ESB eCars

Thanks all for your help, the trip was extremely uneventful. We went via Carrick in the end, got there with 40% which was far more than I expected. Someone in an ID4 was leaving when we arrived so we got straight on, popped across the road for a snack and coffee and left after 40 minutes. We arrived in Belmullet with 30% SoC and I’m charging at an SCP right now so we’ll have plenty for driving around in the rain and the trip back to Dublin in a few days.

The only glitch was the MCU crashing when the charge started first time, I’ve opened a support ticket with Tesla about that. A disconnect and reboot fixed it.

Because the SoC was quite high, I never got above 80kW charge rate, it dropped to 60 after a few minutes and down to 30 after half an hour so it averaged at 43 kW/hr. At that rate, I wonder if it’s worth using the HPCPs at all, an FCP might be fine too.

It gets worse in Jan when temps are hovering just above zero! But no one tells us that.....Thats when superchargers and a pre-warmed battery really come into their own.

I did consider changing from HPCP to FCP when it slowed down but I was lazy and I knew I’d only be there for another few minutes. The pricing model makes sense for their particularly odd infra rollout. If they had more HPCPs, the infra wouldn’t be so scarce and they wouldn’t need to nudge customers in the right direction. But we are where we are…

Surely it is more expensive to buy a 350kW charger than a 50kW. And those costs have to be passed on the customer to recoup the higher investment.

The semi state monopoly conundrum will certainly throw up oddities like restricting those to 150kW after paying for 350kW units alright. eCars have been accused of undercutting the price a private operator can survive on, on this very thread.

As I incorrectly compared the grid connection waiting times for a 50kW vs a 1.4MW connection last week, the infra costs behind those delays also has to be paid for by the end user. Transporting the electricity to site as well as delivering to the car.

That’d be all well and good if the car was being plugged into the generator. It’s not and there are different costs in the bits in between.

That argument worked for water charges. Maybe we should start a protest 😂

Interestingly, the wind and solar generators can't engage in price setting because the fuel is free and they're all generating at the same time, they just have to take whatever the market price is

It's those pricey gas generators who determine the market price of electricity

I presume this is Kona charging for 55 min after the taxi left after 1h.

Amazing that after installing the hub at J14 the units aren’t doing what they were promised to do by eCars.

BlackKnight do you have the stats for J14 to show the usage of the new units?

Is the problem the units, the site connection or something else? If it’s the units you’d think eCars would be aggressively harassing the manufacturer to sort it out. I doubt it’s the case myself , but don’t understand how lacklustre the quality of service is.

It will be interesting to see how the IEVOA meet-up there goes in November.

Why don't you go to the airport chargers? Is less than 5km away and there are 2 units. Pricewise kinda the same.