StevenRB45 said:

Yeah we live in a village with 4 phone lines...you sure the local grid can support 100kw charging?

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I'm sure the big issue with electric cars will be basic infrastructure. Cities will have serious problems because cables will not handle the load and/or chargers are throttled and your battery never gets properly topped up. But small villages will be even worse. Who is going to pay for decent size cables (power and broadband) to be run possibly miles across the countryside.

Solar will help with the villages, but you really need the power when the weather is cold and cloudy. Suddenly your 5KW array is doing 500 watts.

DaveMcT said:

Drivers in Devon have the same range issues. We have the M5 A30 and A38, but after that its mostly two lane A roads and some of those are so narrow they have passing places. It's a big county so going anywhere is a long way.

Going anywhere else in the country you have to add 80 to 100 miles of M5 just to get to Bristol where the "normal" journey can start. The "cheap" electric cars are pretty useless for most people and the expensive stuff like a Tesla Model X is frankly too big for our narrow roads. But at least it has a reversing camera for crawling back to the last passing place.

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Those Teslas are surprisingly big aren't they? As to the rest of it I suppose we could get by with an electric car for everyday use at present as I'm lucky enough to have a driveway and our journey lengths just about fit the profile. But then I wonder about our regular trips to see family members down in north Devon and near Salisbury. Ok, I hear people saying, just go on the train! But then I'd need to hire a car once we got there as neither of our destinations is near a station and both are "out in the country" The Devon one is down (and up) miles of country lane in that warren of single track roads north of Barnstaple - one morning and one evening bus and even at thet a considerable walk to the bus stop. Anyway have you been on a long distance train journey which traverses the midlands lately. It's invariably hellish. We've tried it a few times and it's always been a most stressful experience mainly due to overcrowding, heating which doesn't work, and why can't seats be assigned? In other words, like an aircraft, no booked seat and you don't get on the train? Don't get me started on the cost either - taken in the round we recon it costs about half as much going in the car compared with the train. (in fact I saw a news report last week that railway personnel are now being advised, for some journeys, to fly to save costs!) Considering infrastructure? are we going to see every car parking space with an inductive charging loop? I think that's what will be needed, especially at motorway service areas. Having a relatively small number of wired charging stations dotted around is never going to work because there are so many selfish people around to muck things up - just look at who inappropriately parks in disabled and mother and child spaces? Think I'll stop at that and see what anyone comes back with.

I've just seen a quote for £2m of civils work required to install 2x150kW chargers.

You're not going to see every space with an inductive loop within our lifetimes!

Physical infrastructure will be the big problem and nobody seems to be thinking about it. In country villages it's likely the power cables to the village will struggle with the higher peak loads. It's said that smart chargers and smart meters will be able to use car batteries as buffers during peak periods and charge them overnight, but when everyone is charging overnight the demand will be way higher than it is today.

Villages have the additional problem that they are further out so cover more miles than town people so will need more charging power.

None of this is insurmountable but I suspect power infrastructure (not just charge points) will be the limiting factor for a mass take-up of electric cars.

Two 150KW chargers are great but soon enough wont be enough. When four cars are connected they'll each get 75Kw when it's eight cars the delivery slows down another 50%. Oh just install some more chargers. Yes, but will the incoming power cables cope?

Got a bulb out warning on my 2012..

Had a random one weeks ago.

Assumed it was brake light..

Same today.. switched off whilst in traffic and waited to see once cleared on restart.

Set off anticipating to be error free until I braked in 2 mins..

But meassage scrolled across screen
' check DRL's'

They have been on for @ 40k miles.. so musnt grumble..

Continuing range related musings...today I filled up after doing 397 miles..range computer showed 67 left, but experience says that everything would be showing 0 in about 40 miles if that.

Filled her right up, range computer now says 551 miles.

How? the mpg average over the last tank was 46mpg..which is 2-3 mpg Above the official figure and I was nowhere near!

Hope the electric ones are better! I just don't get how the algorithm works, the trip computer itself was reading 44mpg, the 46 is from a brim to brim measurement. So 44 x every drop of a 12 gallon tank..is 528 but the car throws a light at 2.5 gallons remaining and shows all empty with nearly 2 gallons remaining. So in reality it takes absolute faith to more than than 420 miles in it as all gauges will show "coming soon hard shoulder!" long before the tank is dry.

