EU passes law to blanket highways with fast EV chargers by 2025::The chargers must be placed every 60km (37mi) and allow ad-hoc payment by card or contactless device without subscriptions.
One of the major reasons people shy away from EV is the range. This is great to bring more people to EVs.
However, what policies is EU passing to improve the network of public transport such as buses, trams, and trains?
This is just one area of the overall fit for 55 and general EU plans. Public transport is already being looked at under different working groups (e.g. https://rail-research.europa.eu/about-europes-rail/).
The aim of the overall plan look very promising. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/green-deal/fit-for-55-the-eu-plan-for-a-green-transition/
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There are chargers now that provide 20km of range for every 60 seconds your car is plugged in.
So if you stretch your legs, get a bite to eat, go to the toilet, etc you’ve added enough range to give your car another five hours of range.
And if those chargers are every 60km along the highway… then you’ll be able to stop when it’s convenient for you. That’s an opportunity to stop every 30 minutes.
But the reality is most people will charger their EV while they’re at home or at work. And therefore it will just always be full, you will only ever need to stop on long road trips. Realistically, how many times a year do you go on a road trip? Once? Twice? Not at all?
That does kinda worry me. If I’m on a road trip, I don’t want to wait while the guy ahead of me stretches his legs and grabs a bite to eat before I can even start charging.
It’d be fine if there were more home charging outlets. If you have to rely on a fast charging station, you should not get an EV.
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“jUsT uSe sTrEeT cHaRgErS”. I had a conversation like this here a while back. That person just didn’t accept that no, the city won’t spend millions of Euros on street chargers for apartment dwellers.
If there is demand and they can make money off of them, they absolutely will.
no, cities will send millions on street chargers if there is a demand for them,
My city can’t be assed with proper bike lanes, who do you think will pay for those chargers? In fact, who will pay for those EU mandated ones?
That’s the fun part, it will come out of the cities budget.
and I’m sorry that you have your NIMBYism, but sometimes the needs of the many trumps the wants of the few
Agreed. There needs to be a combination of incentives for building owners and also more basic level 1 street chargers (although a type F outlet is twice the charge of the lowest level 1 US charger). They could easily be integrated into parking meters. Those would give you about 10km/h. Not huge but if you are parking for the night or are parking on the street for work, that is enough during an 8 hour stretch.
Too many people are stuck on the idea of having to go to a specific location to get fuel. Like if you had a fuel pump outside your house that cost 1/5 as much as at a station, would you ever fuel up at a gas station? Or say you had one at a parking meter down the block that was much cheaper, how often should you go to a station? Almost never.
A Tesla can supercharge from 10 to 90 in about 30 minutes if you tell it to pre-heat the battery while* driving. If you’re going 120 on the highway I’m assuming you should get ~400-500 out of it ( depending on how heavily you’re loaded and how much that impacts your aerodynamics ).
I can’t say for non-tesla cars as I’ve not driven one before.
When charging an EV it seems the last 10% takes longer than the first 90. The more throughput the car cam take the faster it will charge. Unfortunately there’s car companies ( like Skoda ) who sell higher charge throughputs separately. I think teslas model 3 can take around 150kw?
I’m not sure on the exact terms( like kw ). I always get them mixed up. Sorry if it doesn’t make sense
Yeah, the charging curve is very tilted. From 0-20%, a Tesla will do 250+ kW, so that only takes a couple of minutes. Then the power slowly tapers off, so your typical motorway charging session will be from 6 % to 70 %, and take around 22 minutes.
Such a charging session will typically yield another 2-2.5 hours of driving at 120 km/h, depending on model and conditions.
I highly recommend abetterrouteplanner if you want to play around with very accurate travel planning for almost any EV on the market.
AFAIK it’s usually pretty fast up to about 80%. It’s only slow when the battery voltage is close to the maximum.
When charging an EV it seems the last 10% takes longer than the first 90
It has to do with a li-ion battery’s charging curve. In the main phase of charging the charger runs in what’s called constant current mode. State of charge and charge time are linearly proportional. When the battery gets to terminal voltage (about 90% charge) the charger runs in constant voltage mode where current falls off as the battery approaches full charge. You can save time and skip CV mode if you don’t need that last 10%.
