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Rapid charger hogging

16K views 162 replies 45 participants last post by  Johnny Read 
Does anyone else think there should be government legislation to fine people for this selfish behaviour?
Some idiots might think that.

The owners of the charger are at liberty to set the rules of usage and enforcement of those rules.

Anyone else with 'self-entitlement' issues can go swivel. None of their business.
 
As @donald points out, it is up to the owner of the charger to decide how it can be used. One of the things that is a little surprising or confusing when getting your first EV is that 'public' chargers are largely not, in fact, public, in terms of ownership nor, in many cases, access i.e. there can be strings attached, such as you must be a customer of such-and-such establishment.

However, as a society or community, we ought to establish the normal conventions around their use. Then, if charger owners want to do it differently, they have to indicate it very clearly at the site. For rapids, the convention might mean time limits, either absolute or after a certain high state of charge, such as 90%, is reached, following which there would be overstay charges per minute. For destination chargers, I would expect a lot more leeway: I think it is reasonable to allow people to finish doing whatever they came to the 'destination' to do rather than having to fuss about moving their car in the middle of it.

Kind regards
- Garry
To be fair to the OP, if there is any legislation that sets requirements for charger provision in public places on trunk roads (specifically, motorway services) then the Gov might well include within that requirement some expectation that timings for charges is regulated in some way.

Of course, they'd say it is now, already, as there is a time limit on the services car parks.

No one solution is ever going to satisfy everyone.

Of course, private chargers like at Lidl and such, it is entirely at the owner's discretion.

I will offer the following warning; make it too difficult for them by throwing lots of regulations at them, and they simply won't bother offering a charger at all. Why should they if everyone is making it difficult for them? Would you?
 
I support 100% a drastic and punitive overstay rate at rapid/ultra rapid chargers - especially ultra rapids.

We are not going to have sufficient of these on motorways anytime soon and I believe EV ownership is already accelerating much, much faster than they can make promises to put them in the ground! We still have a tiny number of ultra rapid 100kWh + chargers in the UK. Zap Map shows 1,211 ultra rapid chargers in the UK as of this month, give or take. I think approx 650 of those are for Tesla only. With something like 330,000 BEVs registered in the UK since 2012 and nearly 10% of those registered in just one month - September 2021 had 32,721 new BEVs registered - over crowding of reliable chargers and poor behaviour is just going to get worse...
This reads as a self-serving opinion, out of synch with the arithmetic of the situation.

There are 4,912 rapid chargers as of 18th October 2021, serving ~330,000 BEVs, so one rapid charger for every 68 BEVs.

There are around 8,000 petrol stations with around 8 petrol pumps per station on average, so 64,000 pumps serving 33 Millions ICE, around one pump per 520 ICE.

(Feel free to juggle with that number if you like, but clearly petrol stations have less than 80 pumps!!!)

You can't 'top up' an ICE at home, but you can with a BEV, making that number even less justified.

What possible justification is there for yet more rapids?

If they are already over-crowded, then something more fundamental is wrong with the 'theory' of BEVs for everyone.
 
Not all of us can… 40% of UK households don’t have off street or allocated parking. Luckily we charge at husband’s office but not everyone has that option. For EV ownership to reach those without home charging, there need to be many more (reliable and available) places to charge. No good having lots of MSAs with rapids if there’s nowhere to charge in my neighbourhood.
Irrelevant to the point.

It should still be better for BEV users even if they couldn't charge at home, there are so many rapids available to them.
 
68 vs 520?

Call it 10x.

Which fits with about 10x the time for a recharge of electrons vs recharge of liquid as Smitten says.

However the number of EVs is going to increase by 100x in the coming two or three decades. Hence the obvious justification for more rapids.
You're missing the point there by a statute mile.

So .. what are we after here? 500,000 rapid chargers for 33M BEVs?

OK, so let's run with that thought experiment. Let's just look at cost first of all.

Say, £34,000 installation cost for 68 BEVs. Each BEV owner therefore has to contribute £500 in cash proceeds to the charger owner for it to break even. Let's say the charger lasts for 10 years, so each BEV owner on average has to contribute £50 on the cash line to the charger owner each year, lets say with a 25% mark up, so on average a BEV user will have to shell out £200 per year on rapid chargers just for them to break even on turn over?

Utterly zero business case for anyone to get involved in that.

A rapid has to be serving at least 300 or so BEVs of the national fleet to get anywhere near a 'business case'. But that's (proportionately) a fifth of what is currently available, and people are already screaming blue murder over not being able to get on one.
 
I think you are making the mistake of lumping together all chargers when my point was about ultra rapid 100kWh + chargers. There are currently only 1200 of those and half are exclusively Tesla.
I am not sure I understand the distinction.

The difference in charging time does not remotely tally up with some proportionate decrease in how many times they are visited, and in turn how many times users might find one already occupied.
 
Technology needs to improve. Charging speeds will get much quicker and ability of cars to charge ultra fast will also improve.
How will the charging speeds of the 330,000 BEVs out there get much quicker?

So you are agreeing, no evidence today that these improvement are possible.
 
The 0.3 million current EVs will be gone in a decade or so. The next generation will be gone a decade after that.

