a fat connection to the grid. I would not be surprised if the BEVs you can buy 20 years from now are not even capable of 'at home' charging because it is cheaper to interface to fast DC charging only. And with widespread use of hydrogen looming at the horizon it makes sense to run cars from hydrogen instead of converting it into electricity at a gas station or at a storage facility. But before that the price of the technology will need to drop significantly. I'm sure it will at some point just like internet access and mobile phones but it takes a long time. Until then the early adopters are footing the bill. Countries that are currently lagging behind will likely to become ahead by skipping the 'at home charging' stage entirely.

[tom66]

I don't disagree that charging speeds will get faster;  CCS v4 is due out soon at 500kW.  But, charging at home is an advantage.  Why would I want to go out and charge my car?  It's time out of my day I need to take.  Of course, it doesn't work for every application, sometimes you need 50kWh in 30 minutes.  But often you don't - so I think the majority of EV charging will continue to be 'slow'.

One thing I could see is onboard AC charging being deleted and it being included in the wall charging units.  It's a compromise to carry it in the car, but there are benefits in having the cooling system already there for the motor.   It would probably depend on the cost of one of those units.  A home DC charging unit from Bosch for instance is still 10k euros, so I think the onboard charger will still win (even if you are paying for it in the sticker price for the car, you may want to charge at multiple AC-only locations.) 

Even if a public charger costs 10kEUR to install (let's go with your estimate).  Let us say it serves those 3 cars at 9000 miles per annum.  So over 10 years it 'provided' 270,000 miles of electricity.  Or about 67MWh of electricity.  That's a 13 euro cent per kWh markup over 10 years.  Hardly devastating. 

On-street charging will be a public resource and like petrol stations, once there's enough demand it will just be installed, either by municipalities or by private companies.  Look at e.g. Ubitricity in London, it's a private company doing exactly this (230V 20A on street charging).

[Someone]

Not to mention, EVs don't need to charge at 6pm, like when you might put the oven on, which creates a lot of demand. EVs can charge at 2am, parked on your driveway,

Can you please get me a driveway? And while you are at it, thousands of people that live in my neighbourhood would like one as well. And make it two driveways for the households with two cars.

Can I please park a caravan in your on street parking and live there? (or rent it out to some 3rd party)

You want something, then pay for it.

[james_s]

Again you can charge at centralised high power charging stations , while home charging is “ nice to have “ , a driveway or home charging is not required to own an EV.

Home charging is the single biggest advantage of having an EV. IMO there is very little point in owning one if this is not an option for you, just get a regular gas/diesel car or hybrid. Yes it's possible to get by without it, my dad did, but if you can't charge at home you are missing out on the best feature they offer, the fact that you start out each day with a full charge and never have to stop anywhere to fill up. I know quite a few people with EVs now and every single one of them charges it primarily at home.

[nctnico]

Even if a public charger costs 10kEUR to install (let's go with your estimate).  Let us say it serves those 3 cars at 9000 miles per annum.  So over 10 years it 'provided' 270,000 miles of electricity.  Or about 67MWh of electricity.  That's a 13 euro cent per kWh markup over 10 years.  Hardly devastating. 

It is still a huge price increase of about 2.6 cents per km. An equavalent of paying 52 eurocents cents extra per liter of gas (assuming driving an efficient hybrid).

[emece67]

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[MadScientist]

Again the drive way and home charging is simply not the issue , undoubtably it’s popular now because it’s cheaper , it’s very unclear over time if the running costs of EVs will remain below ICE , I believe ultimately via road pricing and selective electricity tariffs it’s will probably be as expensive to run as ICE is today

The primary driver of EV public policy is the decarbonisation of private transport. Governments don’t want to make it cheaper in fact they want the make private motoring more expensive to encourage transfers to public transport.

For example there is no concession where I am in road side parking rates for EVs because public policy is to discourage people bringing in private cars into the city centre. BEV s will not enable cheaper motoring I’m sure of that.

[MadScientist]

Again you can charge at centralised high power charging stations , while home charging is “ nice to have “ , a driveway or home charging is not required to own an EV.

Home charging is the single biggest advantage of having an EV. IMO there is very little point in owning one if this is not an option for you, just get a regular gas/diesel car or hybrid. Yes it's possible to get by without it, my dad did, but if you can't charge at home you are missing out on the best feature they offer, the fact that you start out each day with a full charge and never have to stop anywhere to fill up. I know quite a few people with EVs now and every single one of them charges it primarily at home.

