phantom_iv

https://instavolt.co.uk/mcdonalds-partners-with-instavolt-to-deliver-rapid-charging-network-at-drive-thrus/ https://instavolt.co.uk/first-instavolt-ev-rapid-charger-goes-live-at-mcdonalds/ Looks like Instavolt are rolling out chargers at McDonalds across the UK... this will make a significant difference.

Instavolt are excellent. Tesla's supercharger network is a major competitive advantage for them though at present.

This isn't unusual - some charges can go even higher than this. 30p/kwh works out somewhere in the region of 7.5p/mile, which is still a decent saving on current petrol costs. Obviously if you charge at home you'll save a lot more, but public infrastructure has to pay for its installation cost somehow.

Indeed. They're popping up all over the place. I went to my local supermarket last night for the first time in a few weeks and found it had gained a row of EV chargers since my last visit.

These days there's absolutely tonnes of them. They seem pretty frequent along all major roads according to plugshare.com - often multiple choices in the same place. People living out in the sticks are much more likely to have off-street parking for easy charging at home. Seems like a lot of petrol stations e.g. shell are installing them rather than finding they don't have any business in a few years time. A lot city centre & supermarket car parks have free chargers too. It's easier to find somewhere to charge an EV than to fill up with fossil fuels.

Norway's been working on this for a long time - tax on fossil-fuels cars is eye-wateringly high (a base spec 1 litre VW Golf will cost you north of £35k, VW sells the ID3 for virtually the same price), and they've had non-financial incentives for electric cars - for example, you used to (not sure if you still do) get free parking, free ferry travel and best of all could drive in the bus lanes in Oslo. I think they've scrapped the free ferry travel since the Reuters article was written (2018) though as the demand was so high. One of my former colleagues took great pleasure in driving his Tesla model S down the bus lane in Oslo during rush hour. Oh, and the taxes on fossil fuel are as high as ours. Put together as a package, it would have been an exercise in insanity to buy a non-electric car in Norway in the last ~5 years or so, especially when they often cost more than electric cars to buy

I don't have to ask to know that ?

Wow, those look like really nice boats... hate to think what the price tag is though!

I have both of these. Would happily recommend it ?

Probably some "independent think tank" staffed by people who have never left London.

75p/mile is still a massive increase - back of the envelope calculations suggest that the government would break even on current annual VED by the end of January at that rate. On my old diesel car VED was about £180 / year, plus ~10p/mile fuel tax (assuming £1/litre of diesel cost is tax), so the government would break even on annual tax take once you'd driven 280 miles. So assuming average annual milage of 8000/year, at an extra 65p/mile, that's equivalent to VED being £5200 a year at current fuel tax rates.

Surely there's a decimal point missing there? 7.5 p per mile would be in line with current fuel tax receipts I'd have thought? I reckoned on my old diesel car doing about 10 miles / litre of fuel, so 75p/mile is equivalent to diesel at £7.50 per litre in tax alone

Synthetic Intertia is a thing now - they found in the big battery in Australia (Hornsdale power reserve) that it could respond way quicker to frequency changes in the grid than the coal plants that were contracted to provide frequency response services. So it's possible the grid frequency might get more stable rather than less if we get a ton of these big batteries connected - e.g. a battery farm in Dorset went online earlier this year - not at the same scale as Aus though but still a good start. However I'm all for more Nuclear - we need to keep the lights on when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining somehow!

True, but that wasn’t the cost for comparison vs replaceable batteries. However ICE cars also have significant depreciation on new models - I doubt electric ones will be radically different. Yes batteries will degrade over time but so do engines etc

Running costs of 8p /mile? (from the article) No thanks. Today's Teslas will do sub-2p per mile easily.

The CATL batteries may be Cobalt-free but are quite low performance. I was thinking of the forthcoming 4680 cells (https://www.electrive.com/2020/09/23/tesla-battery-day-tabless-4680-cell-and-in-house-production/) which will be using a high-Nickel cathode in place of Cobalt.

