Electric Vehicles and Charging Time

It’s easy to drive a petrol car. You fill up, and 500-600 kilometres later you fill up. With Electric vehicles it is the same in theory. In practice it isn’t that simple. The EV charging market is fragmented and each company has a different app and possibly RFID tag. The result is that you can either be loyal and use just one app or you can have two or more apps on your phone.

In theory you can get an electric power socket installed in your garage to make charging possible. In practice, if you live in a shared building you need to get permission. Considerations also need to be thought of. For example does the building have enough power for two or three cars to charge at once or do you need to setup a rolling charge system, where one car charges, and then a second, and then a third.

The other issue is charge time. I know that with one charging location it will take an hour for five percent. This means that my 30 percent drive will take six hours to recharge to be back to the same status as before.

On the flipside public charging costs 2 to three times more per kilowatt hour, but it takes a fraction of time time. Yesterday I used a proper car charging point and instead of waiting hours for it to charge from 34 percent to 80 percent I waited about an hour. To be specific it cost 8.48 CHF for a 1hr 14 charge and 13.1kw/h of power. With another hour of patience I would have got to a one hundred percent charge. In effect if I went for a two hour walk I would come back to a charged car if I depleted it down to about thirty percent.

Why Is This Relevant?

At the moment car charging is relatively rare. This means that if you have an EV you need to consider where you can charge along the way to your destination or on the way back. For the last year or so I have known that if I use the EV I need to count a day to charge the car, and half a day just to charge what I used.

With an increase in the number of chargers available in an increasing number of villages it will become easy to charge an EV within a reasonable amount of time. As I said before, my issue is not range anxiety, it’s charge time frustration.

What to Do While Charging

Yesterday while waiting for the car to charge I was looking at walking options, bus and train options, and even considering cycling options. If every time you use an EV you have to wait one hour per five percent of charge, then an EV will be used sparingly. This is not helped by the chaos of options with charging.

I have evpass and Swisscharge on my phone and I finally got evpass to work, after some trial and error and now I need to get Swisscharge to work. I could spend 10 CHF on an RFID tag but that would be a waste of money. I tried to pair Swisscharge to the TCS e-charge card and that failed with a borrowed car so I may soon be able to test with my own card. It’s free.

And Finally

With fast charging you regain some of the freedom of using a petrol car. If charging takes as long as a walk, meal, or bike ride, then it becomes almost invisible. It’s at this point that an EV becomes a luxury.