People worry about range too much. Over 95% of trips are under 50 miles and less 1% are over 100 miles in the US. I imagine Europeans cover even less distance on average. Every new EV out there will be able to cover 99% of trips. Most newer EVs have at least a 250 mile range which you should probably stop and take a break in that time period anyway.
In the US, our problem is number of home chargers is horrible. A level 1 charger will get you 35-40 mile range each day. That would be perfectly fine for people in apartments and most people in general. Apartment buildings and condos largely do not even have that though. About 14% of people live in apartments and about 5% live in condos. That means a large chunk of the population does not have easy access to charging. A little over a third of Americans rent (houses and apartments). There is not much incentive for am owner to install a level 1 charger let alone install a 240v outlet. That means those people will currently have to give DC fast charging stations. Those are much more expensive, take a long time, and because Electrify America was only done to satisfy VW’s legal requirement, many are purely maintained and broken.
That situation is even worse in Europe because there is a higher percentage of people living in flats at about 46%.
With the 99% number If you drive every day that’s still 3-4 trips a year when your car will be unable to get you to where you want to go. And with electric cars still being very expensive that is not a good look when a much cheaper ICE vehicle has essentially no such limitation.
It doesn’t help that I have zero trust in the charging infrastructure in Europe at the moment, so completing this proposal is actually what would make electric cars fully viable in my eyes.
Obviously they are already great if you have 2 vehicles in a household where one can complete the longer trips with ease. You really get to enjoy the many upsides during your daily commute where range isn’t really a factor.
You won’t be unable to go, you’ll just have a stopover after 300 miles. You know, like you normally would, anyways.
99% are under 100 miles (161km) . Most EVs have a range of at least 250 miles (~400km). Even if you are going more than that, you are not stuck on the side of the road. You just have to find your way to a DC fast charge station and hang out for a half our while your car charges. ICE vehicles also have a range limitation. As for cost, yes, EVs are pricier but are cheaper to operate (electricity is cheaper than gas and maintenance is much cheaper) and are cost equivalent after 6-7 years compared to an ICE.
As for trust in the infrastructure in Europe, I can’t speak to that. It just got much better here in the US because most auto companies decided on Tesla’s plug as the standard so now all of those are open to most cars. Before that, you were likely using an Electrify America station. VW was required to build those for chatting emissions tests and they have invested very little in maintenance.
The EU is likely better, to be honest. From what I can find, there are over twice the amount of fast charge stations in the EU compared to the US.
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2022/trends-in-charging-infrastructure
You just have to find your way to a DC fast charge station and hang out for a half our while your car charges.
You make it sound like DC fast chargers are everywhere, when they most certainly are not.
In the EU which has twice the number that the US does? You can certainly find one within 400 km. In the US it is certainly more difficult if you are off the beaten path but if you are going down pretty much any interstate, you will find one. On my way to my parents house 225 miles away in BFE Washington, for instance, there are four cities spread out along the way that have multiple DC fast charge stations. None of those cities is over 30k people and only one of them is on an interstate.
Regarding the range problem, that is my personal conspiracy theory. It makes a lot of sense but no way that I or anyone can ever prove it.
Theory: Range was never a real problem and car manufacturers seeded that topic to journalists/press, as the companies already had the solution available before communicating the problem.
More range is done with a larger batteries, usually higher quality cells/chemicals. So making the car bigger and more expensive. That’s what manufacturers desire to do and sell anyways.
It never was or is a real problem. They can just charge the customers more and it’s solved.
As I’ve already seen posted, the real problem that cannot be easily solved is the charging time. Right now I ‘charge’ 0% to 100% in 1-2 minutes. No preparation, no special fuel, no special fees or subscriptions, no fuel stations only for specific brands, no apps, summer or winter same 1-2 min, no strain on the fuel tank by filling fast, sometimes waiting lines at the stations but they move quickly with 1-2 min per vehicle.
