And finally...

I gave you two, what more do you want? :devil:
Yes, my bad, sorry about that :blush:

Short summary: It was a bit stressful, but we made it :thumbsup:
To be fair i also have range anxiety sometimes…….only 230 miles to a tank.
 
So long as we can avoid the street in Hackney where a work colleague lives. They have numerous 13A extension leads stretched out from 1st floor windows into the trees on the roadside. They and their neighbours find a parking spot, locate their cable and unravel or extend it to their car. Apparently on a bad day, it starts to resemble those pictures you see of power cables in India, with a total rats nest strung along the trees and kerbside. Not very sustainable!

We used to live in Hackney - visiting friends I was surprised to see lamp post integrated chargers at the end of their road. I was impressed, seemed like a great idea :thumbsup:
I've just checked online - there are 6 in Ashenden Road all 3kWh (surely 3kW?) out of 63 in the borough along with a number of other faster options.

When we lived in Hackney I filled up the car every couple of months. Most journeys were walking, bus or bike. I could have easily coped with having to charge the car away from home as I commuted by bike into Zone1. I appreciate other people used their cars and vans every single day. We used ours for "the big shop", B&Q, days out and visiting family and friends outside London.

Compare it to my local city of Norwich...
Norwich City Council itself provides public EV charge points in two locations:
Rose Lane multi-storey car park - 6 charge points, 7kW fast charge (parking fee applies – check website for tariff)
UEA Enterprise Centre car park - 2 charge points, 50kW rapid charge (2 hour maximum stay – no parking fee)

Still a long way to go!
 
In kerb charging as a technology has been around for some time even if it is 7Kw. There are even 100's of test installs in various parts of the country. One of the biggest hurdles is planning permission laws which need to change to speed up rollout.

Interestingly, that article is from 2019, but I haven't seen widespread take up as yet. This is not just planning permission, but the cabling and infrastructure to support.

It's much easier to update an existing commercial premises and add a few fast charging points, as the power supply is usually already there. The majority of residential streets simply don't have the supply capacity to add in large numbers of chargers, so new cabling and quite possibly a substation upgrade may be required for anything more than a few basic points.
 
the guy on the radio today was suggesting those who live in appartments, should charge thier cars at the supermarket, i see no issues there...
 
Pretty certain I'm on my last ICE, so in 3 years I will be looking at an EV.

The infrastructure does need to catch up however. We have plenty of off road parking for 2-3 cars at home, but we would only be able to fit 1 charging socket as we have a typical 100A household supply. As we have 2 cars plus 2 daughters with their own, a certain amount of planning will be required to keep everything topped once we all go electric.

In our Lincolnshire market town, there's currently a grand total of 5 public chargers (2 x 7.5KW, 2 x 50KW, 1 Tesla DC), none of which are in convenient locations, being in a retail park car park with just a B&Q or carpet warehouse to wander around and at a small petrol station on the edge of town. We do however have 7 petrol stations with more than 55 pumps between them...

I think this illustrates the scale of the challenge to provide the public charging infrastructure. Allowing for the extended charging time over refuelling, how many public chargers will be required to replace the current petrol stations? My guess would be about 1 charger per 500 cars, but I'm assuming someone's done the detailed maths on this!!

So long as we can avoid the street in Hackney where a work colleague lives. They have numerous 13A extension leads stretched out from 1st floor windows into the trees on the roadside. They and their neighbours find a parking spot, locate their cable and unravel or extend it to their car. Apparently on a bad day, it starts to resemble those pictures you see of power cables in India, with a total rats nest strung along the trees and kerbside. Not very sustainable!
Having a 100A supply is no barrier to having multiple chargepoints, but you probably would need to utilise “smart” units with load management. I’ve got an all-electric house with 100A supply, and when I added a 2nd chargepoint my DNO insisted on mitigations to ensure I could not overload my supply. So the solution they agreed to was for me to use a zappi charger with incoming supply monitoring so that the Zappi could reduce (or even stop) charge current if I exceeded 85A on the incoming supply. My loads are usually very low overnight, so both chargers can run at full output, but should something uneoxoectedly switch on then my Zappi will back off until the load drops again. It makes charging two EVs simultaneously not bother at all.
 
Rugby today, no issues giving the cat a quick Ecotricity 25 min boost :-

DDF04B81-44B0-449B-8B67-D302DD0CBDB8.jpeg

If I’d had a Tesla I may have nearly struggled :-
A511F3A8-E727-4EDE-983F-62DBE07FBFF6.jpeg
 
Rugby today, no issues giving the cat a quick Ecotricity 25 min boost :-

View attachment 1554067
If I’d had a Tesla I may have nearly struggled :-
View attachment 1554068

Ofcourse any Tesla can use any CCS rapid but its just most Tesla owners are cheapskates.....why pay for Rapid charging when its 'free' on Tesla Superchargers:).

Our EV has now taken us to the Highlands, very unpredictable weather, but amazing views, even from the parking bays!!

