Gotta be honest, if you live in a reasonably dense city, it's not that unusual to have to walk ten minutes to where you parked your car just because parking was hard to find the previous day.
One thing you didn’t cover is cost. Charging at home overnight is 7.5p an hour. The public chargers in Hackney are 8x the cost. It’s an insane disparity that makes or breaks ev ownership.
Don't forget workplace charging Jack. For some people without at-home charging options, they can just charge conveniently in their employer's car park while at work. There are lots of incentives to encourage their employer to install chargers too.
The downside there is you're using peak-rate, commercial tariff electricity, unless you're on the night shift or the factory has solar (or is a hydro dam). It's still cheaper than giving you petrol coupons of course.
my company has one a deal with Genie nd 11p kwh for 7kw charging The problem ?? well I WFH ha ha .. just got an EV so will be going in next week to charge up whilst I wait for EV charger at home to be installed
I live in a flat and don’t have a charger at home. So I charge at work. There 4 pct of the parking spaces has chargers. It’s more than enough for the amount of people who need charging while at work. The rest of the EV just park in the non-charger spaces. This often leaves more than half of the charger spaces empty. Have heard some non-EV coworkers complaining about charger spaces not being used all the time. But that buffer is necessary in my opinion. I’ve had a single day where I just parked on the grass and plugged in because the charger spaces were filled up with ICE cars. (Busy day, I work at a University). To me it’s fine and I rarely have to charge anywhere else.
That is such a practical video and clears up one of the most often quoted negatives about EV's "What if you don't have a drive?" Thanks Jack for making this so logical.
We'd like to thank Jack and the Fully Charged crew for this wonderfully balanced, positive and informative video. We are very proud of whgat we've achieved with Co Charger but isn't a silver bullet - there aren't any and this vid hits the real message right on the head: don't let a lack of a home charge point put you off EVs. There are great solutions out there!
In the Dutch provinces of Noord-Holland, Flevoland, and Utrecht. You can request an on-street charger via MRA-e if there is none within 300 meters of your home or work. (And I'm pretty sure that's possible in other provinces too) With current energy prices, it's even cheaper than charging at home.
I’ve been an EV owner for 3.5 years. We have street lamp based chargers in Portsmouth and Southsea where I live and I have 4 near my home. One of them opposite my home. My EV is my personal car as well as my driving school car. My business relies on it getting charged. Charging on street has been reliable. In a city where off street parking is rare it can be easier getting a charge than parking an ICE car.
@@richardnedbalek1968 they aren't that common in the UK yet. But hopefully will be soon, since people can request them and they are (relatively) easy to install. I don't suppose there are many areas in the USA that need it since the country is so suburban. But seems necessary for the old cities (NY, Boston, Philly, San Fran).
This is the single biggest issue preventing me buying an electric vehicle. I live in suburban Sydney with no driveway and very few local charging points and no planning to improve the situation. The obvious solution here would be to install chargers at retail centres, Westfield etc. Surely the benefits to retailers having EV owners as regular visitors is a winner.
Hi Gary, I agree to a very large extent, I'd suggest that buying a new and expensive car is a huge barrier for many people, (2nd and 3rd hyand electric car market only slowly emerging now in UK and Europe) but very close 2nd to that is the lack of available, easy to use charging in some cities. I am shortly visiting Australia for a few months before our live show in Sydney, and advocating and arguing for more companies and locations to install chargers as yes, you are 100% correct, if there are easily accessible and cheap of even free charging in locations like shopping malls, then more people with electric cars will spend more time at that location.
The major issue is that only a tiny percentage of the population actually live in London. The vast majority of us are in smaller towns, or rural villages. Where I am there are literally 8 charging points in total for a population of around 15,000 people. The nearest city is 10 miles away, not a great journey that would flatten your battery, but a hell of a walk when your charge is low! The killer for EVs outside the major cities is still the fundamental lack of investment in a charging network. I can't see where I live getting more charging points in anything like a reasonable timescale. If you're not in a major city, the local councils/authorities just do not have that kind of budget. My area is all communal car parks and minimal lamp posts, so there's no option there. Living 45 metres away from the car park makes for a hell of an extension lead! So, unless billions is piled in to infrastructure, anyone outside London is going to be completely scr*wed in 2030, unless the authorities realise that the majority of us do NOT live in bl**dy London!
I Charge out my Kitchen window to a street pole where I attached a stainless steel zip tie and I run my cord through that zip tie and down the pole and across the roof of my car and down into the charge port. When I am all done, all cables get pulled back into my kitchen.
I know several diabled people with EV's (short range MG ZSEV's) they need to recharge every 2 or 3 weeks. they do it by going to pubs with chargers installed. plug in and go and have a nice Sunday lunch while the car charges. Very civilised in my opinion. More Pubs need to install them.
It’s true that things are changing. I live in a town of around 30,000 people. The biggest issue here is that the older part of the town that I live in having a driveway is impossible for most people and due to the way the houses are laid out you can’t run a cable neither. The town has two major supermarkets and neither offer charging, neither do Aldi or Lidl not even the M&S food store does. Most of the chargers in the town are just 7kW chargers and the rapid chargers top out at 50kW funnily enough at a petrol station. Things are starting to change though as both McDonald’s and Starbucks are getting chargers installed and by the looks of it they will be much faster than 50kW and if one of the supermarkets manages to get one as well then I think owning an EV here will become practical as most people in the older part of town would live within a mile of a modern rapid charger.
I live in Australia where the charging infrastructure is rubbish, but even so, not having a home charger (at least in a city) is not a problem. We just shop where we can charge, often for free, so pretty much whenever we’re shopping, we’re charging. That keeps the car topped up pretty well and for very little cost.
Jack, this video along with Robert's renewable energy videos should be mandatory watching for all local councils and government politicians. Keep spreading the good word!
Love that! So much of this stuff seems so ridiculously obvious to those of us who own EVs that it's easy to forget how many people - including some in decision-making positions - aren't clued up on the basics
Agreed Geoff. Some Local Authorities seem completely oblivious to the fact they are eligible to access Government grants to cover much of the cost of installing public charging infrastructure. Plus there are grants available to Local Councils to fund the *complete* install of grids in pavements, to allow charge cables to pass beneath the surface of the pavement, for those who live in properties without a driveway.....
I'm a polestar 2 owner Love the car Hate the infrastructure/charging my car -i'm from Bolton with only options to use rapid chargers. Sometimes have to wait over a hour just to use one of the chargers available.
I live in central Bristol and my nearest publicly available slow charger is a 30 min walk away. The council also forbid running a charging cable over the pavement in any way, including a cable gully - Bristol City Council really need to up their game...
I think the difference is that charging may have to be a more deliberate and planned event instead of what we’ve become accustomed to with ICE and being able to spontaneously fill up.
I'd say the opposite. Charging will be comparable to parking in a city and paying for parking (or for the old gits, "feeding a meter"). You will just plug in and graze charge when you stop, whenever you stop, without thinking. You will always have to make "a deliberate journey" to fill an ICE.
@@rogerstarkey5390 exactly. If lots of cars have the contactless charging or even the Sono Sion drip charge via solar, we'll have fleets of cars rarely hitting the forecourts.
@@rogerstarkey5390 hopefully in the future it turns out to be that commonplace. But I think right now there is a distinct difference in how one has to go about filling up their vehicle.
Depends on location. When on holiday in Italy or France, I really needed an app to search for a charger. But at home in the Netherlands, almost every street has some chargers, my street even has 8 of them for just 2 small blocks. So yeah, charging is more convenient then making a detour to a gas pump.
No driveway here. Sod it, installing Pod Point in porch, will trail cable over pavement and stick a protector over it and charge it later in the evening. Pavement is only 2ft wide anyway. Fortunately no-one else ever parks in front of my house.
Bought my EV 2 weeks ago, don't have my own charger nor can I run a cable for the granny charger, but there's plenty of chargers nearby to me or I'm happy to sit in the car for a while. One of the places I use is a 15 minute walk from my partners flat. It's encouraging me to walk more and I'm enjoying it tbh.
Warwickshire County Council has started a six month trial for kerbside home charging. We joined the trial yesterday and have already done our first charge. We usually need to charge once or twice weekly so we should be able to ensure that our car is in front of the house when needed. Oh, we do not have a charger as such but we have a 16 amp charger with a 10 metre lead and an appropriate socket on the front of the house. Using cheap overnight electricity will work for us.
Jack, I found this to be one of your best vids as a presenter. Sometimes LESS is MORE, you're extremely likable here, and the knowledge you're sharing feels accurate/trustworthy. I hope to see much more of this side of you.
I liked it too, and I think he has been getting better and better in general. Btw, why doesn't Rob present much anymore? Also i just realized he was in Red Dwarf! 😲
I have lived nearly 5 years charging primarily 120v at home with a regular outlet at home in the Pacific Northwest. I do not and will never chose to live in a place where parking is scarce, nor would I live in a place where one had to pay for parking, but regardless even 120v charging on a regular North American outlet is plenty overnight to get you to a DC charger should you need it.
