car

The more I play with the electric car and the more I feel that it affects how I spend my time. Today I would have written a blog post before going out, but I didn’t. I didn’t write before going out because I knew that the battery would be down to 30 percent by the time I got to my destination, and 30 percent of battery power on a car means 14 hours of charge time. I.e. the earlier I head to charge the car the sooner I can head home to have dinner at a reasonable time.

I had planned to write my blog post this morning, whilst charging the car. I didn’t. Someone was painting in the apartment where I had planned to write. Instead I spent time with people, as the car charged. By the end of the day it was at eighty percent before I drove home and now it’s back to over sixty percent.

Being environmentally conscious, by driving an electric car, rather than a petrol one comes at a cost. That cost is waiting for cars to charge when using normal power sockets. What bothers me is not the charge time. It’s that in 2017 or so buildings were built without power sockets to parking spaces. They should have put normal power plugs.

An electric car doesn’t need much power to charge. With a normal power socket, if you charge overnight you can easily top your car up to one hundred percent every night. It can charge while you’re sleeping, ready for the next day.

Before the pandemic there was a discussion about preparing a garage for electric cars and my experience is proving that we don’t need fast chargers, or even medium chargers. A normal power socket would be enough to charge a car to one hundred percent overnight. Of course it would be nice to have fast charging, but fast charging is an excuse to sell a 900 CHF plug and an excuse to pay thousands to upgrade the power throughput of a building.

The simple reality is that a normal plug is more than enough to charge an electric car, if you admit that a car is parked twenty two hours per day, giving it twenty two hours per day to charge. Fast charging is a gimmick.

I’m bringing this up again because I watched a video yesterday about the Silence 4 electric car. It’s a small electric car that is perfect for urban living. The killer feature is that it has two removable batteries, that can be removed and charged away from the car. This means that when you use the car you can wheel the batteries into your “cave”, apartment, or office, and charge the batteries, before commuting home, or to another location.

The concept goes further. The batteries are leased so the car is fourty percent cheaper. this means that, in theory, and if the car is popular enough, you could go on a road trip and swap the batteries every hundred kilometres. The batteries still require time to charge but if you can swap batteries that are depleted for batteries that are full, the time you stop for is greatly reduced. The beauty of this system is that the batteries can also be used by their electric scooters.

The problem with electric cars, for now, is that they’re not as easy to refuel as petrol cars. Once they are then the barrier to entry will disappear. When a car costs 100 per week, on petrol, it makes sense to switch to electric.