Status-Q

If I had a farm, I’d want one of these. Actually, I don’t have a farm, but I still want one of these.

As regular readers will know, a couple of weeks ago I took my electric car to the Lake District with my friend Hap. I go there fairly regularly, but this was the first time since I got the i3, and I was wondering how it would cope. Charging points are fairly scarce there, and the gradients very different from its normal home in East Anglia. Would we get stranded somewhere on the Whinlatter Pass?

In fact, I needn’t have worried. Our charming B&B in Grasmere let us plug in each night, and even though we did a fair bit of driving around, we always came back at the end of the day with more than 50% charge left. In truth, though you can spend a lot of time driving there, the distances are usually fairly small because so much of it is below 30mph (something which also helps the efficiency!) The steep uphill slopes swallow battery but this is offset somewhat by the regenerative braking on the steep downhill ones.

What I hadn’t expected was just what a delight the car was to drive there! This was partly because creeping down valleys and winding over mountain passes is much more pleasing in an almost-silent vehicle (though you do need to watch out for walkers in the middle of the road who haven’t heard you coming). It was partly because it loves the corners, as a BMW should. And it was partly because the big windows and high driving position gave such a good view of the landscape.

But it was mostly because of what i3 owners call the ‘single-pedal driving’: the fact that the regenerative braking kicks in as you lift your foot off the accelerator, meaning that under normal circumstances you very rarely need to use the brakes. If you know the Lakes, you’ll know there are many roads where, in a normal car, you need to move your foot from accelerator to brake on every corner. You need to change gear around every second bend. I, on the other hand, was just gliding around the corners and up and down the hills with my foot on the one pedal. No gear changes (I don’t have a gearbox, even an automatic one). No sound of straining engines, because it doesn’t make any sounds. No need to engage low gear for engine braking on the steep slopes, because engine braking is what I do all the time. I even enjoyed the long descents, because they recharged my battery.

No, all in all, I spent a lot of time grinning as we drove from Grasmere to Borrowdale, from Great Langdale to Coniston, from Tilberthwaite to Ambleside. It’s the best place to drive this car, and it is certainly the best car I’ve ever driven there.

Early yesterday morning, Richard and I set off to drive from Cambridge to Sheffield for a business meeting — my first such trip in my electric car. It’s 260 miles there and back, and I’ve done longer journeys, but this was the first where professional courtesy was contingent on the state of the UK charging network.

Fortunately, we had a perfect run, charging six times without delay, problem or queueing. And if you’re thinking that six is rather a large number for that length of trip, you’d be right, and we could have done it in fewer stops. But there are different approaches to recharging your car. I decided to go for lots of quick partial charges (each typically a 15-20 min stop) because the rate at which the batteries charge slows down noticeably as they fill up: on these ‘rapid’ chargers at motorway service stations, it’s quicker to charge from 0%-80% than it is from 80%-100%, but you still get the same miles-per-percent. Also, I hadn’t visited any of these locations before, so I was curious to see more of them, and also didn’t know what to expect in terms of congestion. Sub-zero temperatures also reduce your range significantly if you want to keep your toes warm!

The upshot is that a journey like this, even when things are going perfectly, took about an hour longer in each direction than it would have done if we were burning dinosaurs. Richard was a trooper and raised no objection to getting up for a six o’clock departure. For some people, that would be unacceptable. Personally, I find I rather like it – I would normally stop at least once en route anyway and I suspect that getting out and stretching my legs every 40 mins or so is very beneficial from a safety point of view. I certainly arrive feeling more relaxed than in the old days. The extra time you spend on occasional long journeys is offset by the fact that I never have to visit petrol stations during the week. And it’s still much quicker than using public transport.

It’s also much cheaper. Many non EV-owners don’t realise that a significant proportion of public chargers are free to use, including the Ecotricity ones found at many service stations. This means that the ‘fuel’ cost to get the two of us from Cambridge to Sheffield and back yesterday was around £2.50, since we only paid for the charge I did at home before we set off.

But that’s about to change. In a podcast this week the founder of Ecotricity announced that they would start charging for charging in ‘a couple of months’. This comes as no surprise: we knew the free ride couldn’t last forever. Some welcome it, because the reliability of the network should improve when out-of-action chargers mean a loss of revenue. Hopefully the numbers of charging stations will also increase, and it’s less likely that the ‘pumps’ will be blocked by casual chargers, or those with plug-in hybrids, who don’t really need it, leaving more of them free for those with pure electric vehicles, who do.