51372762769_d07ea5b26d_k_d.jpg


51372252456_d76bab5747_k_d.jpg
 
thats what he said, guy was an electrical engineer, said we'd get to the stage of electricity rationing,

my biggest issue with ev is partly the owners there like ex smokers....

and secondly the country cant support them, theres less than 30,000 charging point in the uk, now say half the population drive ev thats 30million ev. then look at the tax side of things, i pay £300+for my focus st each yr, i also pay for vpower which is £1.41 per litre of which and we can say roughly half of that is tax....so when 30 million people switch to ev and theres no longer any tax coming in, wheres that going to come from? will they have dedicated charging points which are on a tariff? or will they be a new road fund licence just for owning a car, i get people wanting to be green and helping the climate i do, i just dont think battery tech is there yet and a good source for it.
 
Where are you buying v-power for 141.9p? :eek:

It is 156.9p round my way.
 
thats what he said, guy was an electrical engineer, said we'd get to the stage of electricity rationing,

my biggest issue with ev is partly the owners there like ex smokers....

and secondly the country cant support them, theres less than 30,000 charging point in the uk, now say half the population drive ev thats 30million ev. then look at the tax side of things, i pay £300+for my focus st each yr, i also pay for vpower which is £1.41 per litre of which and we can say roughly half of that is tax....so when 30 million people switch to ev and theres no longer any tax coming in, wheres that going to come from? will they have dedicated charging points which are on a tariff? or will they be a new road fund licence just for owning a car, i get people wanting to be green and helping the climate i do, i just dont think battery tech is there yet and a good source for it.
EVs certainly won't remain free for very long. As you say, there's a significant tax burden that the government will need to make up. Probably a pay by the mile tax or maybe a parking tax??

The National Grid is actually much more resilient than most people think. It was designed for heavy industry and as we don't really have much of that any more, there's plenty of capacity.

Demand side response will also help to even out the peaks and troughs by enabling cars and houses with their own power banks to supply excess energy into the grid at peak times, recharging overnight and during off-peak hours. Expect to see much more complex energy tariffs where costs will vary depending upon the time of day that you use the energy, possibly at an hourly level.

I doubt free charging will be about for very long. The costs for the suppliers will simply be too high, but hopefully a more unified subscription model can be brought in.

The next 3 years will be crucial in determining how well the rest of the rollout will go. This is going to be the biggest change in personal transport since someone looked at a horse and thought "I wonder if I can ride that..."
 
i think as an end user we're going to be hit very hard,

i know its all ifs and buts, but the general push seems to be, get rid of gas, so my house will need the boiler replacing, for a heat pump - 7-10k, the gas hob removed, probably a rewire as its 30yrs old..then a charging point fitted to accommodate the electric car i cant afford to buy,

and if i dont conform then ill get hit with higher road tax, higher gas prices and higher petrol prices.

i know they are aiming for 2030 but those yrs will fly past,
 
The boiler will eventually have to be replaced anyway. We moved from oil to ASHP and I'm glad we did. Capital cost was high, but I haven't had to service it every year which is a significant saving.
It's powered from a 100% renewable tariff so that was a major part of our carbon footprint reduced.

The cooker will eventually die, moving from a gas hob to an electric induction hob isn't the end of the world. We're on LPG at the moment but when we replace our >14yr old cooker it will be induction.

The price of electric cars is dropping - last time I looked I couldn't justify buying a plugin hybrid or long range EV. Recently I looked again and decided it was worth the investment for financial and more importantly to me for environmental reasons to move to a hybrid. Next time it will be full EV.

I was paying £300 for my old car in tax - the new one was £145. The free ride for plugins is over and the free ride for EV won't be there for much longer either.

The evidence about climate change and just how much of a mess we're is not open for debate and we need to make big changes now.
 
The evidence about climate change and just how much of a mess we're is not open for debate and we need to make big changes now.
Exactly this ^^^ for me and my kids and I don't mind paying a bit for it if it feels like value for money in the right direction + a bit on top to help out..

The ultimate is just having less cars / car journeys in general - i.e. walk, cycle, get public transport etc, but not sure that will realistically happen, although we may as a nation shift some of our journeys more that way..

Problem is there's no utopian perfect answer that people will buy into, any kind of change people will naturally resist if it's different.. It's probably chepear to give EV tax incentives right now than build 1000's of miles of dedicated bike lanes / paths..
 
To be fair i also have range anxiety sometimes…….only 230 miles to a tank.
Try a range of <120 miles and long journeys! To be fair when we did about 260 miles in a day, the only issues that we had were we didn't understand how rapid chargers worked and therefore had a little anxiety of the unknown rather than range anxiety specifically.

@IronGiant Do you have a button close to the charging socket to release the plug? With the Honda e, as long as the car is unlocked, there's a little button that will stop charging and allow the plug to be removed:

Screenshot 2021-08-14 at 07.18.09.png
 
I'll have a look, thanks.
EDit: Can't see anything similar, I'll check again next time we charge it.
 
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