A friend of mine said that "most cars spend 23 hours per day parked, and public charging is about doing the charging in the 24th hour". Not sure the 23 is a real number though.
What was their point exactly? At-home charging is about doing it in the “23 hours” and the 24th hour thing applies to ICE vehicles too. Are they saying to not do public charging if you can? If so, I agree - at home charging is the way to go.
When I add up the 5 minutes I spent a week filling up my diesel I get over 4/hours a year. I’ve not used a public charger for months. I’ll probably save time this year. Plug in at night, unplug in the morning.
We also had a two week period of sun-zero temperatures with my neighbours standing and scraping their windscreen and windows. My car was automatically pre-heated and defrosted on a schedule. More time saved.
If you do lots of long journeys I could definitely see public charging being an issue, especially for non-Teslas. We need lots more fast chargers but in my country they seem hell-bent in building lots of slow ones.
His point was that pushing more work into the few busy per cent of time is making things unnecessarily difficult. He was talking about fast charging, which is needed if you want to charge during the 5% of the time when you're in a hurry, see?
I see. Depends very much on the usage pattern. Since all my charging is done at home the thought of standing in a forecourt in winter weather just to spend 4x as much isn’t something I’d rush back to. But if I did more than 200 miles per day the thought of trying to use public chargers would change that.
If you did 200miles per day, that sounds like you'd be a professional, and in that case, I suspect that your employer would try to have the charging done during your mandatory rest time. The charging would need to be finished before the rest time ends. Fast enough, not fast.
It’s only a few seconds (maybe 7?) and it’s done by the time my son is in/out of his car seat so it’s not really extra time. Just like charging on a long trip - if you’re eating etc it’s not really extra.
but home charging is typically during hours where renewable output is at its lowest. would be amazing if/when all EVs are automatically grid-connected when not in motion. instead of expensive centralized energy storage in giant megapacks, we have low-cost (but stochastic) decentralized storage that is available when renewable generation is at its peak.
(Note it was a wind storm last night for the whole of the UK)
The electricity company charge my car overnight on a schedule that they set. They charge in 30 minute chunks, stopping and starting the charge multiple times to optimise the network.