I don’t see battery or charging tech anywhere close to that in the next 5, 10 or even 20 years.
That’s hard to advance, with decades of research behind us and decades ahead, so car manufacturers focus on their favorite topic: range, where they can just throw their customers money at to solve it immediately.
I think the bigger societal problem is that people need to start thinking differently of how charging works. It won’t and doesn’t need to work like refueling.
What I mean is, nobody would refuel every day at the beginning of their 10km commute. What they’ll do is commute for 2 weeks, and when the car is empty they’ll refuel and then continue on their way.
With EVs, this can be different. Once chargers (and not even fast chargers) are placed on every major location, you don’t need to go 0-100% in 99% of the cases. Getting groceries? Charge at the store for 30mins Going to the gym? Charge there for an hour or two Going out for dinner? Charge for 3h
The car doesn’t need to go empty all the way. Obviously you can’t do that with the current infrastructure, but with enough effort, that’s easily achievable.
Those are various ideas regarding charging problematic.
I’m still on the range topic that people apparently see as the main problem with EVs but I don’t. I’d be even fine with less range than the current top models offer.
Adding an extra step for every time I stop at whatever location is a big ask. Personally, those little tasks wreck havoc with my executive disfunction disorder.
Truthfully, the range is only for long trips. Most commuting will be within normal operating ranges of EVs.
But it does need to be solved in some manner since it’s not uncommon for people to take road trips, even fairly short ones.
Even that is wrong for the most part. People are at home for generally at least 10 hours. How many people would go anywhere to fuel up if they had a pump at their home? A standard type F outlet will get you about a 10km charge per hour. That is 80-100km per day which will fully recharge most people each day. If you go farther than that one of those days? Chances are you will be fully charged the following day.
That is all continent on those shower chargers being decently available for overnight parking though. That will be something that needs to be worked on.
The issue with fast chargers is that they are much more expensive (both to install and for the customer) and tougher on the grid due to their quick, large power draw. They are fine for the less than 1% of time you are going over 400km but ideally not needed much outside of that. But there will be a transitionary period where there is not that lower speed charging everywhere and people will get EVs while having to rely on those chargers. Hopefully governments can provide the right incentives and legislation that gets things to where they need to be.
Absolutely. But I specifically didn’t mention that because it doesn’t apply to everyone. Lots of people living in apartments don’t have an outlet on their parking spot. But if you have, EVs are arguably more convenient than combustion cars already.
Range was definitely a major problem for early adopters - because at the time there weren’t many places you could charge the car.
And now that it’s set in everyone’s mind, it continues to be talked about.
I know you mean state as in country, but my state (Ohio) is literally installing millions of dollars worth of charging stations all over.
Ohio is roughly the size of a small-ish EU country, with roughly the population of Belgium.
I don’t see battery or charging tech anywhere close to that in the next 5, 10 or even 20 years.
Not sure how viable they are, but what about swappable batteries? Leave your battery at the station, move on with a fresh one.
Not really viable - the battery is often heavier than the rest of the car, more expensive than the the rest of the car, and structurally integral to the rest of the car. It’s more like “swapping cars” than swapping batteries.
It might make sense for special niches like trucking… but in that case it’d really make more sense to just swap the trailer to a different truck. Or use a train with batteries on one or two of the carriages, or run a power line along the track to power the motors, or use hydrogen (which has a power to weight ration that makes diesel look terrible), or use a wind/solar (not everything needs to arrive quickly, and on the ocean you don’t need to worry about slow vehicles holding up traffic).
Technically, it can be done, but realistically swapping is only an option on motorcycles (those batteries are exponentially smaller and lighter and cheaper, because they get more range by not having to haul a massive battery ever time you leave a traffic light).
Tesla looked into that and did not really see it as viable for consumer vehicles.
If solid state batteries can get past their longevity issue, getting 500-600km range in 10 minutes will be possible. Toyota claims to be working on a battery that can charge twice that in 10 minutes that is supposed to be available by 2028. But they also claimed to be working on one that would have been commercially available in 2021. Clearly that did not happen.