Great news but still too much hassle for me. I spend 5 mins at the petrol station and I'm good for 400miles, road tax £30. For now that's about £65, the equivalent EV will cost about £40. For a year it's 65x12 = 780 with my use. 40x12 = 480 780-480= £300 more per year for the ICE My car cost £4000 and equivalent EV will be £12000 if you are lucky, and pray that the batteries are OK. 12,000-4000 = £8000 more for the EV 8000/300= 26.5 years So the higher initial outlay for an EV will take over 26 years to be covered by the extra fuel cost of an ICE. Even if you double my fuel cost it will still take 13 years to break even with an EV. I'll stick with my trusty ICE thanks.
I do exactly the same, I have a point A, B & C within 10 minute strolls from my home. And since I do drive a ton of kilometers I use fast chargers quite often. Luckily on my way to work (which can be wherever in the Netherlands) I always cross a lot of fast chargers and if I have a few minutes left before I need to go to work I just pop by a fast charger and give it some extra juice. Btw. In the Netherlands, if you don’t have your own driveway and no public charger within 300 meters of your home the municipality will arrange a public charger for you. So in a couple of months I will have a new (closer) option to charge. Driving an EV does make you plan all your trips a bit more but I really don’t mind doing so. If I can do it (I drive on average 1000 km a week) than everybody can do it. Thanks for the great video once again!
You may have mentioned this, so if you did sorry I missed it, but the other thing that is becoming more common is provision of chargers at workplaces, so if you can't charge overnight at home, you can charge whilst you are at work during the day.
I have had an EV for 18 months .If you dont dont further than range its easy but if you do it is a nightmare unless you get a car with 250 miles real range and DC fast charging. dont forget if its too hot,too cold,raining,windy or uphill you range will be reduced. i have a ZE40 with a real range of approx 150 miles and i recently went to edinburgh-it was a living hell. 1.charge to full before we set off - usual charger in use so wasted time going to plan b 2.charged half way on M6 (couldnt be arsed to come off the motorway) that was over an hour due to my partner panicing that we wouldnt get on another charger. 3.charged in scotland (10 miles to go with onlly 25 showing and panic set in again) 4.charged in scotland. i must say their infrastructure is miles better than UK. mostly free or 0.30p pkw. 22AC chargers everywhere 5.charged on m6 coming home - over an hour once again 6.charged on lidl pod point at home town- low battery and needed shopping took over 6 hours so 2 extra hour each way If you have a home charger you set off full and only need enough charge to get home.instanly removing 2/3 charges.If you got £50k+ to get an ev with decent range and more imprtantly DC charging then cool if not wait i would wait a few years. i move house in a month and cant wait i bought a charger 2 months ago....
Watching this video a year later and the charging issues remain. Using the public chargers is pain, people reporting that charging points are faulty or having to queue to use them for 30mins+ and it cost more than running an older ICE car. Charging at home unless you have a drive is almost impossible where I live and the council are not willing let you install anything like two solutions you mentioned. The over head or cutting a channel for the cable in the path. Don’t get me wrong I am not anti EV, I would actually love one. With my current commute and lifestyle it would work. But one they cost to much to buy in the first place and I can’t charge at home. In an ideal world, I would want solar panels on my roof, with a battery storage system and use the energy generated from that to charge a EV.
This is something that I have been concerned about as someone without a driveway who uses their car for work. As such, I do a lot of miles (around 70 - 100 miles per day). My main concern is that with all the charging networks in the UK being in private hands I would expect the cost of charging to be significantly higher than charging at home. Unfortunately I am going to have to pour some cold water on this guide as road side charging points are very hard to find outside of London. In fact, I have never even seen one.
Very true. I live in one of the largest cities in the UK and my nearest street charging is not walking distance from my house. Without a drive I would have to sit around on a fast charger a couple of times a week. Can't complain too much though as currently EVs get free parking in the city center and there's fast chargers there.
I think "park 10 minutes walk from your house" isn't going to fly for lots of people. And while overnight street parking will work for some people, and some streets, it won't for everyone. I used to think we should flood all terraced residential streets with lamppost/kerb chargers. But all those trip hazards - I think it would be a real problem if it became widespread. I think there's a lot of people for whom "ABC" - "always be charging" - on low-speed chargers at their destinations would work. Charge while you work, shop, eat out, exercise, worship, watch a film, whatever you do while you're parked away from home. Don't normally expect to be fully charged. Expect your charge to drift up and down. But if you drive 5 miles to the supermarket, charge at 7kW while you shop. 30 minutes gets you ~14 miles, so you've covered your return journey and got a bit extra. Don't go places to charge. Charge at the places you go. For this to work, we need lots and lots of slow chargers in the places where people park to spend time. Not rapid chargers -- you don't want to have to dash out of the cinema to unblock a charging bay.
When I got my EV ~4 years ago, there was minimal charging infrastructure around, and I don't have a garage. So, I was having to either slow charge from a standard power point in my parking lot or walk 10 minutes to a L2 charger (2-3 locations to choose from). TBH, managing it all was a fun game I had to play in my head, but I had the freedom and ability to do it. Since then, local charging infrastructure has come quite a ways, and I now have an L2 charging station in my building. But I can see how this approach could be quite inconvenient and impractical for someone else.
The elephant on the bank statement is that public chargers cost 5, 6, 7, even 10 times more per kWh, when compared to home charging. And with only around 35,000 public chargers, the roll-out is so glacial that it makes sense to run a small ULEZ compliant petrol car for the foreseeable future, especially if, like me, you have switched to an e-bike for local trips under 10 miles or so. I very rarely use the car for a long trip, but it’s so reassuring to know that, so long as there are petrol stations, my range is unlimited, and (crucially) very easy to fill up my car without an app, and without having to worry about being fleeced by some speculative operator that wants to charge me many multiples of my domestic electricity tariff. Incidentally, it’s worth bearing in mind that charging a car can use up to 80 times the electricity that an e-bike does, and given that domestic tariffs can be as much as ten times cheaper than public chargers, that works out as costing perhaps as much as 800 times the cost, if you compare a domestically charged e-bike with a publicly charged car. Certainly when everyone is looking at their bills at the moment, this is probably a much bigger difference than most will imagine, not to mention the many tens of thousands saved by keeping an existing petrol car, and investing in an e-bike.
The first two years I had my Model 3 I didn't have home charging, there was a place 2 miles away with a great coffee shop, a gym, and even an aviation museum, I'd hang out at the coffee shop or workout while the car charged, it could be a bit of a hassle, but not terrible.
I've had my MG5 for almost a year now, no home charger. I tend to charge at work. There's a location that has 12 bays within a 10min walk of work which is free on Chargeplace Scotland. Tends to be full when I'm done my shift, and I usually don't need to charge again død almost a week. Failing this, I use Bonnet on the local Ionity or Osprey... Which I still have a shit ton of free referral credit for. I rarely pay to charge my car
Thanks for a very helpful video. This is also helpful for those who are holding back from installing a charge point at home until they have actually bought an electric car and need something to tide them over while they wait for theirs to be installed. One thing you could add when do an update video on this is spend a couple of minutes talking about what people who live in blocks of flats with off-street parking can do and what they can suggest to their management company to install. In some cases parking on-street to charge a car could be expensive just for the parking alone - particularly if you have your own off-street parking space which is free (or already paid for).
Great video and yes, it can be done...We live in the south of France, and don't have a way to charge in in our parking area. There are three public chargers fairly close to our home: 1) at the train station, a ten min walk. 2) at the grocery store (LeClerc) which is about 20 min walk. 3) at grocery store (LIDL) which is 20 min walk. LIDL charges per kWh. LeClerc gives the first 15 minutes free at their charger, then you pay by kWh. The train station charges per minute (which is bad, as it takes twice as long if another car is plugged in). Needless to say, we choose LeClerc and we do most of our weekly shopping there. We don't often have to sit and wait, the charge while shopping is sufficient for our general driving pattern. It's good marketing on their part. We've had our EV for over a year and this has worked out fine for us.
A lot of this is all good and well, and trust me, I really would like to upgrade to an EV, but in the town I live in, there are 4 chargers, all at one supermarket, nowhere else. My current daily commute is a 46 mile round trip and my workplace does not have charging bays. To make matters worse, I do not have a driveway and my house is off road and up a pathway. This county has a severely lacking EV charging network, the current government do not give a shit.
Currently driving an i3 (company car) and charging it solely at work, kinda helps that my job is designing EV chargers so we have a lot of them at the office to plug into but still... companies with on site parking should all have as many of their parking spaces have EVSEs as possible, will take a huge chunk out of the number of cars that will even need on street parking which'll help the people who cant charge at work as their nearest on street chargers will be more likely free day to day.
One major problem with on street charging, is that some of the kids where I live think it's a great laugh to unplug cars which are charging during the night, so you would wake up to a car that hadn't been charged. Is there a standardised way to lock the charge cable onto the charge sockets so you can only remove it if you have a key? If not, it could be a good idea for a standard lock to be designed.
When a car is charging the plug [plugs for untethered chargers] is locked into the socket. New EV owners probably have more issues getting the plug out of the socket than any other problem until they find out the correct procedure. Read the manual or watch an appropriate RUclips video.
