- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
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Friends of ours just got their first EV a few months ago, and are able to charge at home so it’s totally fine. Or at least it was, until their first long-distance trip in the thing last month.
It wasn’t so much the fact that they had to stop three separate times on the drive to charge, it was that the facilties just weren’t enough for the demand. Despite us being in the UK, specifically England, the stereotypical English love of orderly queuing apparently went out the window and there were people pushing into queues and letting their friends in after them. A half hour charge time turned into more like 90mins trying to just actually get at a charger.
Since you can’t really stop people being terrible, the only solution to this is going to be a LOT more available charging points in convenient locations.
Yeah - this was my concern when I looked for my last car. The availability of charging stations is still not perfect everywhere, and in my case I use my car for when I do long trips out of the city, and just my feet/an electric scooter when inside.
So, went something efficient for now, but next vehicle I’d definitely like to consider an EV, so hopefully by then the network is larger. In Western Canada though, so distance between cities is pretty far.
Hopefully the tipping point comes soon in both countries. We’d planned to go EV next but it’s going to just depend on when ours needs replacing and what the state of charging is by then. Fingers crossed, anyway!
It’ll also be cool to see how solar tech goes over the next while too. If it starts incorporating into the vehicle exterior then parking in sunny lots might give enough for most folks daily commutes (10km or so range I’d say)
My natural reaction is to make a joke about the crap English weather but honestly, it’s been heating up here, you might be onto something.
Without a dedicated spot to charge, I would not recommend getting an EV currently. A plug-in hybrid is as far as I would recommend since you an always fallback to gas if you don’t find opportunities to charge.
