Public EV charging is a DISASTER (and always will be) | MGUY Australia
There are so many problems with EV charging it’s often difficult to know where to start firstly there is the problem of charger power versus charging time the faster the charger the less time it takes but the more power it requires from the grid a DC fast charger
With 250 KW of power takes As Much from the grid as 100 average homes that’s just one charger for one car put 10 of these together and you have a small suburb’s worth of power being consumed or a small Hydro power station even at 250 KW 100 KW battery will take 24
Minutes to charge to give you maybe 500 km range if you’re lucky compared to 5 minutes at a gas station for anything up to double that range for a regular gas or diesel car then there’s the throughput if you have 10 Chargers and everything is operating in ideal
Conditions you’ll get about 20 cars through the charging station per hour this is compared to at least 100 cars an hour for a 10 Pump Fuel Station but ideal conditions are extremely unlikely and so you’ll get way less than that number of cars per hour and like you’ll
See in this video you end up with full charging stations and cues and there’s virtually nothing that can be done to make it any better welcome back to M guy British engineer and lawyer turn Sydney YouTuber please be sure to like share and subscribe hit the notification Bell
Drop a comment down below and don’t forget to follow me on Instagram and Twitter X we’re going to ignore the other major problem which is that even if fast Chargers were plentiful regular fast charging can actually shorten the lifespan of an EV battery and many vehicle manufacturers instruct owners to
Avoid fast charging but that’s a story for an entire separate video the poor guys at car expert went to the USA to see what public charging infrastructure was like over there the full video is linked in the description but we’re going to take at a look at a
Few Choice excerpts okay so we’re about to roll into our first charger here at Walmart uh it’s an Electrify America charger so let’s see what the Chargers are like I can see them in that back corner there oh my God there is heaps of
Them 2 3 4 5 6 78 that’s a really nice setup there so um I love how he’s so optimistic at this point every single charging space is taken oh my God there is like a massive queue of cars here how many cars are queued well that including that ID four
Four right okay uh okay so this is a bit of a disaster because there’s now all of these cars waiting plus they’re queuing around the corner as well so granted it is Saturday after and there’s another one that’s just rolled in now another coner um so granted it is Saturday but uh I’m
Now down to 10% of charge I’m going to need to find another charging alternative wow okay still trying to to keep positive that was the look of pure desperation wasn’t it the realization just went across his face happens okay so we have arrived and there is another queue so I’m going to
Join the back of the queue but it’s weird because there’s four chargers for some reason they’re not using them so I can only imagine that their faulty Sea’s just going over to check now hello I’ll show you what the two of them are doing y so that’s one of them
It’s just sitting on that screen broken and too broken sitting on that screen so are they right okay we’re going to go back to our Airbnb we’re going to arrive at our Airbnb now I’m genuinely telling you this none of this was intentional I’m down to 10% battery
Left we’re going to arrive to our Airbnb with 36 km of range I’m going to plug up just to the wall plug um and then later tonight we’re going to have to go find a charger so they go back to the Airbnb and I just took this screenshot here and
As you can see it’s charging at 3 km per hour and it will end in 150 hours and 54 minutes that’s really helpful okay so there’s a queue again so it’s now almost 900 p.m. and we’ve got a queue for Chargers again I just can’t imagine that
You would bother with this if this was your your day-to-day you didn’t have charging at home and you you had to do this like we’re having to nope it’s super frustrating but anyway we’re just going to sit here and wait and um yeah we’ll go in charge hopefully some point
Soon and yeah see what happens it is charging so there’s the charge speed which is heinously slow and I suspect it’s probably not going to get much quicker given that there’s a bank of 10 charges here and they’re all currently in use at sort of various charge rates so uh I suspect it’s
Throttling everyone to accommodate it all uh this was preheated in terms of battery conditioning it can charge at over 200 KW and given it’s at 4% which is a very low state of charge this should be absolutely hauling but um this is a 350 Kow going to take just to get
To 80% I mean that is absolute BS I’m going to rage if I stay here much longer let’s go get some food okay so it is now almost 11:00 p.m. and it’s only 50% full charge rate’s only 42 KW we’re wet everything is closed around here it’s 11:00 p.m. and
There is still a Quee of people trying to charge their cars at that fast charger now I use air quotes because it was anything but fast when you have that many vehicles on a fast charger if it’s not done properly it just charges very slowly and that’s exactly what happened
To us we’re at 50% charg and the car was there for over an hour um the Walmart we went to closed at 11: all of the food places closed at 11: uh ironically the only thing you can do at the food places that are still open is driveth through I
Tried explaining that to the guy but um he didn’t find it amusing um so yeah we’ve pretty much just given up so what we’re going to do we’ll just go back to the air BMB charge it there a little bit which will be pointless but in the morning I’m going
To have to go at like 6:00 a.m. and go find a charger somewhere else uh tell you what this has been the shittest experience I’ve ever had in an electric car uh and I genuinely like 100% serious we went into this just wanting to show
Everyone what it would be like to own an EV in a place like this that has so many EVS on the road and it appears that if you don’t have a Tesla the rest of the public charging infrastructure absolutely sucks and this is the last place I would ever want to own an
EV tragic absolutely tragic this would all be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic but simple arithmetic shows that EV charging stations will always have cues and will always be full as I mentioned in the example at the start a 10 stall fast charging station will have a
Throughput at Best of say 20 cars per hour this compares to a regular filling station that can get through 100 or more cars in the same time so in order to match the throughput of a regular Filling Station you’d need a minimum of five times the number of charging stalls
In other words 50 of them and 50 fast Chargers operating at 250 KW each will draw no less than 12.5 megaw from the grid that is the equivalent of an entire town of 5,000 homes just for one charging station and you still have to wait half
An hour to charge your car if you’re lucky this is why when multiple cars are charging in the same station charging speeds are typically throttled because the grid cannot cope with the demand which means everyone has to wait longer to charge which means throughput decreases even further there is no way
Around this without massive infrastructure upgrades and nobody wants to build charging stations anyway because the margins are tiny or non-existent the three variables of throughput power and charging time are in exteme ibly linked if you want to increase throughput you need to increase power to each charger or add more
Charges which adds more power put simply efficient public fast charging is a dream that will never come true
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