There are certain infrastructure companies who plan for a decade - telecoms, aerospace. There are others who plan for many decades - airports, power generation. You need to get away from such a short terms view!
With your distant view (anyone), can you please lay out what the business case is for rapid chargers of the future (at less than £5/kWh).

Clearly there is no case that can be made today.

There is just a load of hand-wavy "Oh, things will get better, somehow".
 
The business case for rapid chargers? That's easy. Borrow money long term at the record low interest rates, install equipment.
OK but you do have to pay back loans, and also pay salaries and accommodate staff and data systems.

Buy electricity in bulk at 10p a pop, sell it to customers at 30p or 40p or 69p.
That'll pay for the staff, where does the money come from to pay off the loans?
 
People keep looking backwards and not forward.
Or in other words ... you would prefer to see people making plans based on speculations of things which don't yet exist.

:unsure:

What has that got to do with forming any rules to regulate a 22kWh car parked on a 104A max charger?
 
Yes, on things that dont exist but definetly will.

Everything because in 10 yrs low charging cars will not exist at rapid chargers. Problem solved.
Sorry, you folks are not thinking at all about the 'unintended consequences' here.

We have right now a load of 50kW max cars still being made.

If (somehow) cars are NOT permitted to use higher power chargers if they are 'only' 50kW cars, then all these 'new' chargers are going to be prohibited from use by these current cars.

Is that what we're saying here?

Then, if you say 'ah, well, cars are going to have faster charging speeds', so then THEY will have to be banned from using 50kW chargers so these earlier cars have a chance to get on 'a' charger.

It's all totally bonkers. Either we have some sort of workable rules and conditions for ALL BEVs, or we don't.

At the moment, what I am looking at is people like the OP declaring that anyone that stops THEM from accessing THEIR chargers should be sanctioned.

What a lot of tosh and idiocy I am looking at here.
 
Let's wait and see and chat again in four years.
No, let's not wait and see, because we were already 'here' 4 years ago.

What has happened since then, eh? More chargers, faster charging cars, faster chargers, and ...... the same old problems!!!!

Batteries have ALREADY more than doubled since 4 years ago in capacity and charging speed. Chargers have more than doubled in charging rates.

So, seriously, WTH do you think is going to be different about the next 4 years to the last 4 years!?
 
Sorry Donald i thought we were talking about 22kw v rapid charging. Not 50kw charging.
22kW used to be 'rapid' when I got my first BEV in 2012, but became the 'new slow' by 2017~2018 when all new installations were 50kW.
50kW is now the 'new slow' and 150kW is the new standard.
150kW will be the 'new slow' in 4 years time.

etc....

My point is that if you consign the current generation of BEVs to the scrap heap every 4 years because they are too slow for people who expect unlimited access with their new and more expensive BEVs, then basically we're all expected to throw our cars away around the time they need their first MoTs.

Plus, you also have to throw away all those slow chargers too, the ones with the >20 year business plan for pay-back.

We HAVE increased the battery and charger speeds over the last 4 years, and it has solved .... precisely nothing. In fact, and despite similar BEV/charger ratios, it is now MORE difficult to find a free charger, not less.

There are basically no 22kW chargers any more, they almost all broke (so not looking good on reliability, either). So now replaced with 50kW.

But we are going to have 4,000 rapids of <50kW capability and 250,000 BEVs of <50kW capability for the next 20 years, what happens to those, do we throw them away?

Do we ban 50kW cars from using 150kW chargers? If so, to make sure the 50kW cars can charge, do we also ban >150kW BEVs from using <50kW chargers?

I have lots of questions here and all I am reading is, basically, 'I want to charge when I want to charge, and screw anyone else with a different specification of car'. That is what you are all saying here.

Anyone want to offer a voice of reasonableness?
 
You're arguing against yourself now.

We won't need to ban today's 22s because they'll mostly retire.

We'll say wow, look at that vintage Zoe. Or spot an ancient ID3 1st charging at only 100.
I'm definitely arguing against (the likes of) you, because I am saying that you're effectively talking about banning today's 50kW cars in 4 years time.
 
FWIW, if all you nay-sayers really want to carry on in your little cocoons of silly non-beliefs of the future, why don't we turn the clocks back 6 years and re-extrapolate back to now.


I was openly laughed at for suggesting charging a flat £10 for half hour charging.

People were saying 'Pah! How can I make use of that with my puny car battery?!'.

Funny, I was criticised in 2015 for seeing the future, and now I am being criticised now for not seeing the future.

Hilarious really.

It was a year later after that when Ecotricity actually started charging for charges (yep, free up to 2016 ... anyone remember?!) and there was an outcry (here) that anyone would actually CHARGE THEM MONEY (!!!!) to fill up their car.

Like, errr... doh, yeah, that one was difficult to see coming (surely free forever, no?), anyway I laughed my shit out when a year later they went for a £6 per half hour model (which seems to have been to stop Outlanders sitting on rapids and sucking 3kW rates and paying next to nothing for next to no electricity).

.. Unintended consequences, people.

Of course, the nay-sayers were hard at work giving Ecotricity a hard time over that, and it went back to the unsustainable 30p/kWh model.

£10 for a half hour charge. Inconceivable!!! No-one in their right mind would pay for such madness!!!

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