Nice one Jack. I can't charge at home but did my research on ZapMap and decided to go for it with an ev a few weeks ago. Started off using sip charging at Tesco but we shop so quickly it wasn't really worth the hassle. Then we spent a pleasant Sunday lunchtime in our local Premier Inn with a ginger beer whilst it charged to 80%on their rapid BP Pulse charger. Found that to be very good value once the bp card arrived and discovered we could save money shopping at the Aldi on the same site so it did us a favour in more ways than one. I got so engrossed finding my way round the shop the first time that the car was at 100% by the time I got back. Pleased to report that our Ioniq 38kWh suggested we would get 216 miles on the full charge after four or five weeks driving so we must be doing something right. I'm working on our Green councillors to get a slow charger fitted near to us in the village but they're not having much luck persuading their colleagues as yet. I'm sure it'll happen eventually. Research and persuasive powers are what you need to get charged it seems!
Do give Co Charger a look. Even if there's no Host in walking distance from your home (the chances are pretty good that there is) you can set up a free account in a couple of minutes and get notified when a Host sets up nearby.
@@cocharger4630 thanks, I will. At one stage I did have the app on my old phone but as I hadn't got an ev at that point and my phone was needing space I had to uninstall it. 👍
@jamesredfern999 there's lots of data now about real-life battery degradation from Teslas that have been solely supercharged for many years. The vast majority of them are still going strong with less-than-expected wear on the battery. I almost certainly will never need to replace my battery.
Picking random on street charging points with no allocated space is going to cause rage from residents who hate people parking outside their house or in that spot they regularly use. I can see a lot of vandalism of cables while your car is out of sight streets away.
In areas that have EV's They are cutting and stealing charge cables from cars that are actively charging. Where my buddy lives theres 50 houses, no driveways and 3 street lamps. They often have to park a few streets away.
There are 6.5million street lights in the uk of which most are on streets currently occupying double lines. Let’s be generous and assume they all can be converted and miraculously the cabling to power light bulbs is man enough to support 3KW/h chargers. There could be as many as 3.25 million chargers not bad added to the 17 million homes with drives could provide 19million chargers. Almost enough to charge all the EVs over night.
I was ok like jack until the explosion in numbers of company car EVs last year with massive batteries and then it became near impossible to find a charger and I went back to a diesel after 1.5 years of EV ownership - depends where you live but it was completely unmanageable for me
As a "company car driver" (mobile technician) most mileage is not near what would be classed as "EV exclusive" parking. It's from/ to the customer, on motorway or trunk roads, then parking on customer premises. Those of us who do work in a city either use public transport or won't need to charge due to the reduced mileage. I would suggest the "McCharge" type infrastructure is where most business loading would occur (other fast food charging will be available....) . EDIT Just to say... "The cars with massive batteries" won't need to charge.
My EV on the road charging experience hit a new low on Saturday, I was reduced to having to pick out which pictures had boats in them. And Wetherby major charging hub had about half of the chargers not working along with tempers flaring as to who was waiting first. One of the chargers proudly claiming dual charging simply refused to work when I tried it. And BP Pulse at the Fox and Grapes not working, again.
Lol. 2 x paid off diesel owner here. Sweating them out until 2028-29 at the earliest. I pay £20 and £30 VED for each, and EV's from 2025 will be £190. Nah
I’m here a little off topic… we’re trying to build a better world here and that goes for more than just the clean energy transition. Another big step will be Jack and Robert no longer using self deprecating humor ❤️ you’re not idiots, you’re great and you’re doing amazing work!
mmmm Shell have just increased their rates to about 80p a kwh and most EV's do about 4 miles per kWh. I don't have home charging, and at those prices my diesel car doing 48mpg is cheaper to run.... Or maybe the same if you factor in oil changes. The incentive for me to switch is miles away... Plus I drive estate cars, on not too many EV estate options yet at a decent price.
As always Jack - enjoyable and informative. I live in a city in Canada (Toronto) and our public network is an omnishambles. 1 DC fast charger exists within 5 km of my home. And maybe 10 level 2 chargers - but you have to hunt them. BUT even with this paltry situation I can find the electricity I need (and retain the electric smug).
I also live in Toronto, the situation here is so bad I decided it wasn't feasible to buy an EV since I cannot charge at home so I bought a hybrid for now.
@@quixomega I'm not sure it is so bad that one has to default to a hybrid but i understand the temptation. Looking at the map you can see how the chargers are almost exclusively pooled in the downtown core. In some ways this makes sense for commuters coming from out of the city - but if you live in a condo in outside the core, or you street park - this could be a very frustrating situation. Without a doubt we need to do better with the charging infrastructure.
I think a big omission was to not state the obvious (to EV owners) that you don't need to charge every night, which many think is the case. This makes running an EV without off street parking even easier. You do mention it in passing that you rarely use the car's full charge in a day, but this point is lost on those new to EV. I do like the premise of it being easy to live with, so well done for highlighting it and backing it up with personal experience.
❤ Awesome 👏🏽 video! I’m from India 🇮🇳 and though our charging network is not yet developed it’s amazing to know this is so easily possible. Most cities here have a parking space problem and this certainly shows how things can work out. I’m sharing this with EVSE OEMs, & CPOs. Thank you! 🙏🏽
I live in California, this is not viable here. We are dense enough that most people can't afford to live in houses, but unfortunately we are not dense enough to have these on-street chargers everywhere. :(
I am lucky enough to have a driveway with a charge but currently only have a PHEV (limited options for a 7seater) but I am so excited to find out the Fully Charge Live will be only 5 mins away from me in my home town of Harrogate! Really looking forward to it as I hope to get an EV very soon!
Isn't regular rapid charging bad for the long term health of a battery? As a new ev owner without home charging I'm looking for convenience at the least cost but without harming my battery. Any advice welcome.
Yep, I charge without my own home charger using the public network. Charging cost outside my house on a Ubitricity charger when I ordered my Tesla in March was 0.22p kWh. I finally got the Tesla delivered last month, and yesterday the price to charge increased to 0.55p kWh. Its a 5kW charger as well, so it's pretty slow but now the price difference between a 250kW and 5kW charger isn't that different.
FYI. kWh is the total energy delivered. kW is the power - the rate the energy is delivered. So it's 0.22p/kWh (energy) and your battery has a capacity of e.g. 55kWh or 80kWh. The chargers have a rate: 250kW or 5kW. Hope that helps. You could think if it as: kWh is like gallons. kW is like gallons per minute, and also like horsepower.
@@t3chnno Might as well just charge at Shell Recharge locations or at a Tesla supercharger. Ubitricity is just going up and up, I think it went up to 49p last month, and now to 55p so quickly.
don't know if anyone is doing this yet but I think the tech for it is around the corner. It would work similar to Charge Fairy but it would be a drone that could self drive to your location and park in front of your vehicle, slide a wireless charger under your car, charge it and go to the next stop or back to it's base to recharge. I imagine each could serve a specific neighborhood or small town. Neither the car owner or a tech would need to be present for the charge. You would order a charge through an app. If the drone was tall and slim it could just park in the same parking spot and if it could maneuver sideways the drone may even be able to fit between cars parked closely on the street.
Doesn’t work for those of us whose office IS their car. Food delivery drivers for services like DoorDash and Uber Eats (case in point: yours truly) are of course cases in point on that front.
It certainly exists. My brother mostly charges his car at his work car park. He works at an Amazon warehouse, and they have something like 100 chargers in their car park, with the electric connections to add more as more employees need them,
In Denmark we have public charge points everywhere: at gas stations, supermarkets, schools, public parking spaces and even in many workplaces. 5 years ago having an EV was difficult if you couldn't charge at home, now it's not a problem.
Thanks for this - I've an EV on order and no driveway; I still have moments when I think I'm crazy but I'll work it out. PS what did you do with Robert - stealing his office and all (and yes I know it's a green screen)?
Have you ever wondered about this scenario where, right now Governments all over the world get tax revenues out of the fuel sales to the general public, and that amount is huge in some countries, and when more and more people switch to EV gradually the revenue from fuel sales would decrease and then would come to a point where the Govt starts to increase the electricity cost to balance the revenue loss from fuel. And maybe in my worst nightmare, it may become like charging an EV would cost similar to having an ICE vehicle and filling it with fuel. However if we use Solar panels at Home some of the cost can be managed, but we will still end up using outside chargers often though !!
I live in Denmark. First 1.5 years of owning an EV I didnt have my own charger. I needed to charge 1-2 times a week. Had several options: charging at work, rapid charging at a local supermarket, or using a couple of slow chargers 1 km away. Not once did I need juice for my car in that period. That being said I love having my own charger now 😆
This maybe a very sumb question, but let's say i park my car near a charging pole and let it charge overnight, is there some mechanism to prevent someone from unplugging the car?
Great video. Very informative. I really wanted to purchase the Volvo XC40 PHEV. But in Northern Ireland. We’re years behind the rest of the UK in regards availability of charging points. The infrastructure is so poor. So needed up getting a Mild Hybrid petrol car with no plug-in requirements. Sad reality of the variation across the UK.
Great vid. It's a no-brainer that connectivity of power will become huge in the next 20 years. Everything will be electric, which means everything and everyone can trade and sell power (if you make it, you can sell it - but taxes will always apply). Your families, your neighbour, your local shop, your school, your business, your council, the grid will see a constant flow of power in and out. Every country will need more electricians and even more programmers!
@@6chhelipilot I disagree, it's not great but go to Spain for woeful! I have multiple Rapid and standard chargers within a couple of miles, at 3 or 4 supermarkets I often use, at a pub/restaurant , and at a local car park near many amenities...
