It’s a very easy habit to pick up, once you find an affordable EV. The EV habit makes tremendous sense. When I learned to drive petrol was about 1.21 CHF per litre, and when I was driving the most it went to about 1.71 CHF per litre. Recently, due to recent electoral choices petrol has risen to between 1.98 CHF to 2.20CHF per litre in Switzerland.
When you see this price increase it means that your fuel costs from 70-100 CHF per refuelling stop. Even with the petrol scooter it went from 6 CHF up to 9 CHF. Within this context it means that driving to Geneva with the scooter doubled in price. That’s a discernable difference. That is quite the psychological wall.
Meanwhile, the price of electricity, according to an article I saw two or three days ago is meant to go down by four percent in the coming year. This is thanks to hydroelectric power, wind farms and solar. According to another article Switzerland didn’t have an energy crisis thanks to solar energy being produced both on peoples roofs and in other places.
Centuries ago we got energy from the same sources, and forests, but forests take 30 years to grow, so it requires a lot of patience for a tree to grow, be cut down, and very little time for it to be burned. In contrast, with solar panels, a sunny day produces plenty of energy. If it’s windy and sunny then wind turbines and solar work. If it rains then hydroelectric power is also available. In some cases, when there is a surplus of electricity hydroelectric dams pump water from the lower dam to the upper dam, to recycle the energy once demand is up again.
People say that they will not get an EV until they have a charger at home. It makes perfect sense, until you consider the alternative. Plenty of people may not have an EV charger at home, but they could easily have one at hand either at work, or near work, and if EV charging is paid for, by the employer, then EV ownership costs are much, much lower than petrol costs.
Driving the EV to L’Isle might use 15-30 percent of the battery, from Nyon, for each trip, but compared to the train it is cheaper. When I go for the 6am run in Morges it costs about 6 CHF to charge the car between the time I park, run, have breakfast, and then get on with the day. Taking the train costs more, once you exclude the investment in the EV.
Initially when I was driving another EV I tried not to drive too fast. I tried to drive without using too much energy because of how long charging takes. With time I got used to living the EV life, so I sped up a little, when traffic allows, and took advantage, when it doesn’t.
When you own an EV you can get two or three apps, and RFID cards, and you can use whichever card is cheaper, with a specific charger. In so doing range anxiety and vulnerability to a charger being out of service is less of an issue. Shell has one price with its card, ecarup another, and TCS a third. It’s worth having the cards, or at least the app, to benefit from preferential tariffs.
Driving an EV feels no different to driving an automatic car, except for one key difference, road trips. I am impatient to try a multi-charge requiring road trip. Usually when I drive long distance I stop long enough for a bathroom visit and to refuel the car. With an EV I need to count a half hour break every two hours or so. I suspect that this will have a clearly discernible effect on my road trip habit.
Instead of a stop being for a few minutes it will be half an hour each time. I don’t know whether that will make a road trip more, or less tiring. I know that the 1300km drive will require more stops and that the stop will be dictated by a half hour charging stop.
I suspect that having to stop at least once every two hours will relieve pressure from feeling I should minimise stops, but I don’t know whether the charging rest will be refreshing or tiring.
We’ll see.
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