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Burning Gas Pollutes So Much, Dirty EV Battery Manufacturing Evens Out In About 2 Years
(www.jalopnik.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Litte remarks regarding EV and not having a point of charge at home.
I have an EV but don't own a house to charge it. Neither have a charging point on my appartement parking or my office (too complex/expensive to install). So I delayed buying an EV during few years. But I did the switch last year and don't regret it at all.
The solution?
I found a charging station with good price at 7km of my place.
When I come back from office and I'm starting to be below 30% battery remaining, I go there and charge up to 90% during ~30 min.
I read a book on my tablet while waiting in the car with the music and air conditioning (as it quite hot currently) while charging at approx 80~90 kW/h... A nice break before going home to be honest ^^
I really handle the EV like a classic combustion engine car but with a small tank. Instead of having 800km of autonomy, i have 400~450km.
The key is to have a reliable and cheap charging station near your daily travel. Best being having it at home but it's definitely not mandatory.
I'm currently at an average of 4.02€ for 100km driven and my charging station doesn't require monthly fee. Just register an account, associate your car once and now it's plug and charge.
I share your view regarding the grid, you need to prepare it properly and good charging station is the first step.
We have them in public parks here in my area, and people will park their EV's and just go for a hike or a walk. It's not that complex.
It's cool that charging works for you that good. However, now imagine~~g~~ a rush of new EVs storming your charging point at the same time of the day. And also imagine people driving a lot more than you, charging each day for half an hour - that's quite some time spent as charging point. While I agree that having a charging point at home is not mandatory, it's much much friendlier, specially in case of mass EV adoption where chargers would lag behind demand.
Seems pretty easy, instead of incentivizing and infrastructure around gasoline, you incentivize electric already. Data centers are already pushing this for their own use, why would it be impossible in your mind to do this for a transition to greener energy usage?
Even a normal outlet can handle slow charging an EV if you drive less than 100km a day.
Typical EV usage : 18kWh per 100km
Typical "granny" charger : 1800 watts (240v,7 amps)
10 hours at 1800 watts = 18kWh = 100km.
Get home at 6pm, plug in car, car is charged at 4am , leave for work at 7am. Enough spare time there to shift to charging outside peak evening usage at 9pm instead.
Here in the US typical outlets are 120v 15A max. Sure thats also 1800 watts but for a margin of safety, typically, appliances won't use anything over 1500 watts, or about twelve and a half amps.
It's 12 amps even. It's the 80% rule for continuous draw, defined as expected use to run for 3 hours or more. That's why a space heater is 1500 watts, but a hairdryer is 1800.
120v
Oopse. Good catch. Will edit. Missed the "0" lol
Yes, exactly. But if you live in an apartment, you don't have even such outlet.
Not to be "um actually", but I owned a Nissan Leaf 1st gen over a decade ago, and the pain points you worry about weren't really pain points back then, and there was a loooooooooooot less EV infrastructure in place back then. Less reliable, too.
A couple of years ago I rented an EV with a friend who had zero experience with them. I explained everything, we had no evse at the hotel so needed to use public points, still was no issue at all. Each point we used was about 20% to capacity, they all had places to stretch, eat, etc at. No points were damaged or giving less than maximum output. It was extremely pleasant, and we used about $25 in fuel costs, vs $100+ for gasoline in a comparable vehicle.
I also didn't have an evse installed at home - I used the 110V, 'level 1' charger that plugs into an outlet for my Leaf. I drove a ton - 10k miles in 4 months, so 2.5x the national average. Even with heavy reliance on public points on a network that was in its infancy and prone to downtime, I still got by just fine.
And that was 12 years ago.
That is very anecdotal, and unlikely to apply to anyone else. If you charge 30-90% in an hour, that means that you must have found a cheap super charger? Not even just the regular 22kW fast chargers? Where I live all the super chargers is quite expensive, like 1.5x the price of gas /km. Which is fine as you would mainly use them fore rare long trips. Meanwhile charging at home is like 1/4th the cost of gas /km, and regular public 22kW chargers about the same as gas.
Having to regularly wait 30 minutes somewhere to charge can definitely be a real inconvenience, but I buy that it’s nice to just sit and relax for a bit though.
Also, isn’t regular super charging very bad for the battery health in the long run?