OrangeCorvusEU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by 2025
Blaze (he/him)I’m a bit skeptical about it really working on large scales during summer holidays. Aren’t EV supposed to charge for at least 30 minutes 1 hour minimum to be able to get some autonomy? How is that realistic with such a high number of vehicles?
brenneselI’m on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That’s about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
Thanks for your feedback! I’m just curious how it would be realistic to scale the charging stations enough to sustain a larger (let’s say 30% or even 50%) of cars being EV. Should we just have giant charging stations hubs every 50 km?
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important.
That’s very true, to be honest my personal preference would be to reassess the need to have so many people travelling so much during July/August (you see the most popular hotspots such as Venise or Barcelona trying to reduce the number of tourists) but that’s a different story
OneserNot op, but this change won’t happen overnight and charging infrastructure is relatively trivial as long as the energy supply is available.
There are many aspects coming in, such as smarter charging when the price of electricity (based on other local demand) is lowest to reduce the need for significant capacity. Also Car2House/Grid/x aspects, where the flow of energy is two-way (charge battery, or e.g. use the EV battery to power the house) , making car batteries a type of decentralised energy storage system etc.
There are a million solutions being worked on for energy supply security atm. Maybe 1000 of those are viable and only 10s of them will make it to market.