Random EV thoughts.....

I saw a german review of them and the battery swap thing is a novelty but in general the car is just annoying. Theres a siri type assistant that keeps yapping if you do one 1km over the limit and cannot be told to shut up but aparantly this is a positive with the chinese . The lane assist was also a bit crazy going through roadworks and the likes (possibly with more yappin from yer one the voice assistant)

I'm sure they'll improve those things over time, but for now its a rather good car let down by its software

Would have sat back with the popcorn if those lads tried to squeeze into the half car space left by a gobshite I saw parking across 2 spaces in his/her 231 Ioniq 5 recently. Amazing despite all the driver aids packed into new cars these days, some people cant/won't or are too selfish to get the basics right

Do the Dutch still hook up their caravans to the Model 3s ?

UK consumer organisation Which!, as part of their wider annual car survey, asked over 3000 EV owners how much the range of their car had decreased since they bought it.

The results are interesting enough to be indicative even if the sample size and methodology is not robust enough to draw solid conclusions. The article at least does touch on the distinction between new vs older technologies.

I joined a green team in work to put forward ideas of being more eco friendly. EV chargers was mentioned as we don't have any, it was looked into last year but shelved as the idea of free charging would be 'unfair' for those with diesels paying €200 a month.

I didn't mention it yet as this was just a brainstorming meeting but it's not about saving money. I pay €15/pm to drive ~1,200km so I don't care about free charging.

I will be bringing several points up if anyone has any other suggestions that would be great.

A lot of people at the company are commuting 100-150km, chargers are reassuring for those concerned about range particularly in Winter. They're also the biggest polluters given their distance. Remote working seems to be nonexist for most companies.

New estates have to be multi unit developments so there's a lot more duplexes and apartments built that all have parking spaces. The likes of South Dublin County Council have a max 60% driveway rule in new estates so people like myself have parking spaces outside a house. There's also the issue with new estates being privately managed, the council have no obligation to take them over and the management companies might not want to engage in getting chargers installed as a lot of them are useless.

I don't really get the argument against free charging, nobody forced them not to buy an EV. It's like whinging that smokers have a smoking shed out the back that I never get to use because I don't smoke.

As they get more popular you have to come up with some demand management solutions, some places have a max time e.g. 4 hrs and move the car. If you don't you'll be blocked from charging the next time but a lot of places unfortunately just end up charging to stop all the whinging. If the price is ok it's still a great option for people with no home chargers.

If it's a large enough electricity consumer then AFAIK the unit rate isn't exactly fixed, it depends on the amount of power being consumed at any particular time

So working out the actual unit rate for EV charging might not be that straightforward

Having said that, it should be fairly easy to pick something nominally representative of the cost of electricity and stick to that

I think workplace charging is a great resource, but I agree it probably doesn't make sense for it to be free. Try to match the cheapest night rate so it's really only an incentive for people who need it would be a good approach IMO

Many years ago I was an employee/prisoner of a large manufacturing site near Dublin that operated 24/7

There was a guy who worked shifts in the factory who would bring his campervan so his commute was reduced to a walk across the car park for those days he was working

I'd say if there was an available 3 pin socket he'd have plugged in straight away, and probably another dozen employees would have done the same trick

Or a gang of the local traditionalist nomads would park up one weekend and steal a load of free leccy while wrecking the gaff (not that much stops them anyway)

So I can understand not using 3 pin sockets and having type 2 sockets instead, but I do agree anything over 7kW is a waste of space and if the choice was installing four 22kW chargers, twelve 7kW chargers or twenty four 3kW chargers then I'd go for the option of most chargers

Although frankly, if I was the dude sleeping in ten van when I'm off shift then I'd probably be looking up some way to hook up an EV charger to my van batteries to run my appliances. It's been done a few times already, doesn't seem like the biggest struggle

Had the exact same experience. Whingers, moaners, jealous people are in every workplace.

Two simple options...

1) The company ignores the whingers and provide the charge points for free.

2) The company doesn't want to rock the boat and be seen to be giving a benefit to some people and not others in which case they simply install a solution where its not free to use.

It sounds like option 2 is for your company. Plenty options for that depending on how simple or complex you want the solution to be.

e.g. You can dumb it down and just have a charge point that takes a token to give you Xhrs of charging. You "buy" the tokens from someone in the company and you set the price of the token at whatever level you wish. This is simple and gives you lots of control within your "green team" to adjust pricing/rules as you see fit.

You can make it more complicated and sub-contract it out to a company who will install charge points in your site and manage the whole thing via their pre-existing backend systems and the employees will signup for that providers app and pay their rates. Its almost entirely out of the companies hands then but it wont be cheap and is likely to have low uptake in that case (i.e. emergency use only). I was at a site yesterday actually where EO Charging had this setup. You had to use their eoApp to start the charge session. Works fine but it was almost as expensive as DC charging!

I think external 3 pin sockets is a bad idea. Too many potential downsides there.

A bank of proper charge points should be the solution. Paid or free is up to the company.

would you not be able to do it completely green and install solar panels and let anyone who wants a charge then charge off them?

Then nobody can say theres preferential treatment as the electricity is coming from the sky for free, not being bought by the company for a priviledged subgroup of the employees .

If the company has cash to throw around, then maybe offer fuel vouchers to anyone doing car share as maybe people just need an extra kick up the rear to organise themselves ? They will still be burning fossil fuel, but if you slash the number of cars travelling in every morning then you are still slashing emmissions. Doing something like that might also lessen any problems people have with giving free electricity to Ev owners. There'd be something for everyone. If Ev owners are getting 5 or 10 euro per day (1000 euro + per year) of benefits, then offer similar to ICE drivers

Is it not the general consensus that a free service is abused so unless there are more chargers that chargees, free charging is going to lead to hogging of chargers. Much better to have a reasonable fee for charging so people don't take the mickey hogging a limited resource to fully charge their 70kwh batteries.

I'm in Sardinia airport now waiting to come home. Been here a week.

Almost 280 Kms from the airport to the house we rented plus we drove around a lot.

In that time I saw 3 Model Y's, 1 BMW M40 and 1 fiat 500e. Also saw a model 3 parked in a multi storey.

Out and about I saw 2 x 22ac chargers and at the motorway services I saw 4 x 300kw new chargers with their cables still wrapped in plastic.

Mostly still the battered fiat Pandas and Tipos that I see most times I'm in Italy!!

Of course one man's significant benefit is anothers loose change. Depends on your perspective. In fairness if you were paying say 30c per kW for domestic electricity 50kw at work is only worth €15 to you, pennies really. Now of course if you didn't have home charging that 50kw would be worth approx €30, again I'm sure loose change for some priveledged employees

Didn't understand one single word(or abbreviation) of that post, well, maybe CCS1 is type one I'm guessing. We'll need a glossary of terms soon.