DaveMcT said:

Physical infrastructure will be the big problem and nobody seems to be thinking about it.

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I've just come back from 4 days on our customer stand at Goodwood.

I found a real split in people - those who could see the potential in hydrogen and understood that mass uptake of hydrogen would be easier to manage than mass uptake of BEV.

The rest seemed to live in this mythical world where they'll be able to buy a Mondeo sized BEV that'll do 400 miles on a charge and can be charged from empty to full using your home charger.

I did point out that it would take 36 hours to charge a Tesla from what we'd call a 'fast' charger at home and they seemed to be genuinely surprised - especially when it was pointed out that home charging is unlikely to get much faster.

Schumi2001 said:

I did point out that it would take 36 hours to charge a Tesla from what we'd call a 'fast' charger at home and they seemed to be genuinely surprised -

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I would be surprised if you told me that.... because it’s simply not true...!

You can charge a model 3 to maximum range on a 13a standard home outlet in 27hrs. (2.3kw) 15hrs on a 16A connection or on Tesla’s 11kw fast charger you can charge it to full in 5hrs 30mins.....

The only thing that’s not surprising is someone who works for an oil company misrepresenting electric vehicles.

AndyRKett said:

I would be surprised if you told me that.... because it’s simply not true...!

You can charge a model 3 to maximum range on a 13a standard home outlet in 27hrs. (2.3kw) 15hrs on a 16A connection or on Tesla’s 11kw fast charger you can charge it to full in 5hrs 30mins.....

The only thing that’s not surprising is someone who works for an oil company misrepresenting electric vehicles.

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I was there partially representing EVs (We had a BMW i3S and 150kW charger on the stand). You you, as the owner (until last week) of the UK's largest solar farm.

A P100D on a 3kW charger takes more or less 36 hours to charge - and most homes will only be able to have a 3kW charger installed, without spending significantly on upgrades. (A P100D on a 13a socket takes 50 hours!)

We are looking at 350kW chargers, but the bills to upgrade supplies into sites are eye watering.

m20b25 said:

Alfa GTV's

I get good funds from one for almost having a monopoly on the spare parts market on some items but they are a pig to work on.... For example I got paid a good bit for handy parts today but spent my entire evening trying to put in a Fiat anti roll bar into one....

Meh

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During the Kit Car boom, I struggled for hours to connect a Ford Escort ARB to the bottom arms. Fitting the arms first or leaving arms loose either way the ends would not pull into the chassis cross-beam.

I got the job done with a tow rope. Fitted ARB to bottom arms, looped the rope around the ARB and tightened then used steel tube to twist the tow rope and pulled the arms together. Once I had it sussed the job was done in 15 minutes. Undoing the tow rope knot was "interesting" but the job was done.

Back to work tomorrow

Had a fortnight off and enjoyed it but should probably go in and catch up on the 800 or so emails. At least I should spend less with all the travelling about I appear to have set fire to a pile of money.

However worth it and wife's back to work next month and will be working weekend night shifts..so days of going places on the weekend as a family are numbered so just sucked the cost up cos there will be plenty of opportunity to be stuck in the house or local area with munchkin on the weekend in future.

Re: What's made you not grumpy but not smile either today?t

Schumi2001 said:

I was there partially representing EVs (We had a BMW i3S and 150kW charger on the stand). You you, as the owner (until last week) of the UK's largest solar farm.

A P100D on a 3kW charger takes more or less 36 hours to charge - and most homes will only be able to have a 3kW charger installed, without spending significantly on upgrades. (A P100D on a 13a socket takes 50 hours!)

We are looking at 350kW chargers, but the bills to upgrade supplies into sites are eye watering.

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You need to stop quoting corporate figures and go do your own research.