If longevity is an issue that can’t be bypassed, it might make sense to have a car that has a smaller standard lithium ion battery that can go 75 km and then a solid state that is able to go 300-400 km. The lithium ion battery would cover over 95% of trips but when longer range is needed along with faster charge time, the solid state could be used. That would allow for less wear on the solid state while also minimizing range anxiety and long range charge time
Seriously. Do people really think EVs will save us from climate change? They are hardly good for the environment. There’s already a sustainable EV, it’s called a train.
And don’t get me started on electrical scooters… How is that more sustainable than a bike…
Although I like big public transportation options, cars are also awesome and won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. I’d rather have electric cars than gas cars as we can generate renewable electricity but not renewable gas.
I’ve seen your argument a few times now. In San Francisco, some folk are protesting self driving cars with cones because they want more public transportation infrastructure. Again, I’m sympathetic—I love public infrastructure. But improving public transportation doesn’t have to be antithetical to EVs.
the problem with cars is still like 30-50% of usable area is converted into roads and parking, which means things are 30-50% further apart, which means it takes at least 30%+ longer for people to complete a transportation loop, which creates 30%+ more traffic while putting more people out of walking distance.
This compounding effect of parking really means cities without alternatives to cars result in higher housing costs, more wasted space, and more congestion than cities with less dedicated car infrastructure, and it raises agricultural prices as farmers compete with suburbs for land.
Its one of the deep inefficiencies of the american “cars only” system of transit.
Edit: This isnt even getting into things like the safe area of travel for kids has been reduced by like 95% from like 100 years ago and the many other problems resulting from society having to sacrifice monstrous amounts of safety and community protections to make cars just barely work in most cities.
What about sustainable fuels for ICEs? I know little about them but isn’t that a more reasonable option due to it being able to be used on current cars?
The problem with sustainable fuels is that they also cost a lot of resources. Those resources can come from farm land that could be put to better use instead. The energy required to create these alternative fuels also has to come from somewhere, which usually isn’t mostly renewable either.
Furthermore the biofuels and efuels may be better for CO2 emissions, but still dump a lot of pollution in the air.
Until people start to rely less on their cars, the uptick of EV’s will lessen fossil fuel usage. For many people car sharing would also be a good option for when they need a car. That cuts down on resource usage.
The best EV’s in my opinion are human/electric hybrids, aka electric bicycles. They help people choose a bicycle over another motorized form of transportation, because it’s often just a convenient and cheap option that gets you from where you are to where you want to go, when you want to go there… Something public transport isn’t very good at outside cities, unless combined with (e)bikes or scooters for example for the last miles.
It is not in any way a more reasonable option. Mass-produced energy is always going to be cleaner and more efficient than “alternative fuels” - which don’t actually exist at present.
Not sure how someone can think they have a leg to stand on being opposed to EVs
E-Scooters are much better in conjunction with public transit as they take up much less space and are easier to take up steps to the platform.
As such they are a good personal transportation option to solve the ‘last mile’.
I do however think that public, shared E-Scooters are a big nuicance to a citys center especially
a lot of the shared E-Scotter thing is local cities not wanting them to exist in the first place, replace a parking spot every once in a while with a scooter collection point and watch as they almost completely disappear from the side of the road, we give the literally worse in every aspect cars their own dedicated infrastructure that is choking our cities, but a scooter? no, that’s untenable…
I don’t have anything against trains, but our rail network is really limited.
If I want to go from Barcelona to Madrid, it’s easy and actually more convenient than flying albeit more expensive.
But if I want to take my kids to go and see the cool medieval castle in the mountains? There’s no train going anywhere near there.
In places that don’t have EV chargers currently, will it be the state’s responsibility to install them?
On Finland’s highways highlighted on the ball in that article, there are a lot of existing gas stations that have EV chargers. But there can easily be more than a 60km gap, especially the further north you go. Is it down to the state, local municipality, or EU to fund it?
Furthermore, if a commercial provider, like a gas station shuts down, would some authority be required to at least keep the EV chargers running?