Yet I have met loads of people with EVs at fast charger sites that have no domestic charging solution so I’d query your logic. It all depends on usage , if you have 20 km commute and 400km range , charging at home is irelevant as is the weekly overhead in visiting a fast charger , whereas I had a 130 km daily commute and relied heavily on nightly domestic charging

[PlainName]

as is the weekly overhead in visiting a fast charger

Which means you need to allow time to go there and then sit waiting while it charges, which is a drag. And as they get more popular you'll go there expecting to waste time waiting for it to charge, only to find there isn't a charger free so you go home and plan another trip sometime.

You may think it's not an issue, but during the recent petrol shortages it was a MASSIVE bummer to find somewhere flogging the stuff and which didn't have a round-the-block queue. Just thinking about going out again to try and get some juice was seriously aggravating. You're suggesting EV charging won't be like that, but the only way it won't is it you can fast charge batteries, like in 5 mins or so. That's not to prevent the wait-while-charge bummer but to have a greater chance of finding a charger free.

[james_s]

Yet I have met loads of people with EVs at fast charger sites that have no domestic charging solution so I’d query your logic. It all depends on usage , if you have 20 km commute and 400km range , charging at home is irelevant as is the weekly overhead in visiting a fast charger , whereas I had a 130 km daily commute and relied heavily on nightly domestic charging

It's actually quite the opposite of that. If you have only a 20km commute then you can easily charge at home with even a little 120V 15A charger, no need to even install a 240V 30-50A circuit for higher power charging because you're only draining a small portion of the charge every day. If you have an exceptionally long commute or need to take a particularly long trip then you'll need faster charging to be practical. Tesla has said so themselves, the supercharger stations are intended to be used when you really need to charge up quickly, most charging is intended to be at home. Have you ever actually spent any time driving an EV? From what you say I suspect not, because if you had, my point about the home charging would be immediately obvious. As I said, every single person I know that has an EV charges primarily at home, every one of them, 100%. I don't know why someone would buy an electric car if they had nowhere to charge it at home when fuel powered cars are readily available and a bit cheaper. You just don't seem to get it and I don't know why this is a difficult concept to grasp.

[nctnico]

You make it sound so easy but having a BEV ready to go at all times, means you need to plug it in (&out) all the time. That isn't an improvement in a time where modern cars have features like keyless entry where the number of things to do before driving away gets minimised.

At one of my employers one of my projects was an instrumented car that could also run the computers from mains power when the engine was off. Easy when it is parked inside where you certainly can do without the exhaust fumes. To me having to plug it in & out every time was a nuisance and more than once I drove off without disconnecting it first OR forgot to reconnect it. Fortunately I had made the mains connection using a plug that would prevent any damage from driving away with the mains plugged in.

The key point here is that making sure a BEV is ready to go whenever you want takes planning in advance which is much harder to do in a busy life compared to taking care of a car when it is actually needed. When I take a trip with a car (long or short) I don't fuel it up the night before. I do that along the way. There is always a gas station along the way and it takes a couple of minutes at most; not worth to put in extra planning effort. There is enough other stuff to plan.


BTW: one of my recent purchases is a corded screw driver / drill that runs from mains power. I got fed up with having to charge the batteries hours before using my cordless drill.

[richard.cs]

The key point here is that making sure a BEV is ready to go whenever you want takes planning in advance which is much harder to do in a busy life compared to taking care of a car when it is actually needed. When I take a trip with a car (long or short) I don't fuel it up the night before. I do that along the way. There is always a gas station along the way and it takes a couple of minutes at most; not worth to put in extra planning effort. There is enough other stuff to plan.

I don't know about you but I do have to plan with my petrol car. I often find myself visiting friends on a Sunday evening and have to consciously decide if I have enough petrol for the round trip and if needed buy petrol on the way (or the day before if I know I am going to be busy) because around here all the petrol stations shut early on a Sunday. At least charge points tend to be available 24 hours.

[nctnico]

Over here the majority of the petrol stations are open for fueling 24/7 (many of them are unmanned anyway with a debit/credit card terminal). I very much prefer those because I can pay much quicker compared to going into the shop.

[richard.cs]

Here even the ones with card prepayment at the pump tend to only be open when there is someone at the kiosk, though as I understand it unmanned ones are permitted. It may be mostly to do with the margins on fuel being low, most petrol stations here make the majority of their money in incidental sales (snacks, cigarettes, etc.) so there's little point them being open when "just" selling fuel.

[PlainName]

though as I understand it unmanned ones are permitted

No idea about permissions but the Asda near here has a 24/7 forecourt which is pay-at-pump only outside what seems to be office hours - it's like that even when the main shop is still open. No-one in the kiosk or anywhere near.