240v 13a U.K. mains power is 3Kw your claims of only being able to cope with 3Kw in a U.K. home is nonsense most modern houses are on a 100a mains fuse (mine is) I have a 63A breaker on my plug socket circuits. I can run a 3Kw heater, boil a 3Kw kettle and use our electric cooker all at the same time if I want without tripping out the breakers to the house as it can cope with 100A. Now I’m not saying you’ll charge your car at 100a (24kw) but our and every other U.K. house on the grid can certainly cope with more than 13a. At worse an old house is 30a (7.2kw)

Your figure for charging a P100D is stupid, 1. Because it’s a £100,000 car that 99% of people can’t and won’t afford, and 2 because the figures you’re quoting related to the 110v system the average American home has, not the European 240v mains

Most electric car owners will have a 30 - 60kw battery found in something like the new Electric mini launched this week or the top end Nissan Leaf with extended range.
Even the Tesla model 3 only has a 75kw battery.

You literally took the biggest battery available in a car and quoted the longest time to charge it from a American supply which is lower voltage than the U.K....

I think this proves my point about an oil company only looking after it’s own interests with scare tactics.

Take off the rose tinted glasses.

We are an oil company who is installing a network of some of the fastest chargers in the business outside of Tesla. Yes, that's right, an oil company! - but we're no longer an oil company anyway, so that's a moot point.

There are really silly, almost insurmountable, infrastructure issues at play here - yes, you can exceed a 3kW in some houses, but you do fall into the trap of being able to overload the supply at times. And if all the houses in your street are running 3kW chargers at the same time, the local grid runs into challenges, too.

In terms of figures - these were the figures I found quoted for 'worst case' charging. I'll happily work in worst case, because the evangelists work in best case, which assumes you're running on unlimited unicorn farts to make it work and never have to make any kind of unexpected journey.

Right now, I'm an hour away from the nearest charger which can deliver more than 50kW. Really useful.

Oh, and my local supermarkets don't have charging points, either.

There's a serious amount of smoke and mirrors and burying heads in the sand with the EV movement - not least those who think the big oil companies are trying to sabotage, whilst we're busy trying to make this whole cluster**** of a government policy work in the real world.

Here are the real world scenarios for charging the current model S range. UK figures, BTW.



Now, you may say 'the market isn't in £100k cars' - it may be in £25k cars doing 120-200 miles on a charge - but that is 2nd car territory. If I want a car that covers all my use (and not just me - most people want this) - I want 400-500 mile range and refilling in less than 10 minutes. I don't want to have to hire something for holidays and weekends away. I don't want to plan journeys just to find chargers!

Practical Classics raced a Tesla and a 2CV based Mehari from the UK to the South of France. The Mehari won. Mostly because the Tesla wasted hours in service areas being charged up.

As I've already posted - to get a couple of 150kW chargers into one location was generating a bill of around £2m. For many independent forecourt owners, a single 150kW charger is running over a quarter of a million for most sites. These are real-world costs - a normal case and worst case.

To put it into perspective, a quad hose fuel dispenser is £12k delivered and fitted.

Schumi2001 said:

Take off the rose tinted glasses.

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I dont have rose tinted glasses, and i'm not stupid either.

I know that the current network would need massive investment and upgrades before it was ready to supply every car in the uk with a copious amount of electricity.

But then 130 years ago when Benz was building his first cars, there where no petrol stations, in many cases barely any roads.

The infrastructure will and is growing with demand, and many modern homes are more than capable of supplying more than 3kw, 3kw in the UK is what you get out of a normal socket, in any normal house.

You however as a representative of an oil company are misrepresenting this.... why is that ???

50 hours to charge a tesla is on 110V American mains not the U.

Absolute worst case you could charge a car at 3kw in a UK house and still boil a 3kw kettle, with some wiggle room to charge your phone.

In an average UK home, a home charger can be considerably more than 3KW

As I stated above, an Model 3 can be charged in 5 hrs on an 11KW home charger.

If I go to work my car can either sit in a car park for 8 hrs or sit at home for 8 hrs either way thats plenty of time in which to charge it to full. If I drive from home to work even a long commute to my Cambridge office is only 50 miles out of a 220 mile range, there is still plenty in the battery for getting me from home to the nearest hospital in an emergency.

At the moment people expect to be able to get in a car fill it with petrol and drive for as long as they want, because that's how things are.

The world needs to change, the environment depends on it, and people will have to change with it. I would happily drive down to Kent, have a coffee at the channel tunnel terminal while waiting for my train and while the car charged on a super charger for 30 - 40 mins.