How is the 60km distance calculated? From existing EV chargers? If a gas station closes, the measuring point to/from the next/previous EV charger will change.
I can’t imagine the state will want to install EV chargers every 60km in addition to the ones already provided by commercial enterprises such as gas stations. Will they be required to?
It says in the article ‘Lightly trafficked roads or locations that just don’t make socio-economic sense can be excluded from the requirement’ for the comprehensive network.
It’ll be up to each country how they decide to implement it. In some countries the core roads are managed by a central government agency so they would need to arrange it. In others it is the the local municipalities or privatised. Some countries will offer to private companies. Others will provide it themselves. The governments would be ultimately responsible but Im sure they can manage this given they already have responsibilities about maintaining the roads and rest areas. In the worst case they might have to pay for some infrastructure themselves but can make it back with the charges.
Infrastructure is a big consideration that is sort of glossed over by governments enacting legislation to force the adoption of electric cars. When gas powered cars initially came about, law makers and manufactures had to go to some lengths to set up an infrastructure for fuel delivery and accessibility. It wasn’t just about making the cars, a whole system had to be deployed.
Not much thought about infrastructure has gone into the adoption of electric cars. It could easily end up being a situation where there’s too many cars and not enough support. The EU is already thinking ahead, but I think its likely the USA will get caught with their pants down.
For example California has already enacted legislation forcing all new cars to electric after 2035, but has not passed any legislation about infrastructure for them. There are over thirty million privately registered cars in California. You need places to charge all of them and support the power demand for it. The power grid in its current state would not be able to do it. They already have problems when existing demand gets too high. So it’s not going to be a small issue by any means.
It’s up to the state to figure out details like that.
If a state does install a charger, they might pass a local law that makes it illegal for commercial chargers to operate nearby - which would ensure the state charger doesn’t cost tax payers any money (because a good charger with no competition will run at a profit).
I’m not saying states will do that, but they have the option. The only thing that matters is that there is a charger available, and at competitive prices. I can’t imagine why the state would bother though, because again chargers are profitable and commercial enterprises will want to install them.
Realistically the only thing that might stop a charger from being installed along a stretch of highway is if the government doesn’t allow it due to zoning issues/etc. This law will force governments to ensure there is appropriately zoned land somewhere along the highway.
I know you mean state as in country, but my state (Ohio) is literally installing millions of dollars worth of charging stations all over our highways.
Ohio is roughly the size of a small-ish EU country, with roughly the population of Belgium.
This is great, and ambitious.
I wish it was more ambitious with a fatter timeline.
I’d rather see passive charging lanes added by 2030 or something.
But again, this is great.
Charging lanes are still a pipe dream as long as inductive charging wastes about 1/3 of energy used.
Swhat I’m saying! Like, adding this many charging stations is both necessary and wasteful. We need a better solution in general.
I think it would be much cheaper if there was a universal standard for car batteries that could then be replaced for charged ones at charging stations
I guess it will be great in the wealthier countries. Here in Spain the reason EV’s are incredibly rare is simply the cost.
And rather than making them more affordable the Government just makes ICE vehicles more expensive to use, which is almost a regressive tax on those too poor to afford an EV. Especially given in many areas it’s not really optional given public transport may be unreliable or non-existent.
you could elect people who will expand public transport… we did it, went from 4 buses a day to an hourly schedule, middle Mosel region Germany, come by our wine is better =P
I lived in Germany for some months in University.
The trains there are amazing, it really feels like you can get just about anywhere by train. In Spain, we have good connections between major cities but you can’t really use them to go on day-trips to places like the castles or the salt mines or whatever.
I’d love to have an electric car, but yeah, shortage of charging stations in the USA and also they’re more expensive. Though what I’m paying in gasoline would offset that an amount. Also cheaper maintenance (other than replacing the battery). No problem for me on daily driving range, but doing a long trip with one would require some planning.
From what I understand, the car will help you plan your trip with charging stations along the way. At least, that’s what Teslas do.
Even if you don’t have a Tesla there are a handful of apps out there that will help.