But we’re all wondering what Ecotricity’s pricing will be. They are an honourable company with good motives, and are unlikely to resort to excessive profiteering from their effective monopoly on much of the UK’s motorway network. On the other hand, there are large chunks of the country that they don’t cover — try going south of Gatwick, for example — and the rapid chargers available in those areas from other companies are often selling their electricity with a 5x markup, such that petrol is a cheaper alternative. Even at those rates, it would take a long time to recoup the tens of thousands of pounds needed for a 50kW rapid charger installation. In due course, as EV ownership and awareness increases, and competition starts to become more real, the financials will change. After all – installing a petrol station is outrageously more expensive, but you can be sure of a flow of regular customers throughout the day. Even if electricity at the service station proves more expensive than petrol, most people do 90-95% of their charging at home or work, so the benefits of going electric are still substantial.

I’m in the fortunate position of having an electric car with a ‘range extender’: a small 650cc generator in the back that allows me to double my electric range using a couple of gallons of fuel. So Richard and I could have gone from Cambridge to Sheffield using 50% electricity from home and 50% petrol. We were able to charge at our destination, so we could have done the same on the way home. This would have been faster, though we wouldn’t have felt quite so smug about our lack of CO2 emissions, or the fact that the whole trip cost us less than one of the lattes we consumed on the way, though it might still have cost us less than the sum total of all our lattes!

My somewhat pricey BMW is, however, the only car on sale in the UK at the moment which falls into this mostly-electric-with-a-little-bit-of-petrol category. Part of the reason I bought it was because it was so perfect for riding out this transition that we’re going through. Those who own, or sell, pure-electric vehicles will be watching the Ecotricity prices with rather more skin in the game.

I think it’s vital that the other key part of our successful trip yesterday: the fact that there was a space available immediately at every charge point we visited, continues to be the norm, until they are much less of a scarcity or the range of affordable electric vehicles increases substantially. That means that companies will probably continue to need substantial government incentives to keep installing them ahead of the growth in electric vehicle sales, because it’s going to be hard to pay for them simply by charging for electricity in the short term. In the long term, however, such an investment will definitely be worth it for the nation.

We drive in interesting times.

Six years. Not long after the next general election. That’s the estimate as to when electric cars will become cheaper than their petrol-powered predecessors, from a Bloomberg report quoted by Wired in ‘The Electric Car Revolution Is Now Scheduled for 2022‘. Worth a read.

The estimate makes certain assumptions about continued government support etc, so it may be out by a few years, but the principle is right.

One of the things I love about my car is the simplicity – I have no gearbox, no exhaust system, no oil sump, no cambelt, tappets, head gaskets or piston rings. Mine is also made mostly of aluminium and carbon fibre, so rusting shouldn’t be an issue.

This relative simplicity means that electric cars should be more reliable, longer-lasting and eventually cheaper, but it also raises interesting questions. Things like:

• When the metals needed for batteries become more important than oil, which countries will we have to be nice to? Or invade?

• Will the business model of dealers have to change when servicing costs are lower and cars last longer?

• What will be the thing that causes me to sell this and buy a new car? In the short term, probably the opportunity for increased range, but eventually it may be that my car’s CPUs can’t run the latest version of the BMW operating system?

• How quickly will the electricity grid and service-station infrastructure be able to change to support a world where transport is predominantly electric, once electric cars become the economically-preferable option, and not just something for enthusiasts like me?

I assume that eventually, every supermarket car park, every park & ride, every pay & display, will have inductive loops in significant numbers of their parking spaces, so you’ll be doing lots of little charges throughout your day without thinking about it, rather than needing to seek out special charging locations. That’s probably the right model for residential streets in cities where there’s no off-street parking, too. But I wonder how the transition will take place.

The great thing is that, right now, installing a charging point for your customers is something that any country pub or B&B can do – a very different proposition from becoming a petrol station. 🙂

My car’s going in to the garage for a service today. Oil? New tyres? Shock absorbers?

No.

A software update.

I imagine the actual update will take a couple of minutes and a USB stick. But they’re keeping the car for about three days, presumably to test all of the things that it affects.

We stopped at the rapid chargers at the multi-storey car park in King’s Lynn yesterday.

As I was getting out of the car, I heard a passer-by tell his son, “Yes, but they have to wait 20 hours for them to charge up.”

Tilly and I set off on our stroll, and we met them on the pavement.

“So how long does the charging take, mate?” I explained that it depended on various things. I expected to be there for 20 minutes, but it could sometimes take as long as 45 mins if you needed a lot of charge.

“So what’s all the fuss about, then? I saw that thing on Top Gear…”

If I get too snooty about how we electric vehicle drivers are living in the future, you can remind me of this. An advertisement from 1912.

Right – I’m off to glide noiselessly down the boulevard and through the park.

(Thanks to Plug In Sites).