ESB eCars

It only takes about an 1.5 hours for those to charge, there fairly economical, I am on 170 mpg.

Seen on Saturday a Taxi charging at a AC, check the app after it was there since 4 am, I presumed he finished his work Friday night and plugged in, still there at 2 pm.

He moved later on and a phev parked up and did not charge he was gone after 30 minutes.

Feet under the table? More like bent over a barrel I'd say

Like I've said before, if IEOVA rocks the boat with Ecars then they'll just get the door slammed on their face and another EV owners group will get the airtime with Ecars

Personally I'm just holding out hope for the Ionity expansion and maybe Elon opening up the SuC network in Ireland. If those two go ahead then that'll be more or less game over for Ecars

The demise of eCars might be a bit premature. It’s hard to see a big expansion of Ionity here, their focus is on busy inter-city routes and their capital costs are huge. Tesla will almost definitely open to the public over the next year but their network is relatively small in Ireland so it will be positive for people who use those routes but that still leaves a lot of the country needing another network.

I robbed this from the Ionity thread, apparently this is going to be the network by 2025, black markers are new sites

We'll see what happens of course, if ESBN are going to sandbag the whole process 😏

You're right that they're interested in mainly intercity routes, but those are the main money makers for ESB outside of the handful of DC chargers in Dublin

If the competition start eating into that revenue stream then there won't be much money making potential for Ecars, so it'll receive even less attention from ESB

As I've said before, Ecars should mainly be focusing on enabling charging in places where commercial operators won't touch, like providing AC chargers to people without driveways

There’s every possibility that eCars consists of nothing more than one or two ESBN staff with no fixed budget managing an outsourced operation of engineers, call centre and PR agency. I’ve seen more than a few times where public sector staff are busy doing their job and suddenly a second role is landed on them because it looks like a small piece of additional work and some government minister wants the work done quickly and without guaranteed funding.

They start training them young in ESB

we do have a good grad program….

'Grad' being short for Grandfathered yeah. Psych.

????

So, If I understand correctly. Local authorities in the UK picked locations that they believed would be useful for EV chargers and put the process of installation out to tender. Then companies, including eCars, vied for tha opportunity and install the chargers where they're needed in a possibly timely manner.

Here, neither the local authorities or eCars can be bothered doing either.

Or is that a gross oversimplification.

I agree but local authorities don't have a clue about it , whereas ESB (theoretically) have the expertise. So it should be a case of councils saying they want, for example, some 50kW chargers in every town plus kerbside chargers for all council run street parking, and tendering out the contract to a provider like Ecars

Similar to how Ecars currently operates in the UK

It's probably also better that every council doesn't use a different provider, otherwise you'd need a different app or card for every county (like our current situation, but 26 times worse)

Councils (the few here that have any interest in charging points) seem to be having more luck with Easygo than ESB, see what’s happened in Carlow recently.

Maybe they come across the same lack of interest from ESB as Joe public, but imho I think it’s more like when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object and they both double down and cancel each other out.

Whatever way you look at it ESB is falling way short of it’s role in the national strategy, especially given how successful they’ve been in the UK.

True, I did say ESB theoretically have the expertise to design a charging network, I've yet to see any evidence of this

My comment around having multiple providers was more around ensuring some level of interoperability between different councils

If you look at the situation with paid public parking, it's fairly dire. If I'm parking in county Dublin, I need one app. If I park in a train station, I need a different app. If I need to go to Connolly hospital, I need another app again

Evidently nobody in any of the councils said that all paid parking providers need to provide a payment API to allow 3rd party providers. Frankly I doubt anyone in the council understands what an API is

Now imagine the same situation with public charging overlaid on top and a bunch of different charging providers

I know a bit of forward planning and research can alleviate this. But really, should I have to download a bunch of different apps and register new accounts to travel from Swords to Dundalk for an afternoon?

So apparently I was on RTE radio this morning...