@@bellshooter Same here in California. There are 10+ rapid charging stations within 5 miles of me, including a multi-stall EA station at the Target in Rancho Santa Margarita and a Tesla Supercharger at the Shops at Mission Viejo. About half as many as there are gas stations and 3 times as many as there are hydrogen stations (which I currently use).
@@6chhelipilot Woeful some in places, perhaps. Around Kendal there are chargers at several supermarkets, and even one by the register office. At Sainsburglary there are two Podpoint 7kW chargers, and all the rest are faster. I don't often see all the chargers in use at any one spot.
I've done it for the last year, there is a lot of frustration especially if you try to go charge your car and the only rapid charger around your house is taken. Waiting for 40mins for someone to finish charging. Going to do grocery in the middle of the night to make sure the charger is not taken. Making sure you plan 40mins into the longer journeys to charge in between. But I have now returned my EV to buy a Hybrid (self charging one) because the raising cost of public charger. If most of public chargers goes up to £1 per kw/h then its effectively costing more than petrol or diesel. My new hybrid now run cheaper than EV on public chargers.
BTW not a lot of local council will allow alternative means to have your cable under or over the pavement. It is up to your local council to consent or not, you cannot install it yourself
My work buddy lives in a development behind the Nissan dealership where he and his wife bought their Leaf. He walks 2 miles over the course of the work day, she has a sitting job so she likes to take a walk before and after dinner. She'll drive a block or so to the dealer, plug the car in on their charger (free for customers) and walk home, reverse and repeat after dinner.
conveniently, in New Zealand, nearly all chargers are located at supermarkets, restaurants and shopping malls, so just charge on your weekly shopping :)
Any link to that curb-o thing. I’ve seen local issue where people have cables across a footpath or in a tree. Wondered if local council would approve it
Thanks for your well balanced overview on this topic. I deliberately got into owning an EV without the option of charging at home because I can do it at work and with that it‘s abolutely no problem. The only problems are charging-companies not caring much about maintaining their chargers. When you are on a trip, having a charching stop planned and the chargers aren‘t working, that‘s annoying. Second problem is the hummer boy of my city. Hummer boy and co love to park at charging spots, even if they are EV only. City doesn‘t care much and I‘ve often been in the situation where I just could not charge anywhere near my home because chargers were all blocked by hummer boys. These were the only times I seriously thought about getting rid of my EV, if there is no change of my city looking after this problem. Cheers!
Try asking the question that I did at work - "Can we have a charger installed here?" 4 months later there were two Zappi Type 2 chargers [sorry "EVSE" equipment for the proper name] installed. It cost the company nothing, via govt grant, and charging is free. Btw, I'm not an executive, nor on the board. Just an ordinary employee. I don't have a driveway. So try asking. If they refuse you're no worse off than if you hadn't asked. I have been emailing my Southampton city council for the best part of 5 years, to try to get residential EVSEs. We have residential car parks where I live. One or two per car park, linked to one's electricity account, would entirely solve the problem. Will they do it or something like it? Not a chance in hell. I'm told to drive into the city centre 5 miles away and charge there. Good eh? Thank goodness for the company I work for.
I've lasted over 18 months without any home charger. And just realised that I can use a granny charger because my parking space at home is directly outside my window, so no trailing cables, only do 15 miles a day, so no worries.Moving house soon with two parking spaces not connecting to the house. What's annoying is the new houses around me all have dedicated 7kw chargers.
I live in London with pretty much the same option and the difference in cost of the different options is huge. The cheapest overnight rate if I can charge from a home charger is less than 10p per kWh, ubitricity from the lamppost is 50p and the big source London chargers are 59p if you pay the monthly membership -
Here, a supermarket has free 2kw outlets for electrical cars, for while you are shopping, you will not fill up, but you will get back the energy you lost by driving there to shop and come out to a warm car in the winter. There is also fastchargers there, but they are not free.
As someone who had an EV(company car) for 2 years with no home charging and cover >30k miles per yr. My tips: Subscribe to Elli and OVO charge (aka Bonnet) ABC, always be charging If you go shopping etc, try to find parking with chargers Familiarise yourself with the routes you take most often and what your vehicle range is. Try to lobby work for a charge point, they barely cost 2-3k, most work places will do that no problem. I have gone to a hybrid now temporarily, but the fuel costs are double what I was paying with my EV and Elli membership. I am waiting for a BMWi4 now.
I don't know if I'm missing a search term here... But where I live your options are the fast chargers at Asda or Lidl. That's it. Now this is a pretty small town where most have driveways but not all
One word of caution for the "charge near home" idea. If you live in an area where parking is expensive, you will likely have to pay for parking to access the charger - even if the charger itself is cheap or free - and the parking fees can make charging considerably more expensive than gas/diesel if you're not careful. This is especially true if you are already paying a monthly parking fee for home parking without charging, and the sole value to you of the $5/hour parking garage is access to the charger. In many cases, the best place for a city dweller to charge is actually in the suburbs (but by attaching charging to a trip you're making anyway, not making a special trip, just to charge). Rapid charging may seem more expensive than level 2 charging, but if you're not paying for the parking space, it can be quite often considerably cheaper.
You live in London and have a Polestar 2? Seen that video where Robert describes driving around London in a barge/supertanker sized car even if it is an EV, as something not good! I also like how a lot of these solutions are London centric, maybe go up North to some of the poor communities? Or try here in Wrexham, where many of the public chargers are knackered most days or way too expensive, so everyone goes to Tesco and sometimes it's rammed! Loving that idea with the groove for the cable!
It's not just "EV Haters" who would object to pavements being cluttered with charging cables. I use an EV and would strongly object to cables strung over pavements.
One thing I didn’t see in the video is how to find the nearby chargers. There are apps and companies that have maps of all chargers on all networks and you can use them to compare costs, find units you weren’t aware of and even sometimes check if they are working or not.
Live in the LA area and do not have an electric car but would like one so where to charge is important, to say the least. Just searched and Los Angles County has a map of public charging stations. Don't see many street parking charging stations but there are some. And as I live, as many do, in an apartment with no charging, public charging is not just important, it is all there is. The last place I lived installed 5 charge spaces in the underground parking garage. Not all that cheap but still, made it possible.
I had a couple chargers in front of my home in Amsterdam, and now I have a couple more in front of my new house in The Hague. Also, there's a bunch of chargers at work as well. So yeah, I don't need my own charger, just like I never needed my own gas station at home
I charged my 21' bolt EV exclusively at an Electrify America station for over a year, before I moved into a house with a garage and got my 22' EUV. Totally fine. Would charge it up once every couple weeks. Took about an hour or so.
Gotta be honest, if you live in a reasonably dense city, it's not that unusual to have to walk ten minutes to where you parked your car just because parking was hard to find the previous day.
I bought an e-scooter for that. It's always in my trunk and if the parking is "far" away I use it.
@@donpatricio1927 Rack to hook a manual bike on also works. Whenever I have to go up to DTLA, that’s how I get around.
@@donpatricio1927 Brilliant.
And if you don't have a car but use public transport, you're used to walking 10 minutes to the nearest bus stop or metro station anyway.
If you live in a rural area, charger is 45+ miles away.
One thing you didn’t cover is cost. Charging at home overnight is 7.5p an hour. The public chargers in Hackney are 8x the cost. It’s an insane disparity that makes or breaks ev ownership.
Don't forget workplace charging Jack. For some people without at-home charging options, they can just charge conveniently in their employer's car park while at work. There are lots of incentives to encourage their employer to install chargers too.
The downside there is you're using peak-rate, commercial tariff electricity, unless you're on the night shift or the factory has solar (or is a hydro dam). It's still cheaper than giving you petrol coupons of course.
Not all companies allow charging at their sites
my company has one a deal with Genie nd 11p kwh for 7kw charging The problem ?? well I WFH ha ha .. just got an EV so will be going in next week to charge up whilst I wait for EV charger at home to be installed
Where I last worked they had parking for about 300 cars at work and 5 EV chargers.
I live in a flat and don’t have a charger at home. So I charge at work. There 4 pct of the parking spaces has chargers. It’s more than enough for the amount of people who need charging while at work. The rest of the EV just park in the non-charger spaces. This often leaves more than half of the charger spaces empty. Have heard some non-EV coworkers complaining about charger spaces not being used all the time. But that buffer is necessary in my opinion. I’ve had a single day where I just parked on the grass and plugged in because the charger spaces were filled up with ICE cars. (Busy day, I work at a University).
To me it’s fine and I rarely have to charge anywhere else.
That is such a practical video and clears up one of the most often quoted negatives about EV's "What if you don't have a drive?" Thanks Jack for making this so logical.
Really? Forgive me if I say I'm not convinced.
@@rob5944you're forgiven. It takes time to change already formed views and opinions.
We'd like to thank Jack and the Fully Charged crew for this wonderfully balanced, positive and informative video. We are very proud of whgat we've achieved with Co Charger but isn't a silver bullet - there aren't any and this vid hits the real message right on the head: don't let a lack of a home charge point put you off EVs. There are great solutions out there!
In the Dutch provinces of Noord-Holland, Flevoland, and Utrecht. You can request an on-street charger via MRA-e if there is none within 300 meters of your home or work. (And I'm pretty sure that's possible in other provinces too) With current energy prices, it's even cheaper than charging at home.
Yep, I can vouch for Gelderland supporting a similar construction as well.
Such a good policy!