The local Tesco doesn't even have a kiosk. It's effectively a huge above-ground tank wrapped in cladding (I saw it being built) with pay-at-pump only available. No staff anywhere.

[2N3055]

Here plenty of gas pumps work 24/7. Not all, but many.

I have additional  thing to add to the mix. We are tourist country.
During summer season, we need to have both gasoline and in this case EV chargers capacity for all those tourists that pour in. Since we are in the middle of EU, most tourists come with the car...
There are some little places by the sea where population is 10k but they carry 50-60 thousands of people over summer.

Also Croatia has unique problem of having thousands of islands. Basic electricity distribution is a pain in a first place.
Saving grace is that there are many smaller islands that have no vehicles. Some of hose actually use all electric fleet for public services and solar charging with local storage battery installation. On one island they boost power grid with large solar installation.

So where it is possible and smart, people already use green energy.  Even in a small and not very rich country like mine.
But infrastructure is not in place for a country wide deployment of BEV and ban of liquid/gas fueled vehicles. That is a simple fact. And unlike simple and quick job of buying a piece of land, digging in a tank and basically dropping on a top a ready made pump facility, that I've seen done in few months, installing 100ths of thousands chargers on streets and charging stations with 10s of thousands of new transformer stations and building a new grid capacity on every level is a
25 years infrastructure project. Without even mentioning additional generation capacity on country level. Those are major projects..

I'm not arguing BEV or any kind of green energy vehicles are not good. If I could charge at home, and would have one that  has 400km range, it would fill all my short and long range needs. In that case I would buy it in a hearthbeat.

But as it is now, no. I have to make frequent trips to our capital. That's cca. 350 km round trip. And I do it randomly, when I need to support customers. So it is sometimes 3 days in a row and sometimes once in 2 weeks.
So I either have to charge at home every night and be ready every day, or I loose huge amount of time catering to stupid charging.

[tom66]

though as I understand it unmanned ones are permitted

No idea about permissions but the Asda near here has a 24/7 forecourt which is pay-at-pump only outside what seems to be office hours - it's like that even when the main shop is still open. No-one in the kiosk or anywhere near.

The local Tesco doesn't even have a kiosk. It's effectively a huge above-ground tank wrapped in cladding (I saw it being built) with pay-at-pump only available. No staff anywhere.

I think there's some regulation that these pumping stations need to be monitored, that's why they don't activate immediately when you lift the nozzle.  Someone is probably checking CCTV somewhere, but you could serve ten petrol stations with one CCTV attendant pretty easily, so it may well all be remote.  Not certain but that would be my guess.

Anyway, it's absolutely possible to conceive of situations where EVs are less convenient than petrol cars as well as the reverse.  I would argue that a car that charges up overnight so it always has pretty much 80% SoC is about as convenient as you can get.  There are of course situations where you might have to go on a long trip just after a work commute - but I am convinced that inconvenience is far outweighed by the need to visit a petrol station every 2-3 weeks.

[james_s]

I don't know about you but I do have to plan with my petrol car. I often find myself visiting friends on a Sunday evening and have to consciously decide if I have enough petrol for the round trip and if needed buy petrol on the way (or the day before if I know I am going to be busy) because around here all the petrol stations shut early on a Sunday. At least charge points tend to be available 24 hours.

He will argue endlessly about these impossible challenges facing EV owners that will make them completely unworkable, despite the inconvenient fact that millions of EV owners have already solved these "problems" years ago and they are a complete non-issue for hundreds of millions of people around the world. It happens in every single EV related thread. "I have these unusual edge cases that make it impractical for me therefor it will not work for anyone!"

[james_s]

Anyway, it's absolutely possible to conceive of situations where EVs are less convenient than petrol cars as well as the reverse.  I would argue that a car that charges up overnight so it always has pretty much 80% SoC is about as convenient as you can get.  There are of course situations where you might have to go on a long trip just after a work commute - but I am convinced that inconvenience is far outweighed by the need to visit a petrol station every 2-3 weeks.

I've said this before but I would happily give up the ability to use gas (petrol) stations entirely if I could trickle gas into my car overnight via a little tube hung on the wall in my garage and have a full tank every morning. The last time I drove through more than a whole tank of gas in a single day was around 20 years ago, I can rent different car if I ever need to do that again. I simply don't care if it takes hours to fill up if it can be done while I'm parked at home, my car spends the majority of the time in my garage or driveway just sitting there.