I expect in the future cars could charge on trains or on ferries, and i would bumble across Europe stopping when needed to charge.

You're talking about electric car infrastructure and playing on the current drawbacks which would only actually apply if every car out there suddenly turned into an electric car over night, Which is not happening, But its going to be a slow and gradual process over many years.

Any oil company thats investing in building infrastructure to support with would likely want to hold back peoples investment in electric cars 1. so that they can make as much as possible from the outgoing fossil fuels which they still have huge amounts invested, and so they can build their presence in the market to be able to capitalise on future technologies.

*bangs head against wall*

Nothing worse than EV evangelists. Completely ignoring the massive challenges facing us as people take them on and burying their heads in the sand / making excuses and compromising their lives because they're artificially being advantaged by taxation.

If 'big oil' don't do this stuff, nobody will. That doesn't quite fit with your agenda, though!

Also remember that this isn't just about the UK, either - huge swathes of Europe don't have access to the kind of infrastructure we do. Go to the Southern European countries in particular and their domestic supplies are much weaker than ours - kettle, oven and heating will trip out the supply. Look at Germany, where most people in the big cities live in apartment blocks. How will this work for them?

There's a reason Germany are chasing hydrogen.

Schumi2001 said:

*bangs head against wall*

Nothing worse than EV evangelists. Completely ignoring the massive challenges facing us as people take them on and burying their heads in the sand / making excuses and compromising their lives because they're artificially being advantaged by taxation.

If 'big oil' don't do this stuff, nobody will. That doesn't quite fit with your agenda, though!

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Carry on banging your head till you realise all you’re doing is quoting your company lines.

I’m no EV evangelist, the fact that you tout such a term shows your contempt for the electric car or the people that use it.

I am merely pointing out your maths is nonsense. Also I don’t own a house in a far flung area of Europe, nor. Am I driving there, I dare say if I were to drive somewhere that could not support electric cars I would use an alternative vehicle and if I were an “evangelist” as you say, I would maybe perhaps have an electric car....!

And your claim of ‘if big oil don’t do this no one will’ is also utter nonsense, most of the infrastructure already in place is not from the likes of shell, BP, or other oil companies, but energy/electric suppliers who see that they will be the main benefactors of the boom in electric cars, the oil companies are playing catch up at this point, which as I said is a good reason you would want to slow down the uptake in electric cars while you position yourself in the market. If oil companies don’t do this they will disappear. Your company is currently Kodak looking at a future of digital cameras, what was once one of the biggest companies in the world, wiped from existence by a change in technology that they failed to harness in time.

Your post above shows that you went to goodwood and quoted false facts to members of the public 50hr charging times here in the U.K. could only manage a 3Kw “fast charger” which here is known as normal plug socket. We were not talking about the whole of Europe, you where also not talking about an average car, but picked the most expensive with the biggest battery that would take the longest to charge. Why are you telling people it takes 50 hrs (incorrectly) to charge a car if not to try and put them off, if you’re all for electric cars. It’s not different to telling the average person it’s going to cost them £150 to fill the tank and a service £20,000 but forgetting to point out you’re talking about a Bugatti

£2M is not huge amounts for an infrastructure project, it is huge amounts for an oil company when returns on electric vehicle charging are tiny compared to what they earn from petrol or diesel. Something they have control over rather than having to buy in....

I’m not ranting like a mad man about some secret conspiracy, this is how businesses work, I’ve been in enough meetings to know that, as I say, you’re an oil company playing catch up and trying to make a place for yourself in a market before the world changes. But don’t go posting your corporate nonsense here, because it will get pointed out.

Once again showing your complete lack of knowledge of the industry, what is going on, who owns what and is doing what and basically dismissing any challenge outside of your own little window.

£2m to get a feed for 300kW of charging capacity is a huge price to pay! That’s not a major infrastructure investment, it’s 2 charging units. That will never recoup the investment.

And we do need to think about the whole picture, mass uptake of BEV will only be possible if it works for everyone as the UK is a tiny fraction of the market.

It’s not just about you being fine with 100 miles range and grabbing a little top up every night.

