Electric car drivers face queues and quarrels
With electric vehicle (EV) sales booming, soaring numbers of drivers are putting themselves at the mercy of a charging network that rapidly becoming overburdened.
In the US there have already been rows at charging points as drivers squabble over access and the phenomenon has even been given a (rather ungainly) name: charge rage.
Founder of rapid charging point company Ecotricity, Dale Vince, says the network is coping at the moment but admits his company does have some busy sites. “We do get charge rage if someone ICEs your bay. And people don’t like it if someone parks a Tesla to charge for two hours. When your car has finished charging, our message is: move it.”
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ICE-ing is EV owner-speak for when an internal combustion engine (ICE) car blocks or parks in a charging point space. On EV internet forums, stories of drivers being ICEd abound. But rather than scuffles breaking out, if stories are to be believed, British EV drivers resort to leaving notes and icy stares when the offending ICE driver returns.
“The vast majority of EV drivers are very accommodating,” Vince adds. How relaxed they will be as they become more numerous remains to be seen. In March, more than 17,000 new electric or hybrid models left showrooms. That’s more than 12 times the number that was sold in the same month 10 years ago. In 2015, sales of cars eligible for the government’s plug-in grant were up by 94 per cent compared to the previous year.
Now, measure that against charging points. According to online database Zap-Map, there are currently 10,727 public connectors in the UK. Between February 2015 and January 2016, the number increased by 48 per cent from 7,091 to nearly 10,500. So the number of charging points is growing quickly. But not at the same rate as EV sales.
There are now estimated to be in excess of 70,000 pure electric vehicles on UK roads. That’s about seven vehicles for every charging point, even before you take plug-in hybrids into account.
Whether the chargers that are installed meet people’s needs is another question altogether. There are essentially three sorts of charger: slow, fast and rapid. Around a quarter of all the UK’s public charging points are slow chargers, Zap-Map says. These are similar to plugging into your regular domestic supply at home and will take six to eight hours to return something like a Nissan Leaf to full charge. For electric vehicle users these are pointless, unless desperation outweighs pragmatism.
More than half of the publicly available chargers are fast chargers. Rather belying their name, they will give a full charge in three to four hours and return a full-electric car to 80 per cent charge in half an hour. The remaining quarter are rapid chargers. The holy grail of car charging points, these will fully charge a car in half an hour. But they will also deliver 20 to 30 miles of range in about 10 minutes.
Charging points can be a potential problem for companies that put them in for employees, too. Elm EV is a Sunderland-based company that installs chargers for organisations all over the country. Its commercial director Dan Martin explained: “Everyone has to play ball. You can’t hog the charger. There is a bit of etiquette involved among the people who use our EV charging posts.”
To ensure things go as smoothly as possible, the company has set up an online calendar for people to book their slots. Of course if you install more charging points the problem will solve itself. But it’s easier said than done. “We do have a challenge with infrastructure for EVs,” Martin said. “That sort of thing costs a lot of money.”
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In fact a, single basic charge point will cost about £1,400. A dual unit fast charger will be about £3,500 and then there’s a massive jump to £22,000 if you want to install a rapid charger. Hardly surprisingly some companies that put in rapid chargers want reimbursement. Yet this is at odds with electric car owners who frequently make the switch to battery power because of promised fuel savings.
The Electric Vehicle Drivers Association (EVDA) claimed that increasing costs for power were in danger of killing the market at a stroke. And in a letter to charging point supplier Chargemaster, the EVDA claimed: “This means that the driver of an extended-range EV with an on-board generator (like the BMW i3 or Vauxhall Ampera) would be better off using petrol.”
The good news for EV drivers is that Ecotricity’s 250 points are free and it’s planning to double that number within the next 18 months. The bad news is that as EV sales boom drivers are likely to find it increasingly difficult to plug into a vacant charger. Philip Gomm from the RAC Foundation said: “In London a lot of charging points are out of action for a lot of the time. To roll out a network of charging points is an immense task and there will be practical problems if the rate of EV take-up continues.
"Two charging points at a motorway services are fine – unless you have four cars wanting to use them. There are only so many cups of coffee you can drink.”
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