EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by 2025
EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by 2025
The chargers must be placed every 60km (37mi) and allow ad-hoc payment by card or contactless device without subscriptions.
Sometimes, I dream that at least half of the same effort was made for public transport between densely populated areas
Currently doing my first long trip (~450km) with my EV. Highway charging is more or less already pretty good between Germany and Austria. Faced some issues esp where a 150kw charger maxed out at 18kw somewhere in Austria , when I had only 80km to spare.
I'm a bit skeptical about it really working on large scales during summer holidays. Aren't EV supposed to charge for at least 30 minutes 1 hour minimum to be able to get some autonomy? How is that realistic with such a high number of vehicles?
Our EV6 should be one of such newer models. We just did our first holiday trip with it from Belgium to Brittany. Some key points to note;
- it’s 20 minutes up to 80% on fast chargers. The remaining 20% is an additional 20 minutes
- sometimes there will be no free charger and other cars are NOT fast charging
- while the range was quoted being 480km it’s closed to 320 with a vehicle full for a 2weeks trip with and additional car roof luggage
- you also need charge at destination. Our last leg was on smaller roads with less chargers
In addition with 2 kids it makes sense anyway to pause for 30mins every 300km or so. For us ot was a pleasant experience all in all.
Newer ones can charge an acceptable amount in 10 to 15 minutes. Technology is rapidly improving, and will only get better. Also if there's lots of chargers along multiple rest stops, shouldn't be a problem to find one.
Bigger problem is the clusterfuck of roaming agreements, apps, charge cards, and obscure rules between all these charger operators. Also how to find the chargers and their status. Needs to be regulated into an open standard.
It's not as complicated as I thought at first. Driving a Tesla you have most routes covered with Tesla Superchargers.
Additionally, I have a basic subscription from an electricity provider including their charging card for rare cases where the app doesn't work. There are just 3 different types with increasing rates:
- Owned by provider
- Not owned by provider
- Ionity
I'm on vacation with a rented Tesla Y LR in Tuscany right now. We traveled all the way from northern Germany (about 1500 km) and never had any issues finding a free charging station. Just once every single parking spot was used and the charging automatically stopped at 80% in order to make space for others more quickly (and to be honest, this was due to other cars parking in the Tesla reserved parking spots at an Italian supermarket).
Traveling with kids automatically makes you take a break every 3 hours or so. This time, we just let the car charge during these breaks and had a 100% charged car afterwards. That's about 55 min of charging time. In about 25 min you can charge from 20% to 80% using a 250 kW supercharger.
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important. Most camping sites, hotels and vacation resorts offer at least two 11 kW stations at their own rates.
right now
That's the key phrase. Consider a regular gas station where cars constantly come and go. Now, imagine if in 10 years we'll have a similar demand for EV charging stations. I can't see that working well with the current batteries. Solid-state batteries are not available yet and there's no guarantee that they'll hit the market anytime soon.
Thanks for your feedback! I'm just curious how it would be realistic to scale the charging stations enough to sustain a larger (let's say 30% or even 50%) of cars being EV. Should we just have giant charging stations hubs every 50 km?
You have to keep in mind that long distance travel is not the usual use case and that being able to slowly charge the vehicle during the night is also important.
That's very true, to be honest my personal preference would be to reassess the need to have so many people travelling so much during July/August (you see the most popular hotspots such as Venise or Barcelona trying to reduce the number of tourists) but that's a different story
The key is that you put charging next to other amenities like restaurants and rest stops.
You should never really be stopping only to charge your car, you should be charging while stopping to do other things.
This makes sense, but for every parking spot at restaurants and rest stops parking to have a charger seems like quite a logistical challenge.
I have a wall charger at my Airbnb for a year now, with plenty of drive thru stays from Sweden, Norway an Holland to Italy, Croatia and back. I have yet have a guest need or use it. 🤷
There needs to be more around before people feel more comfortable with going full EV
Does anyone know what the status is on the electryfying roads in Europe? Like they'll do in Sweden (permanent electric road
patented technology [...] transmits up to 300kW of power to the vehicle through a retractable pick-up that drags along a metal rail embedded in the road.
Interesting. So that would be one lane on only?
One of the biggest issue right now is diversification. If we (try to) establish various different loading technologies will we only be able to use one in some places? Will we be able to use and need various adapters? Will we have to adjust our vehicles eventually with a tech switch?
We're still in a diversification stage. Hopefully we'll arrive in a consolidation phase soon, or a more structured focused international approach.