I’ve been an EV owner for 3.5 years. We have street lamp based chargers in Portsmouth and Southsea where I live and I have 4 near my home. One of them opposite my home. My EV is my personal car as well as my driving school car. My business relies on it getting charged.
Charging on street has been reliable. In a city where off street parking is rare it can be easier getting a charge than parking an ICE car.
I wish we had lamp pole chargers in the US. So practical and low-tech, provided you have your own cable.
@@richardnedbalek1968 Why is that? Is it because of the different voltage in the USA?
@@dougbamford No, I charge all the time off my home 120V, 15A outlet. We just haven’t adopted this technique.
@@richardnedbalek1968 they aren't that common in the UK yet. But hopefully will be soon, since people can request them and they are (relatively) easy to install. I don't suppose there are many areas in the USA that need it since the country is so suburban. But seems necessary for the old cities (NY, Boston, Philly, San Fran).
What does it cost and how much do you get for a 10 hours charge?
Good advice for Londoners! Most of the rest of us are stuck without realistic solutions still.
This is the single biggest issue preventing me buying an electric vehicle. I live in suburban Sydney with no driveway and very few local charging points and no planning to improve the situation. The obvious solution here would be to install chargers at retail centres, Westfield etc. Surely the benefits to retailers having EV owners as regular visitors is a winner.
Hi Gary, I agree to a very large extent, I'd suggest that buying a new and expensive car is a huge barrier for many people, (2nd and 3rd hyand electric car market only slowly emerging now in UK and Europe) but very close 2nd to that is the lack of available, easy to use charging in some cities. I am shortly visiting Australia for a few months before our live show in Sydney, and advocating and arguing for more companies and locations to install chargers as yes, you are 100% correct, if there are easily accessible and cheap of even free charging in locations like shopping malls, then more people with electric cars will spend more time at that location.
The major issue is that only a tiny percentage of the population actually live in London. The vast majority of us are in smaller towns, or rural villages. Where I am there are literally 8 charging points in total for a population of around 15,000 people. The nearest city is 10 miles away, not a great journey that would flatten your battery, but a hell of a walk when your charge is low!
The killer for EVs outside the major cities is still the fundamental lack of investment in a charging network. I can't see where I live getting more charging points in anything like a reasonable timescale. If you're not in a major city, the local councils/authorities just do not have that kind of budget. My area is all communal car parks and minimal lamp posts, so there's no option there. Living 45 metres away from the car park makes for a hell of an extension lead! So, unless billions is piled in to infrastructure, anyone outside London is going to be completely scr*wed in 2030, unless the authorities realise that the majority of us do NOT live in bl**dy London!
I Charge out my Kitchen window to a street pole where I attached a stainless steel zip tie and I run my cord through that zip tie and down the pole and across the roof of my car and down into the charge port. When I am all done, all cables get pulled back into my kitchen.
I know several diabled people with EV's (short range MG ZSEV's) they need to recharge every 2 or 3 weeks. they do it by going to pubs with chargers installed. plug in and go and have a nice Sunday lunch while the car charges. Very civilised in my opinion. More Pubs need to install them.
It’s true that things are changing. I live in a town of around 30,000 people. The biggest issue here is that the older part of the town that I live in having a driveway is impossible for most people and due to the way the houses are laid out you can’t run a cable neither.
The town has two major supermarkets and neither offer charging, neither do Aldi or Lidl not even the M&S food store does. Most of the chargers in the town are just 7kW chargers and the rapid chargers top out at 50kW funnily enough at a petrol station.
Things are starting to change though as both McDonald’s and Starbucks are getting chargers installed and by the looks of it they will be much faster than 50kW and if one of the supermarkets manages to get one as well then I think owning an EV here will become practical as most people in the older part of town would live within a mile of a modern rapid charger.
I live in Australia where the charging infrastructure is rubbish, but even so, not having a home charger (at least in a city) is not a problem. We just shop where we can charge, often for free, so pretty much whenever we’re shopping, we’re charging. That keeps the car topped up pretty well and for very little cost.
Jack, this video along with Robert's renewable energy videos should be mandatory watching for all local councils and government politicians.
Keep spreading the good word!
That's exactly it - we're hoping the link to this vid becomes a standard in discussions with councils, fleets, politicians. It's SO needed!
Love that! So much of this stuff seems so ridiculously obvious to those of us who own EVs that it's easy to forget how many people - including some in decision-making positions - aren't clued up on the basics
What's the renewable energy video? link pls :)
They're all bust, there's no money left for vanity projects and virtue signalling.
Agreed Geoff. Some Local Authorities seem completely oblivious to the fact they are eligible to access Government grants to cover much of the cost of installing public charging infrastructure. Plus there are grants available to Local Councils to fund the *complete* install of grids in pavements, to allow charge cables to pass beneath the surface of the pavement, for those who live in properties without a driveway.....
I'm a polestar 2 owner
Love the car
Hate the infrastructure/charging my car -i'm from Bolton with only options to use rapid chargers. Sometimes have to wait over a hour just to use one of the chargers available.
I don’t have a driveway, but I just had two 22kw chargers installed right out side my office… all I need now is an electric car 🙂
I live in central Bristol and my nearest publicly available slow charger is a 30 min walk away. The council also forbid running a charging cable over the pavement in any way, including a cable gully - Bristol City Council really need to up their game...
I think the difference is that charging may have to be a more deliberate and planned event instead of what we’ve become accustomed to with ICE and being able to spontaneously fill up.
I'd say the opposite.
Charging will be comparable to parking in a city and paying for parking (or for the old gits, "feeding a meter").
You will just plug in and graze charge when you stop, whenever you stop, without thinking.
You will always have to make "a deliberate journey" to fill an ICE.
@@rogerstarkey5390 exactly. If lots of cars have the contactless charging or even the Sono Sion drip charge via solar, we'll have fleets of cars rarely hitting the forecourts.
@@rogerstarkey5390 hopefully in the future it turns out to be that commonplace. But I think right now there is a distinct difference in how one has to go about filling up their vehicle.
Sometimes more convenient sometimes less convenient, always worth it
Depends on location. When on holiday in Italy or France, I really needed an app to search for a charger. But at home in the Netherlands, almost every street has some chargers, my street even has 8 of them for just 2 small blocks. So yeah, charging is more convenient then making a detour to a gas pump.
No driveway here. Sod it, installing Pod Point in porch, will trail cable over pavement and stick a protector over it and charge it later in the evening. Pavement is only 2ft wide anyway. Fortunately no-one else ever parks in front of my house.
Bought my EV 2 weeks ago, don't have my own charger nor can I run a cable for the granny charger, but there's plenty of chargers nearby to me or I'm happy to sit in the car for a while. One of the places I use is a 15 minute walk from my partners flat. It's encouraging me to walk more and I'm enjoying it tbh.
Warwickshire County Council has started a six month trial for kerbside home charging. We joined the trial yesterday and have already done our first charge.
We usually need to charge once or twice weekly so we should be able to ensure that our car is in front of the house when needed.
Oh, we do not have a charger as such but we have a 16 amp charger with a 10 metre lead and an appropriate socket on the front of the house. Using cheap overnight electricity will work for us.
Market chargers are great. 50 kW DC is plenty to recharge an EV during your weekly shopping errands!
Jack, I found this to be one of your best vids as a presenter. Sometimes LESS is MORE, you're extremely likable here, and the knowledge you're sharing feels accurate/trustworthy. I hope to see much more of this side of you.
I liked it too, and I think he has been getting better and better in general. Btw, why doesn't Rob present much anymore? Also i just realized he was in Red Dwarf! 😲
I installed one at my office. It makes a huge difference and other people then bought EV’s
That's the way to go! If the office is near a residential area you can also make it a Community Charger out of hours via Co Charger.
I have lived nearly 5 years charging primarily 120v at home with a regular outlet at home in the Pacific Northwest. I do not and will never chose to live in a place where parking is scarce, nor would I live in a place where one had to pay for parking, but regardless even 120v charging on a regular North American outlet is plenty overnight to get you to a DC charger should you need it.
Like, if you treat your car like you treat any other battery powered appliance, ie you charge it up at the end of the day, you'll be good.
Great video, now 4 years no home charging and been fine so far with up to 300 miles a week it’s all possible as long as you want to do it
Give Co Charger a go!
Great news but still too much hassle for me. I spend 5 mins at the petrol station and I'm good for 400miles, road tax £30.
For now that's about £65, the equivalent EV will cost about £40. For a year it's
65x12 = 780 with my use.
40x12 = 480
780-480= £300 more per year for the ICE
My car cost £4000 and equivalent EV will be £12000 if you are lucky, and pray that the batteries are OK.
12,000-4000 = £8000 more for the EV
8000/300= 26.5 years
So the higher initial outlay for an EV will take over 26 years to be covered by the extra fuel cost of an ICE. Even if you double my fuel cost it will still take 13 years to break even with an EV.
I'll stick with my trusty ICE thanks.
I do exactly the same, I have a point A, B & C within 10 minute strolls from my home. And since I do drive a ton of kilometers I use fast chargers quite often. Luckily on my way to work (which can be wherever in the Netherlands) I always cross a lot of fast chargers and if I have a few minutes left before I need to go to work I just pop by a fast charger and give it some extra juice.
Btw. In the Netherlands, if you don’t have your own driveway and no public charger within 300 meters of your home the municipality will arrange a public charger for you. So in a couple of months I will have a new (closer) option to charge.
