Charging an electric car is not the same as filling up a tank of gas. You will find petrol stations wherever there are people. The same does not apply to EV charging points, and it is generally recommended that you install a home charger so you always have a place to plug it in.
However, it is not always possible to get a home charger. If you live in an apartment building, don’t have off-street parking, or have other logistical issues, home chargers are not an option. Fortunately, public chargers are there to fill the void, though they’re far from a perfect solution.
The main benefit of a home charger isn’t just that you can reliably charge your battery. It is also so that you have a place to slowly recharge. Lithium batteries are pretty tricky things, and the faster you try to recharge them, the faster they deteriorate.
A quick DC charger in a public place can potentially charge you to 80% in an hour or two, but in the long run it will be hell for your battery. Because of this, most EV recommendations recommend not using them on a regular basis. Charging on long trips is fine, but quick daily charges are not.
This complicates the public charging problem and can make owning an electric vehicle easily feel like a no-profit situation. But it’s not all bad news.
If you are in the right place, you can only top up publicly
The prospect of not knowing where to charge is no fun, especially when you know you need to plug in a charger that can take several hours to fully charge. Are you sitting there and waiting? Or park somewhere else in the meantime, connect and roll?
These are all questions that need to be answered, and how feasible the options are will depend on your circumstances.
For example, I live within walking distance of about a dozen EV charging stations, about half of which can be charged at comfortably slow 7kW speeds. When I need power quickly, the 50 kW DC chargers are also available. So I can park and just go home to do things that need to be done while my car is charging.
It’s not ideal, and if I could have a charger in my garage, I would. But thanks to some ingenious decisions made by the builders in the early 80s, my garage has no electricity. It’s also in a special garage block about 30 meters from my house so it can’t be wired to my electricity meter.
It doesn’t cost a fortune either
The hidden benefit of home charging is the cost. Once you’ve actually installed the charger, it costs pennies to charge your car – with the added convenience of being your own private charger. You save even more when you can take advantage of grants or other financial incentives that reduce the initial installation costs.
Public chargers are there to make money and you will end up paying more to charge them. But it’s still not particularly expensive.
I’ll pay £ 0.25 ($ 0.35) per kWh on my next charger. So for a 40kWh battery like mine, you’d consider £ 10 ($ 14) for a full charge. That’s almost double the £ 5.60 ($ 7.80) I would pay with a home charger that would cost me £ 0.14 ($ 0.19) for every kWh of electricity I use .
There is a noticeable difference. While not huge, it adds up over time, making the home charger more economical than the public one. However, my point here is that charging from home isn’t overly expensive, even if other chargers in my area typically cost five to 10p more per kWh.
For comparison, my girlfriend’s car holds about 45 gallons of fuel and costs about 45 pounds ($ 63) to fill it up completely. It’s twice the distance, about 300 miles to my Nissan Leaf’s 150, but it sends a lot more. Although this comparison will depend on how much fuel is in your area, UK fuel is taxed quite heavily.
The only thing to watch out for with public EV chargers are the hidden fees. Some chargers have an activation fee that is added to your total. Others demand you hang out too long.
My local chargers give you four hours of free parking. After that, you’ll have to pay £ 5 for every additional hour you stay connected. Meanwhile, the petrol station charger that I charged halfway through my 250 mile round trip to my brother’s place The wedding is £ 10 if you stay longer than 90 minutes. That was a DC quick charger. So if someone was still there after 90 minutes, they definitely deserved to be fined for it.
On the other hand, some public chargers are completely free and have no visible restrictions. There have been several times I’ve drove to a free charger (no less at the grocery store) and found the same unattended delivery van plugged in.
But not everyone is like me
I have no illusions about how privileged my position is. I live on the outskirts of the suburbs, about an hour outside of London. Last year I happened to move to an area that is remarkably well served by EV charging points.
In fact, I live very close to the regional headquarters of a company that deals specifically with EV chargers. Of course, they have a pretty large number of charging points that are open to the public.
Situations like mine are rare and I’m lucky enough not to have a lot of people around so the competition for an EV charger is pretty low. My old home was only five miles away and not only was it near impossible to park on the street there, but all of the local EV chargers were in private parking lots that would charge you a fortune just to get in.
Owning an EV would have been impossible back then. It wouldn’t have been easy to own a normal car that runs on gasoline.
I can imagine that many people will have limited options in similar circumstances, especially if they live in cities where space is limited and there is not much incentive to give EV drivers a place to safely charge their cars.
A problem with a pretty simple solution
That could easily be enough to discourage people from buying an electric vehicle, a less than ideal result. With many governments setting a timetable for the death of the internal combustion engine, it is important that people start thinking about the future.
The problem is not a lack of charging infrastructure. The problem is that the charging infrastructure needs to grow, adapt and make sure there are convenient options for people who cannot install chargers for their home. Fortunately, this shouldn’t be a particularly difficult problem to solve.
Some naysayers might argue that there is a vicious circle of people who don’t want to buy electric vehicles because of insufficient charging infrastructure, resulting in a lack of charging infrastructure as only a handful of people own electric vehicles.
Really, it’s the opposite. The acceptance of electric vehicles has increased in the western world. In the US, EV sales accounted for 1.9% of all auto sales in 2020, and there are forecasts that they could reach 2.5% this year. In 2020, EV sales in the UK rose 185%, although new registrations fell to their lowest level in 30 years.
So in reality we should be seeing more of a positive feedback loop. The more EV owners there are, the more charging points are likely to show up in response. After all, there are so many different companies that offer EV charging solutions and they are going to want to compete for all of that inbound business.
However, the solution is more than just more chargers. We also need various chargers that can be retrospectively built into existing street plans and that ideally do not require massive construction work.
Fortunately, there are possible options out there. Most exciting is the prospect of converting street lights into EV charging stations. Not only are street lights pretty common, especially in urban areas, but they’re usually within easy reach of the street as well. If a car can legally park nearby, there is no technological reason why these couldn’t be installed on a larger scale.
As always, it will come down to the cost of whether local governments make the initial investment or the charging companies do it themselves to recoup the cost of charging. In any case, this will be another barrier to the widespread availability of charging stations.
Bottom line
Convenient charging is one of the main issues EV owners face, be it the fact that charging takes significantly longer than filling up a tank of fuel or off-street parking is a luxury for many car owners.
However, potential EV owners shouldn’t be put off by the fact that a charger isn’t within range. As I’ve found, it’s possible to stick to public chargers and get excited about them. Yes, it costs more to use public chargers and I don’t have to worry about the daily commute, but it is possible.
Charging your EV outside of the home is all about the circumstances and the type of infrastructure around you. You need to do your research before committing to buying an electric vehicle, including making sure you can easily and safely charge your car.
Finding chargers for electric cars isn’t particularly difficult. Numerous services have emerged over the years to help people find chargers around the world. At the very least, you can search for something as simple as “car chargers” on Google or Apple Maps and see what they can find near you. Note, however, that no single service shows everything you need to see, which means you need to do a bit of digging.
Most importantly, you check each public charging station yourself. Make sure it is publicly available and look for any obvious restrictions and cost information. If public chargers near your home are unusable or far too expensive, consider putting an electric vehicle on hold until something changes.
And things will change. It may only take a while, and there is no point in making your life difficult in the meantime.
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