Now if we could get everyone on the same stupid plug - but thats a different conversation.
I find it crazy that the plug hasn’t been defined and made universal. They mandated USB-C, I’m sure they can figure out something for car chargers.
For me it’s the cost and how much CO2 is created making batteries. They are so expensive when compared to ICE vehicles and in order to offset the CO2 footprint from the manufacturing process, you have to drive a lot to break even and I don’t drive a lot. Once they address those 2 main issues, I’ll get one.
how much CO2 is created making batteries.
That’s actually an important consideration. I think there might be a failure to understand the overall environmental impact of forcing all cars to electric.
80% of power stations in the USA use fossil fuels to generate power. However power plants are much more efficient than IC engines. Powerplants can be as much as 50% efficient and an electric car can be as much as 80% efficient. End to end efficiency is around 40%, but considering 20% of power stations don’t burn fuel let’s make that 50% efficient.
So around half of the fuel consumed to power an electric car goes to waste. An IC powered car is around 20% efficient so 80% of the fuel consumed goes to waste. An electric car wastes less, but it’s not an enormous amount, a waste of 50% versus 80%.
Then there’s the environmental impact of producing and disposing of batteries. An electric car battery contains around a thousand pounds of materials and is industrially intensive to produce. I don’t know the numbers as far as how much pollution is created in making batteries and how much environmental impact there is in materials, but were talking about a huge number of cars in the USA, around 300 million which equates to around 300 billion pounds of batteries. That’s definitely going to leave a mark.
There’s some other considerations like electric cars consume tires faster because they’re heavier. Also an amount of pollution is created to refine gasoline which is not required for power plants that use coal or natural gas.
At this point I don’t think there’s a huge advantage in electric over gasoline in terms of environment impact. However gas will always present the problems it does at the level it does. As power generation relies less on fossil fuels and as battery tech improves the benefits could be dramatic. So it’s more a matter of poising ourselves for future tech rather than an immediate fix.
Even if you are charging with 100% coal power, an EV breaks even around 85k miles. With renewable energy, it is less than half that.
Used batteries are starting to be recycled into energy storage for the grid. A battery at 80% (after like 300k miles BTW) is still absolutely amazing for energy density compared to our other methods of storage.
Tires do wear out faster but pretty much nothing else does. There are very few other parts to replace compared to an ICE. Their maintenance cost is a fraction of an ICE. No real oil changes. No belts breaking. No spark plug replacements. Very little brake replacement. The entire life cycle of an EV uses significantly less CO2 than a comparable ICE.
Where will solar panels and wind turbines for powering those chargers be located at?
Not in Bavaria, that’s for sure!
Nuclear a power, when done right, is highly efficient.
If only we had tons of space on top of things we already need everywhere people live and work… and everyone knows that windmills create a 250 m exclusion zone around them that you can’t do anything in anymore, and my god we really don’t need to start shading our crops because the direct sunlight is starting to dry them out because of a constant record in temps every year…
If only there were people who would do some research on this stuff…
but in all reality there really is plenty of space for solar panels, wind turbines, etc… (unless you are the Holy Sea, San Marino, Lichtenstein, etc…) and we are even expanding chemical storage of energy in Europe now (hydrogen + synth gas)
Another good move EU!!
Anyone know how the price of electricity from these chargers compares to prices in the home?
I just wonder about possible non-car use-cases. E.g. someone is off the grid and they use a cargo cycle to bring batteries¹ to one of these charging stations. Will they be fleeced on price, or are there subsidies that could perhaps make the cost lower than household electric?
① asking w.r.t. both lead-acid batteries and li-ion, though I suspect these chargers would be li-ion only.
Currently these charge points cost more than at home, and i believe it will stay this way. There is more overhead and more companies connected to the highway chargers so more people looking to make a profit. There is also the fact that currently ( and thats what these laws want to change ), you need some kind of subscription to use these public chargers, so even more costs :)
Dont get me wrong though, its not like public charging is like 2€/kW vs 0.35kW at home, but there is like a 10c/kW difference