It was interesting watching Tesla's "battery day" a few weeks ago where mr Musk and co were showing off their new battery which they plan to produce in the next few years. It'll be zero Cobalt, and fully recyclable, so eventually they hope to get to the point where pretty much all their raw materials come from recycling old batteries. Until then they're also getting into the mining business and have come up with a process to extract Lithium from clay deposits, of which they've bought a load in Nevada for just this purpose, with the intention of returning the used clay to the ground when they've got the Lithium from it. Interesting to see how much of this comes off as they say it will, but there is certainly potential for innovation in how these raw materials are extracted and reused. Of course the Lithium mining industry says he's bonkers. But people said that when he started making electric cars and reusable rockets...

Probably not, but they were opened under private ownership and closed under public. I assume no such thing. But if performance, good or bad, has no consequences one way or the other (as seems to happen in the public sector), then you can't expect good performance as a result. Regarding cartels, firstly we already have competition laws for things like this, but also the barrier to market entry is fairly low for EV charging I'd have thought - the equipment isn't terribly expensive and electricity supplies are commonplace - which might make a price-fixing cartel rather hard to maintain in this sort of market I'd expect. Major cost will be wholesale cost of electric I'd have thought. You can form as big a cartel as you like but watch what happens if I open a charging station just down the road with significantly lower prices...

Which is surely measured in Watts? I can't really find a use for "Watts per hour" other than maybe the rate at which solar power increases as the sun rises?

National grid is a private company these days ? Last time I checked, there wasn't national water distribution - there were only local private monopoly-holding companies. Road and railway infrastructure takes longer, costs more and is worse maintained in general than many other comparable companies. E.g. go to France. Yes, it is state owned there, but they're better at it it seems. I'm not saying state ownership is necessarily a bad thing in itself, we just seem to do it really badly in this country. As for railway provision in remote areas being worse pre-grouping, there's a lot of places that had a railway connection before nationalisation that don't have one now. Ultimately, the key to successful privatisation is competition. Without competition private companies have no incentive to keep prices low, as their customers have nowhere else to go. The days of duplicated railway lines into major urban areas did at least provide competition for better services and lower prices for customers, compared to these days of insufficient capacity. Regaring EV charging points, yes, I do believe private companies will do a better job than the government of rolling them out. Because eventually if they make them too expensive / too hard to use / too unreliable customers will simply go elsewhere. With a government-run monopoly if you don't like the service / it's too expensive / too unreliable then tough. You'll have to live with it as you have no alternative. And the people running it will still have a job regardless of how incompetently they do it so what's their incentive to make it actually work well? Same as in the NHS there seems to be zero incentive to provide a good standard of care to your patients and actually look after them, because patients have nowhere else to go. Complain and you're told, "it's free, what did you expect?"

As an aside it really does my head in when people can't use units for power and energy properly - "The net gain was a disappointing 9.5% of our total battery capacity, equivalent to 5.32 kWh, or 532 Watts per hour." - I mean what does this actually mean? I think he means 532Wh per hour, or 532 Watts, but as written it's nonsensical.

Fair play to the MHRA for quick work on the approvals. But the NHS is a disaster in many ways... as is the US system, true. But elsewhere in Europe (and indeed the world) there are much better health systems than either, not all of which are publicly run, which are also free at the point of use. Must admit I'm not sure what to think about railway nationalisation - BR was a disaster, private operation is also a disaster, although the track and signalling systems are still nationalised.

You make a good point - the MHRA seems to be a rare exception on recent performance. Don't get me wrong, I think in this case the government needs to regulate to ensure a payment method that works for everyone, and to make sure commercial operators aren't ripping off "pay as you go" customers, but not actually manage, install and maintain the infrastructure. That's not something they do well. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/all-new-rapid-chargepoints-should-offer-card-payment-by-2020

Oh god no. When has anything the state does (at least in this country) ever been delivered on time, not cost 10 times more than it should, actually worked reliably without massive headaches and not been embarrassingly laughable compared to what is available overseas?

Isn't it a legal requirement to accept contactless credit/debit cards in all newly installed ones? Frankly getting the bloody apps to work is the biggest problem with the UK charging network to date, it's so much faff. Some are better than others though, e.g. Instavolt are great. Tesla's charging network is a big plus point for buying their cars, just plug it in and wander off with zero faffing and they'll send you the bill. Yes, it's hard to imagine why you would want a fossil-fuelled car in 2030. They just seem really expensive to run, unreliable and inconvenient. Having to go to a petrol station to buy fuel all the time is just so much faff!