Driving an EV does make you plan all your trips a bit more but I really don’t mind doing so. If I can do it (I drive on average 1000 km a week) than everybody can do it.
Thanks for the great video once again!
9 months and 15000 km in, I can confirm: Yes you can lead a busy EV family life without a socket where we park at home.
13 months, 35000 km and a trip through Croatia and Italy included I can confirm the same. Never had range anxiety.
Amen!
You may have mentioned this, so if you did sorry I missed it, but the other thing that is becoming more common is provision of chargers at workplaces, so if you can't charge overnight at home, you can charge whilst you are at work during the day.
100%. We need a LOT more of this.
I have had an EV for 18 months .If you dont dont further than range its easy but if you do it is a nightmare unless you get a car with 250 miles real range and DC fast charging. dont forget if its too hot,too cold,raining,windy or uphill you range will be reduced. i have a ZE40 with a real range of approx 150 miles and i recently went to edinburgh-it was a living hell.
1.charge to full before we set off - usual charger in use so wasted time going to plan b
2.charged half way on M6 (couldnt be arsed to come off the motorway) that was over an hour due to my partner panicing that we wouldnt get on another charger.
3.charged in scotland (10 miles to go with onlly 25 showing and panic set in again)
4.charged in scotland. i must say their infrastructure is miles better than UK. mostly free or 0.30p pkw. 22AC chargers everywhere
5.charged on m6 coming home - over an hour once again
6.charged on lidl pod point at home town- low battery and needed shopping
took over 6 hours so 2 extra hour each way
If you have a home charger you set off full and only need enough charge to get home.instanly removing 2/3 charges.If you got £50k+ to get an ev with decent range and more imprtantly DC charging then cool if not wait i would wait a few years. i move house in a month and cant wait i bought a charger 2 months ago....
Watching this video a year later and the charging issues remain. Using the public chargers is pain, people reporting that charging points are faulty or having to queue to use them for 30mins+ and it cost more than running an older ICE car.
Charging at home unless you have a drive is almost impossible where I live and the council are not willing let you install anything like two solutions you mentioned. The over head or cutting a channel for the cable in the path.
Don’t get me wrong I am not anti EV, I would actually love one. With my current commute and lifestyle it would work. But one they cost to much to buy in the first place and I can’t charge at home.
In an ideal world, I would want solar panels on my roof, with a battery storage system and use the energy generated from that to charge a EV.
This is something that I have been concerned about as someone without a driveway who uses their car for work. As such, I do a lot of miles (around 70 - 100 miles per day). My main concern is that with all the charging networks in the UK being in private hands I would expect the cost of charging to be significantly higher than charging at home. Unfortunately I am going to have to pour some cold water on this guide as road side charging points are very hard to find outside of London. In fact, I have never even seen one.
Very true. I live in one of the largest cities in the UK and my nearest street charging is not walking distance from my house. Without a drive I would have to sit around on a fast charger a couple of times a week. Can't complain too much though as currently EVs get free parking in the city center and there's fast chargers there.
Must have changed now guys? Heck they’re even in lampposts round out way😮❤
I think "park 10 minutes walk from your house" isn't going to fly for lots of people.
And while overnight street parking will work for some people, and some streets, it won't for everyone. I used to think we should flood all terraced residential streets with lamppost/kerb chargers. But all those trip hazards - I think it would be a real problem if it became widespread.
I think there's a lot of people for whom "ABC" - "always be charging" - on low-speed chargers at their destinations would work. Charge while you work, shop, eat out, exercise, worship, watch a film, whatever you do while you're parked away from home. Don't normally expect to be fully charged. Expect your charge to drift up and down. But if you drive 5 miles to the supermarket, charge at 7kW while you shop. 30 minutes gets you ~14 miles, so you've covered your return journey and got a bit extra.
Don't go places to charge. Charge at the places you go.
For this to work, we need lots and lots of slow chargers in the places where people park to spend time. Not rapid chargers -- you don't want to have to dash out of the cinema to unblock a charging bay.
When I got my EV ~4 years ago, there was minimal charging infrastructure around, and I don't have a garage. So, I was having to either slow charge from a standard power point in my parking lot or walk 10 minutes to a L2 charger (2-3 locations to choose from). TBH, managing it all was a fun game I had to play in my head, but I had the freedom and ability to do it. Since then, local charging infrastructure has come quite a ways, and I now have an L2 charging station in my building. But I can see how this approach could be quite inconvenient and impractical for someone else.
The elephant on the bank statement is that public chargers cost 5, 6, 7, even 10 times more per kWh, when compared to home charging.
And with only around 35,000 public chargers, the roll-out is so glacial that it makes sense to run a small ULEZ compliant petrol car for the foreseeable future, especially if, like me, you have switched to an e-bike for local trips under 10 miles or so.
I very rarely use the car for a long trip, but it’s so reassuring to know that, so long as there are petrol stations, my range is unlimited, and (crucially) very easy to fill up my car without an app, and without having to worry about being fleeced by some speculative operator that wants to charge me many multiples of my domestic electricity tariff.
Incidentally, it’s worth bearing in mind that charging a car can use up to 80 times the electricity that an e-bike does, and given that domestic tariffs can be as much as ten times cheaper than public chargers, that works out as costing perhaps as much as 800 times the cost, if you compare a domestically charged e-bike with a publicly charged car.
Certainly when everyone is looking at their bills at the moment, this is probably a much bigger difference than most will imagine, not to mention the many tens of thousands saved by keeping an existing petrol car, and investing in an e-bike.
The first two years I had my Model 3 I didn't have home charging, there was a place 2 miles away with a great coffee shop, a gym, and even an aviation museum, I'd hang out at the coffee shop or workout while the car charged, it could be a bit of a hassle, but not terrible.
I've had my MG5 for almost a year now, no home charger. I tend to charge at work. There's a location that has 12 bays within a 10min walk of work which is free on Chargeplace Scotland. Tends to be full when I'm done my shift, and I usually don't need to charge again død almost a week.
Failing this, I use Bonnet on the local Ionity or Osprey... Which I still have a shit ton of free referral credit for. I rarely pay to charge my car
Thanks for a very helpful video.
This is also helpful for those who are holding back from installing a charge point at home until they have actually bought an electric car and need something to tide them over while they wait for theirs to be installed.
One thing you could add when do an update video on this is spend a couple of minutes talking about what people who live in blocks of flats with off-street parking can do and what they can suggest to their management company to install. In some cases parking on-street to charge a car could be expensive just for the parking alone - particularly if you have your own off-street parking space which is free (or already paid for).
Great video and yes, it can be done...We live in the south of France, and don't have a way to charge in in our parking area. There are three public chargers fairly close to our home: 1) at the train station, a ten min walk. 2) at the grocery store (LeClerc) which is about 20 min walk. 3) at grocery store (LIDL) which is 20 min walk. LIDL charges per kWh. LeClerc gives the first 15 minutes free at their charger, then you pay by kWh. The train station charges per minute (which is bad, as it takes twice as long if another car is plugged in). Needless to say, we choose LeClerc and we do most of our weekly shopping there. We don't often have to sit and wait, the charge while shopping is sufficient for our general driving pattern. It's good marketing on their part. We've had our EV for over a year and this has worked out fine for us.
Jack, thanks for sharing your positive experience of owning an all-electric car and charging it regularly without the ability to do so at home.
A lot of this is all good and well, and trust me, I really would like to upgrade to an EV, but in the town I live in, there are 4 chargers, all at one supermarket, nowhere else. My current daily commute is a 46 mile round trip and my workplace does not have charging bays. To make matters worse, I do not have a driveway and my house is off road and up a pathway.
This county has a severely lacking EV charging network, the current government do not give a shit.
Currently driving an i3 (company car) and charging it solely at work, kinda helps that my job is designing EV chargers so we have a lot of them at the office to plug into but still... companies with on site parking should all have as many of their parking spaces have EVSEs as possible, will take a huge chunk out of the number of cars that will even need on street parking which'll help the people who cant charge at work as their nearest on street chargers will be more likely free day to day.
One major problem with on street charging, is that some of the kids where I live think it's a great laugh to unplug cars which are charging during the night, so you would wake up to a car that hadn't been charged. Is there a standardised way to lock the charge cable onto the charge sockets so you can only remove it if you have a key? If not, it could be a good idea for a standard lock to be designed.
When a car is charging the plug [plugs for untethered chargers] is locked into the socket. New EV owners probably have more issues getting the plug out of the socket than any other problem until they find out the correct procedure. Read the manual or watch an appropriate RUclips video.
@@ramblerandy2397 True, although if there isn't a key involved, kids round here will have learnt how to do it.
@@MrJozza65 Theres also the folks who cut and steal the live cable as the car is charging.
Nice one Jack. I can't charge at home but did my research on ZapMap and decided to go for it with an ev a few weeks ago. Started off using sip charging at Tesco but we shop so quickly it wasn't really worth the hassle.
Then we spent a pleasant Sunday lunchtime in our local Premier Inn with a ginger beer whilst it charged to 80%on their rapid BP Pulse charger.
Found that to be very good value once the bp card arrived and discovered we could save money shopping at the Aldi on the same site so it did us a favour in more ways than one.
