[LINK] All German petrol stations must offer electric car charging

Paul Brooks pbrooks-link at layer10.com.au
Fri Jun 12 01:52:09 AEST 2020


On 11/06/2020 1:20 pm, David Lochrin wrote:
>
> The other thing which would be useful is an index of charging points.  One doesn't want to run out of charge while driving around looking for one.

ALmost every car GPS sat-nav system - and portable third-party (Navman/Garmin/phone
with Google Maps) already has 'fuel stations' and 'car parks' as points-of-interest
categories, and you can press a few buttons to be directed to the nearest one already.
Adding a flag for 'PEV charger' is trivial. Teslas have the index of charging stations
already built into the nav system I believe, and its updated over-the-air in much the
same way the car software is, so is continually up-to-date much like Google maps is.
So this is a non-issue.

But the real value in 'charging points' is to charge at home. or at work. or at the
shops - or anywhere you are stopped for many hours at a time. Seriously, installing
charger points at current petrol stations is stupid. We only have so many petrol
stations on every corner because its dangerous and infeasible for everyone to have a
fuel store at home and fill the tank overnight or in the morning before leaving. If
you could guarantee that every time you reversed down your driveway your fuel tank was
full to the top, you would pretty much never ever pull into a petrol station in a
suburban area - at worst you might need a topup on a long highway drive to another
city/town, when you stop for a meal, a coffee and a driver-change, or you charge up at
your overnight accomodation.

Most EVs have a range of several hundred kilometres in a charge - the ones I've looked
at, I can drive from Sydney to Newcastle and back again without charging in the
middle. For many cars, several hundred kilometres means charging overnight no more
than once a week. You leave your driveway in the morning with the charge full, you
return home, plug in, after driving right by all those lonely fuel stations losing
patronage and selling more pies and softdrink than fuel. If you do need to charge,
they are the last place you would want to go to, because you need 15 mins to a couple
of hours to push in a decent charge to make stopping worthwhile, and theres nothing
else to do at those places. To me, suburban fuel stations are dodos, and we will
quickly find alternative uses for all those corner real-estate blocks when they go
broke from disuse. Putting charger-points at those locations is nuts.

Paul


>
> David Lochrin
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