Keep your focus on that 6 hour difference on a 4 day charge, though.

StevenRB45 said:

Continuing range related musings...today I filled up after doing 397 miles..range computer showed 67 left, but experience says that everything would be showing 0 in about 40 miles if that.

Filled her right up, range computer now says 551 miles.

How? the mpg average over the last tank was 46mpg..which is 2-3 mpg Above the official figure and I was nowhere near!

Hope the electric ones are better! I just don't get how the algorithm works, the trip computer itself was reading 44mpg, the 46 is from a brim to brim measurement. So 44 x every drop of a 12 gallon tank..is 528 but the car throws a light at 2.5 gallons remaining and shows all empty with nearly 2 gallons remaining. So in reality it takes absolute faith to more than than 420 miles in it as all gauges will show "coming soon hard shoulder!" long before the tank is dry.

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Of you can ignore the complaining alarms, just carry a 10 litre fuel can to use when you run dry.

Schumi2001 said:

Once again showing your complete lack of knowledge of the industry, what is going on, who owns what and is doing what and basically dismissing any challenge outside of your own little window.

£2m to get a feed for 300kW of charging capacity is a huge price to pay! That’s not a major infrastructure investment, it’s 2 charging units. That will never recoup the investment.

And we do need to think about the whole picture, mass uptake of BEV will only be possible if it works for everyone as the UK is a tiny fraction of the market.

It’s not just about you being fine with 100 miles range and grabbing a little top up every night.

Keep your focus on that 6 hour difference on a 4 day charge, though.

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You’re ranting about stuff that does not affect the man on the street.

The man on the street doesn’t care if you have to spend £2M to install a charger, how much thought do you think the public give to the cost of a petrol station build?

What will make the difference to a member of public is how long their car will take to charge, and you’re making 50hr claims for charging at home (based on highly distorted information) versus 6 hrs on a properly installed home fast charger for a 220mile range.

Obviously to an oil company, people charging at home is not in your interests. You want to keep people coming to your stations and buying from you.... to do that you need to offer more than someone can get at home. A 300kw charger could charge a car in minutes. Something like 5 minutes for a 75kw battery assuming a battery would cope with it. That’s why a company like yours is willing to invest £2m without a chance of getting it back because it’s an investment in the future. How many oil wells got drilled that don’t pay off costing millions, fracking as a technology is haemorrhaging money with little payoff.

Big companies don’t pay out huge sums of money with no expectation of ever getting anything back from it.

Your 50hr charging times are nothing more than a way to put people off. Utter nonsense.


You can go round and round like this all day. Your point of view as a rep in an oil company is never going to be the same as mine or anyone else outside of that world.

If I were buying an EV currently I’d be looking to pair it with a substantial roof top solar installation and a powerwall type device combined with other smart technology it would substantially reduce my electricity use and move away from the dependence not only of oil but of satellite stations for refuelling. This is obviously not a world your company wants to happen.

Power cable infrastructure will be the problem. My house could deliver 11KW (45amps @240V) and run the cooker fridges lights etc but the puny cable in the street wont cope when everyone is doing it and neither will my house when the storage heaters are cooking up overnight. I can probably manage 6kw during the winter = 48KWH over 8 hours so full charging should be ok. But what about my wife's car? That does fewer miles so we should cope but its certainly not convenient. We would not be able to charge both cars on low cost overnight power.

Don't get me wrong I'm a fan of electric cars. The new Hyundai Kona sounds great - even though I really do dislike SUVs. https://www.hyundai.co.uk/new-cars/kona-electric I would also ignore the lower spec versions. You need a big battery to allow for capacity degradation over time.

People who live in flats will have to make do with commercial charging points. That's likely to be either very slow to catch on or people wont bother owning a car. Exit the car manufacturing industry. Flats could be built with charging points at each parking bay but the costs to retrofit would be huge. On-street charging? Forget it. We had enough hassle when fibre internet cables were going in. Souping up the street light power cables and adding car charging points just isn't going to happen. Last years, we were supposed to have the street upgradedto "underground" the power cables. The job stalled because householders refused to park their cars elsewhere for a few days while the work was done. Keeping the ugly, unreliable overheads was more important to them.