That assumes that everyone charges them all at the same time, which is highly unlikely, however you would get potential (and predictable) surges such as when everyone sticks the kettle on after Coronation Street.
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I think when I was on a road trip through Dumfries and Galloway, I noticed that there were charging points literally everywhere we went. Made me wish the car rental agency had given me an EV instead of the shite they did.
That was only reinforced when Putler invaded Ukraine during that week, which made petrol go up from £1.38/L to £1.52/L I think, which wasn’t the main problem, but there were rather long queues to refuel then.
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It wouldn’t. these charging points attract customers for their convenience, customers still have to pay for the electricity because it’s not something the businesses run for free. A third-party company installs and runs these.
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For now. There’s no guarantee that that won’t change as retail becomes more competitive.
“Come and shop with us, and you can charge your car for free!”
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I doubt they would become that competitive. It’s currently what, £20 per charge? I’m not sure they have the margins to support that…
It could however become a profit centre if they start generating their own electricity on-site via solar panels or similar…
I read somewhere that this is a disincentive to buy an electric car if you can’t charge at home as it can work out more expensive. Of course, as there is more competition it should force the price down, but I think @cynicaloldgit has a point that establishments may use cheap charging as a way of attracting custom.
I’m trying to work out the costs. I had a look at the VWs as they do seem to produce equivalent electric and petrol models.
The id.3 uses around 14 KwH per 100km. the Golf uses 4.7l /100km. At the moment, domestic electricity in Germany is around 0.4€ per kWh and E10 1.60€ / litre. Per 100km that would be 5.60€ electric and 7.52€ for petrol. To be perfectly honest, that isn’t a huge saving considering the extra cost of the electric model and the pain-in-the-arse factor of range.
Obviously, there are other factors and if petrol was to become significantly more expensive or if we had home generation then the economics could swing widely.
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As my lad once said… It is only a matter of time before electric cars have a solar panel sun roof, and the energy, turning motion of the wheels/tyres is not converted to power the engine…
Charging points might just be the stepping stone towards self reliance in the ever advancing basics of the car
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We’re a long way off that i think. Solar cells just cant generate the energy and actually thinking about it even if they had 100% efficiency i still dont think its enough.
Not with modern car construction and performance.
More than happy to be corrected on that though.
Also will it mean having to cull all seagulls?
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As long as somebody else has one though. Unless you exist purely in a city, life without a car is extremely difficult, especially with kids. Just shopping would be a nightmare.
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As above, cost me £38 to do 50 miles.
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Currently (like what I did there?) the power vs size of solar panels would mean you’d need the area of a tennis court to power a car made of balsa wood. I’d be surprised if a solar panel could move its own weight. I don’t mean an ultra light one, I mean something with structure and resilience. Hmm, might try that. You can buy little kits that do exactly this but they weigh grams. Cars having to have all the modern safety kit take a hell of a lot of power to move. We could all move to lightweight cars but the dangers would exceed the rewards.
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That was the van with a public charging point?
Don’t have kids. 
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I agree, and that’s why I said it could even become a profit centre in its own right since I think there’s currently quite a gulf between household rates and the charging rates.
This is something that bemuses me a lot. How many people actually require that kind of extended range? I don’t doubt that there will be people who try to cover 100s of km/miles at one go, but most of the time you’d want a break every couple of hours, which, after hitting the toilet, a quick refreshment, would already amount to perhaps 15 to 20 minutes, enough time to top up the charge quite a fair bit. And you don’t have to be waiting at the pump to do so either.
I think the physics make that rather unfeasible except for a top-up, but that said, Technology demonstrator VISION EQXX | Mercedes-Benz Group > Innovations > Product innovation > Technology has attempted it, but it doesn’t power the main battery. They’re just too heavy.
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That’s what rentals/car-sharing schemes are great for.
It just requires a paradigm shift. Too many people are too used to piling the whole family into the car for a weekend shop at the big supermarket, when in reality, what is needed is either smaller shops in closer distances, or deliveries. I’ve done weekly shops for 4 adults on a bicycle. With a simple messenger bag. For more, all you need is additional panniers.
That said, I didn’t buy bottled water nor juices and all that stuff so…
As @RedWhippet pointed out, that was with a van. How much did the van weigh? What is its base unloaded consumption, and how much were you carrying with it? What was your driving like?
If I’m not wrong, for electric vehicles, given that the powertrain is relatively uniformly efficient no matter how much power it’s outputting, the biggest factor contributing to the power consumption would then be the speed you were driving it at. 70mph uses quite a fair bit more power than 50mph for example.
Most people would not see anywhere close to that.
It depends where you live. My wife occasionally has to go to big cities which is a round trip of 300-400km. That’s pushing the useable range of the better EVs. Of course, you can charge up whilst you are there, but that assumes that you can find a suitable charging point and so on. It’s hardly the end of the world but it is still a pain-in-the-arse if you have to plan around it.
For day-to.day use it would be fine as she is typically only doing 200km at most. (She is effectively the equivalent of a district nurse. We live in a rural part of Germany.)
That’s part of what @cynicaloldgit is alluding to.
The whole transportation model needs to change, drastically.
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That would apply to cars, but with commercial vehicles the gross weight has a far bigger effect. I can remember driving a 7.5 tonne truck between Newcastle and Stirling. When it was full, it used about 2 to 3 times as much fuel as when empty.
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Yeah but if he’s like the typical tradie, he’ll be driving around a largely empty van anyway.
Me and about 300kg. Driving reasonably, the van had none of the glorious elec acceleration of more sporty models so no point ragging it. Sure it would have been cheaper charged at home but how many homes have the supply to facilitate 120KW charging? And there’s the next problem. Domestic supplies are 63A main breaker or there or there abouts. Assume 10A ish being used at night across various devices so you have 50A which gives you 12KW. That’s 10 hours for the big batteries but only whilt everything else in the house is turned off. That 50A is when everybody is asleep. Dishwasher, Washing machine, oven and a few elec heaters and that could be down to 20A easilly. That’s then 4.8KW and a LOT of time to charge fully. Domestic supply was never installed to provide a constant 63A to houses. If everybody on our estate utilised the max available current over night, the system would blow instantly. Maybe it could do 5KW constant for charging for everybody. That’s 20 hours for a 100KWH battery. Charging on specific fast chargers away from home is, as I discovered, very expensive. I suspect Tesla have a better system.
Odd that.