I got so engrossed finding my way round the shop the first time that the car was at 100% by the time I got back. Pleased to report that our Ioniq 38kWh suggested we would get 216 miles on the full charge after four or five weeks driving so we must be doing something right.
I'm working on our Green councillors to get a slow charger fitted near to us in the village but they're not having much luck persuading their colleagues as yet.
I'm sure it'll happen eventually. Research and persuasive powers are what you need to get charged it seems!
Do give Co Charger a look. Even if there's no Host in walking distance from your home (the chances are pretty good that there is) you can set up a free account in a couple of minutes and get notified when a Host sets up nearby.
@@cocharger4630 thanks, I will. At one stage I did have the app on my old phone but as I hadn't got an ev at that point and my phone was needing space I had to uninstall it. 👍
The first year I had my Model X, I didn't have my own charger. I just went to a supercharger about once a week. It wasn't a problem at all.
It would have been when your battery suffers from constant super charging
Good luck. You'll be paying for a new battery soon and won't be covered by a warrantee. Read the manual.
@jamesredfern999 there's lots of data now about real-life battery degradation from Teslas that have been solely supercharged for many years. The vast majority of them are still going strong with less-than-expected wear on the battery. I almost certainly will never need to replace my battery.
Picking random on street charging points with no allocated space is going to cause rage from residents who hate people parking outside their house or in that spot they regularly use. I can see a lot of vandalism of cables while your car is out of sight streets away.
In areas that have EV's
They are cutting and stealing charge cables from cars that are actively charging.
Where my buddy lives theres 50 houses, no driveways and 3 street lamps. They often have to park a few streets away.
There are 6.5million street lights in the uk of which most are on streets currently occupying double lines. Let’s be generous and assume they all can be converted and miraculously the cabling to power light bulbs is man enough to support 3KW/h chargers. There could be as many as 3.25 million chargers not bad added to the 17 million homes with drives could provide 19million chargers. Almost enough to charge all the EVs over night.
Spoken like a EV owner who has the luxury, cost and convenience benefit of home charging.
Let them eat cake eh?
Great overview with added credibility from Jack’s personal experience. Loved the animation & Jack’s delivery. 👏👏
Good video but you missed the portable home charger that can give you a quick charge
I was ok like jack until the explosion in numbers of company car EVs last year with massive batteries and then it became near impossible to find a charger and I went back to a diesel after 1.5 years of EV ownership - depends where you live but it was completely unmanageable for me
As a "company car driver" (mobile technician) most mileage is not near what would be classed as "EV exclusive" parking.
It's from/ to the customer, on motorway or trunk roads, then parking on customer premises.
Those of us who do work in a city either use public transport or won't need to charge due to the reduced mileage.
I would suggest the "McCharge" type infrastructure is where most business loading would occur (other fast food charging will be available....)
.
EDIT
Just to say... "The cars with massive batteries" won't need to charge.
My EV on the road charging experience hit a new low on Saturday, I was reduced to having to pick out which pictures had boats in them.
And Wetherby major charging hub had about half of the chargers not working along with tempers flaring as to who was waiting first.
One of the chargers proudly claiming dual charging simply refused to work when I tried it.
And BP Pulse at the Fox and Grapes not working, again.
Lol. 2 x paid off diesel owner here. Sweating them out until 2028-29 at the earliest.
I pay £20 and £30 VED for each, and EV's from 2025 will be £190.
Nah
@@stuartburns8657 £0.01 per mile compared to £0.13 per mile. Now let's talk 150,000 miles, plus difference in maintenance costs.
I’m here a little off topic… we’re trying to build a better world here and that goes for more than just the clean energy transition. Another big step will be Jack and Robert no longer using self deprecating humor ❤️ you’re not idiots, you’re great and you’re doing amazing work!
mmmm Shell have just increased their rates to about 80p a kwh and most EV's do about 4 miles per kWh. I don't have home charging, and at those prices my diesel car doing 48mpg is cheaper to run.... Or maybe the same if you factor in oil changes. The incentive for me to switch is miles away... Plus I drive estate cars, on not too many EV estate options yet at a decent price.
As always Jack - enjoyable and informative. I live in a city in Canada (Toronto) and our public network is an omnishambles. 1 DC fast charger exists within 5 km of my home. And maybe 10 level 2 chargers - but you have to hunt them. BUT even with this paltry situation I can find the electricity I need (and retain the electric smug).
Same in Gothenburg Sweden.
I also live in Toronto, the situation here is so bad I decided it wasn't feasible to buy an EV since I cannot charge at home so I bought a hybrid for now.
Toronto Hydro is subordinated to the City Hall .... You have what you vote
@@quixomega I'm not sure it is so bad that one has to default to a hybrid but i understand the temptation. Looking at the map you can see how the chargers are almost exclusively pooled in the downtown core. In some ways this makes sense for commuters coming from out of the city - but if you live in a condo in outside the core, or you street park - this could be a very frustrating situation. Without a doubt we need to do better with the charging infrastructure.
@@bm8641 unclear what you mean here. Why would hydro object to chargers? Why would city hall (especially if linked to the existing infrastructure)?
I think a big omission was to not state the obvious (to EV owners) that you don't need to charge every night, which many think is the case. This makes running an EV without off street parking even easier. You do mention it in passing that you rarely use the car's full charge in a day, but this point is lost on those new to EV. I do like the premise of it being easy to live with, so well done for highlighting it and backing it up with personal experience.
❤ Awesome 👏🏽 video! I’m from India 🇮🇳 and though our charging network is not yet developed it’s amazing to know this is so easily possible. Most cities here have a parking space problem and this certainly shows how things can work out. I’m sharing this with EVSE OEMs, & CPOs. Thank you! 🙏🏽
I live in California, this is not viable here. We are dense enough that most people can't afford to live in houses, but unfortunately we are not dense enough to have these on-street chargers everywhere. :(
I am lucky enough to have a driveway with a charge but currently only have a PHEV (limited options for a 7seater) but I am so excited to find out the Fully Charge Live will be only 5 mins away from me in my home town of Harrogate! Really looking forward to it as I hope to get an EV very soon!
Isn't regular rapid charging bad for the long term health of a battery? As a new ev owner without home charging I'm looking for convenience at the least cost but without harming my battery. Any advice welcome.
Yep, I charge without my own home charger using the public network. Charging cost outside my house on a Ubitricity charger when I ordered my Tesla in March was 0.22p kWh. I finally got the Tesla delivered last month, and yesterday the price to charge increased to 0.55p kWh. Its a 5kW charger as well, so it's pretty slow but now the price difference between a 250kW and 5kW charger isn't that different.
FYI. kWh is the total energy delivered. kW is the power - the rate the energy is delivered. So it's 0.22p/kWh (energy) and your battery has a capacity of e.g. 55kWh or 80kWh. The chargers have a rate: 250kW or 5kW.
Hope that helps. You could think if it as: kWh is like gallons. kW is like gallons per minute, and also like horsepower.
Ubitricity charges are a ridiculous since the start of October.
@@t3chnno Might as well just charge at Shell Recharge locations or at a Tesla supercharger. Ubitricity is just going up and up, I think it went up to 49p last month, and now to 55p so quickly.
@@NealeUpstone thanks for the explanation.
That's still eye-wateringly high. You're paying about the same as you would if you owned a petrol car.
How do you stop people unplugging the cable either from your car or from the street lamp charger? Do they lock?
Yes
Jack is total eye candy ❤ I don’t own an electric car here in NZ but it’s always good to watch is presentation skills 😊
don't know if anyone is doing this yet but I think the tech for it is around the corner.
It would work similar to Charge Fairy but it would be a drone that could self drive to your location and park in front of your vehicle, slide a wireless charger under your car, charge it and go to the next stop or back to it's base to recharge.
I imagine each could serve a specific neighborhood or small town. Neither the car owner or a tech would need to be present for the charge. You would order a charge through an app. If the drone was tall and slim it could just park in the same parking spot and if it could maneuver sideways the drone may even be able to fit between cars parked closely on the street.
Is workplace charging not common enough?
Not for us Pensioners! 🤣
nonexistent.
Doesn’t work for those of us whose office IS their car. Food delivery drivers for services like DoorDash and Uber Eats (case in point: yours truly) are of course cases in point on that front.
It certainly exists. My brother mostly charges his car at his work car park. He works at an Amazon warehouse, and they have something like 100 chargers in their car park, with the electric connections to add more as more employees need them,
Some workplaces are threatening staff just for charging their phones in the office! 😄
In Denmark we have public charge points everywhere: at gas stations, supermarkets, schools, public parking spaces and even in many workplaces. 5 years ago having an EV was difficult if you couldn't charge at home, now it's not a problem.
Thanks for this - I've an EV on order and no driveway; I still have moments when I think I'm crazy but I'll work it out. PS what did you do with Robert - stealing his office and all (and yes I know it's a green screen)?
I would do it. Crazy like a fox, hungry like the wolf.
How did it go? Was it doable?
Have you ever wondered about this scenario where, right now Governments all over the world get tax revenues out of the fuel sales to the general public, and that amount is huge in some countries, and when more and more people switch to EV gradually the revenue from fuel sales would decrease and then would come to a point where the Govt starts to increase the electricity cost to balance the revenue loss from fuel. And maybe in my worst nightmare, it may become like charging an EV would cost similar to having an ICE vehicle and filling it with fuel. However if we use Solar panels at Home some of the cost can be managed, but we will still end up using outside chargers often though !!
I live in Denmark. First 1.5 years of owning an EV I didnt have my own charger. I needed to charge 1-2 times a week. Had several options: charging at work, rapid charging at a local supermarket, or using a couple of slow chargers 1 km away. Not once did I need juice for my car in that period. That being said I love having my own charger now 😆
Yeah for those that drive to work or somewhere they will be for a while, that opens up another area to look for places to slow charge.
This maybe a very sumb question, but let's say i park my car near a charging pole and let it charge overnight, is there some mechanism to prevent someone from unplugging the car?
Great video. Very informative. I really wanted to purchase the Volvo XC40 PHEV. But in Northern Ireland. We’re years behind the rest of the UK in regards availability of charging points. The infrastructure is so poor. So needed up getting a Mild Hybrid petrol car with no plug-in requirements. Sad reality of the variation across the UK.
Brilliant and really helpful in trying to bring co-workers into the EV world. Thanks!
Great vid. It's a no-brainer that connectivity of power will become huge in the next 20 years. Everything will be electric, which means everything and everyone can trade and sell power (if you make it, you can sell it - but taxes will always apply). Your families, your neighbour, your local shop, your school, your business, your council, the grid will see a constant flow of power in and out. Every country will need more electricians and even more programmers!
Welcome to the new normal, its not like i.c.e owners have gas stations in their garage
No, but they are always within range and are more plentiful. Electric charging in the UK is woeful.
@@6chhelipilot I disagree, it's not great but go to Spain for woeful!
I have multiple Rapid and standard chargers within a couple of miles, at 3 or 4 supermarkets I often use, at a pub/restaurant , and at a local car park near many amenities...
@@bellshooter Same here in California. There are 10+ rapid charging stations within 5 miles of me, including a multi-stall EA station at the Target in Rancho Santa Margarita and a Tesla Supercharger at the Shops at Mission Viejo. About half as many as there are gas stations and 3 times as many as there are hydrogen stations (which I currently use).
@@6chhelipilot Woeful some in places, perhaps.
Around Kendal there are chargers at several supermarkets, and even one by the register office. At Sainsburglary there are two Podpoint 7kW chargers, and all the rest are faster. I don't often see all the chargers in use at any one spot.
@@kennystrawnmusic Whatever possessed you to go hydrogen?
I've done it for the last year, there is a lot of frustration especially if you try to go charge your car and the only rapid charger around your house is taken. Waiting for 40mins for someone to finish charging. Going to do grocery in the middle of the night to make sure the charger is not taken. Making sure you plan 40mins into the longer journeys to charge in between. But I have now returned my EV to buy a Hybrid (self charging one) because the raising cost of public charger. If most of public chargers goes up to £1 per kw/h then its effectively costing more than petrol or diesel. My new hybrid now run cheaper than EV on public chargers.
BTW not a lot of local council will allow alternative means to have your cable under or over the pavement. It is up to your local council to consent or not, you cannot install it yourself
I charge my car on a 50 kW unit while i walk my dog
Get your dog to tow the car while on re-gen, charges car and exercises dog all
for the cost of a can of dog food ! PS you will need a 50 Kw dog !
My work buddy lives in a development behind the Nissan dealership where he and his wife bought their Leaf. He walks 2 miles over the course of the work day, she has a sitting job so she likes to take a walk before and after dinner. She'll drive a block or so to the dealer, plug the car in on their charger (free for customers) and walk home, reverse and repeat after dinner.
conveniently, in New Zealand, nearly all chargers are located at supermarkets, restaurants and shopping malls, so just charge on your weekly shopping :)
The problem isn't the lack of chargers, it's the cost. Compared to 5p/kwh or less at home public chargers really add to the cost
Any link to that curb-o thing. I’ve seen local issue where people have cables across a footpath or in a tree. Wondered if local council would approve it
I searched for this, could not find anything. It looks like a perfect solution
Thanks for your well balanced overview on this topic. I deliberately got into owning an EV without the option of charging at home because I can do it at work and with that it‘s abolutely no problem. The only problems are charging-companies not caring much about maintaining their chargers. When you are on a trip, having a charching stop planned and the chargers aren‘t working, that‘s annoying. Second problem is the hummer boy of my city. Hummer boy and co love to park at charging spots, even if they are EV only. City doesn‘t care much and I‘ve often been in the situation where I just could not charge anywhere near my home because chargers were all blocked by hummer boys. These were the only times I seriously thought about getting rid of my EV, if there is no change of my city looking after this problem. Cheers!
We‘ve been using public on the street charging in Cologne, Germany since mid December 2021. Works fine as does the Ionity network when traveling.
Try asking the question that I did at work - "Can we have a charger installed here?" 4 months later there were two Zappi Type 2 chargers [sorry "EVSE" equipment for the proper name] installed. It cost the company nothing, via govt grant, and charging is free. Btw, I'm not an executive, nor on the board. Just an ordinary employee. I don't have a driveway. So try asking. If they refuse you're no worse off than if you hadn't asked.
I have been emailing my Southampton city council for the best part of 5 years, to try to get residential EVSEs. We have residential car parks where I live. One or two per car park, linked to one's electricity account, would entirely solve the problem. Will they do it or something like it? Not a chance in hell. I'm told to drive into the city centre 5 miles away and charge there. Good eh? Thank goodness for the company I work for.
I've lasted over 18 months without any home charger. And just realised that I can use a granny charger because my parking space at home is directly outside my window, so no trailing cables, only do 15 miles a day, so no worries.Moving house soon with two parking spaces not connecting to the house. What's annoying is the new houses around me all have dedicated 7kw chargers.
I live in London with pretty much the same option and the difference in cost of the different options is huge. The cheapest overnight rate if I can charge from a home charger is less than 10p per kWh, ubitricity from the lamppost is 50p and the big source London chargers are 59p if you pay the monthly membership -
Here, a supermarket has free 2kw outlets for electrical cars, for while you are shopping, you will not fill up, but you will get back the energy you lost by driving there to shop and come out to a warm car in the winter.
There is also fastchargers there, but they are not free.
Congrats for your Polestar 2 - I have one, too, and I‘m in the lucky situation to charge at home, with a PV solar roof.
As someone who had an EV(company car) for 2 years with no home charging and cover >30k miles per yr.
My tips:
Subscribe to Elli and OVO charge (aka Bonnet)
ABC, always be charging
If you go shopping etc, try to find parking with chargers
Familiarise yourself with the routes you take most often and what your vehicle range is.
Try to lobby work for a charge point, they barely cost 2-3k, most work places will do that no problem.
I have gone to a hybrid now temporarily, but the fuel costs are double what I was paying with my EV and Elli membership. I am waiting for a BMWi4 now.
Quite a few supermarkets in the UK have EV charging. Charge whilst you shop.
solar kit for your ev roof?
I don't know if I'm missing a search term here... But where I live your options are the fast chargers at Asda or Lidl. That's it. Now this is a pretty small town where most have driveways but not all
You forgot to mention free EV charging points like you can find in Tesco, Costco and some local malls...
Which Tesco offers free charging please?
Thanks
One word of caution for the "charge near home" idea. If you live in an area where parking is expensive, you will likely have to pay for parking to access the charger - even if the charger itself is cheap or free - and the parking fees can make charging considerably more expensive than gas/diesel if you're not careful. This is especially true if you are already paying a monthly parking fee for home parking without charging, and the sole value to you of the $5/hour parking garage is access to the charger.
In many cases, the best place for a city dweller to charge is actually in the suburbs (but by attaching charging to a trip you're making anyway, not making a special trip, just to charge). Rapid charging may seem more expensive than level 2 charging, but if you're not paying for the parking space, it can be quite often considerably cheaper.
You live in London and have a Polestar 2? Seen that video where Robert describes driving around London in a barge/supertanker sized car even if it is an EV, as something not good!
I also like how a lot of these solutions are London centric, maybe go up North to some of the poor communities? Or try here in Wrexham, where many of the public chargers are knackered most days or way too expensive, so everyone goes to Tesco and sometimes it's rammed!
Loving that idea with the groove for the cable!
It's not just "EV Haters" who would object to pavements being cluttered with charging cables. I use an EV and would strongly object to cables strung over pavements.
One thing I didn’t see in the video is how to find the nearby chargers. There are apps and companies that have maps of all chargers on all networks and you can use them to compare costs, find units you weren’t aware of and even sometimes check if they are working or not.
Live in the LA area and do not have an electric car but would like one so where to charge is important, to say the least. Just searched and Los Angles County has a map of public charging stations. Don't see many street parking charging stations but there are some. And as I live, as many do, in an apartment with no charging, public charging is not just important, it is all there is. The last place I lived installed 5 charge spaces in the underground parking garage. Not all that cheap but still, made it possible.
I had a couple chargers in front of my home in Amsterdam, and now I have a couple more in front of my new house in The Hague. Also, there's a bunch of chargers at work as well. So yeah, I don't need my own charger, just like I never needed my own gas station at home
I charged my 21' bolt EV exclusively at an Electrify America station for over a year, before I moved into a house with a garage and got my 22' EUV. Totally fine. Would charge it up once every couple weeks. Took about an hour or so.
Had a Tesla 3 years. Not got off street charging or my own charger. It’s a piece of piss. Never ever ever been an issue.