With over a million battery electric vehicles on the market, electrical installers are working up and down the country to ensure that EV drivers throughout the United Kingdom will have a place to charge their cars.
According to a survey by Charge UK, a new charging station is being installed every 25 minutes, showing just how rapid the change is and how intense the demand is for electric motoring
Some of these will be for home users, and this is a good approach for any driver who regularly commutes in their electric car, as whilst public charging stations are increasingly available at large car parks such as those near supermarkets and stadiums, they are not without issues.
Some issues are caused by current technology, whilst others are caused more by driver behaviour, but in either case, many of the most common problems drivers have at public stations according to a study commissioned by Sainsbury’s are fixable through careful design and skilled installation.
Lack Of Availability
The most common problem and the easiest to solve is simply not having enough charging stations available, leading to lengthy queues.
A lot of this is a consequence of the rapid ascent of EVs catching a lot of people by surprise as it went from a niche concern to rapidly becoming the norm for so many drivers.
This can be fixed simply by expanding charging stations in public car parks and adding charging stations to meet the capacity needs.
Plug Hogging
An issue that is more social than technological but could potentially be fixed through technological means is a driver leaving their EV charging for a much longer time than is truly necessary.
This is predominantly an issue of etiquette, as some people will leave their cars on charge to guarantee they are fully charged and spend the day elsewhere, but there are still potential solutions.
One would be to fit short-stay and long-stay charging stations, with a display that shows how long a particular vehicle has been plugged in to potentially enable another driver to park nearby and use the charger once it has been clearly fully charged.
The two other main solutions are more chargers and faster chargers, which help to fix the problems above and below this one as well.
Long Waiting Times
Another common complaint and one that not only can be fixed but is actively being worked on in many EV stations is the problem of long waiting times.
Home chargers tend to be around 7kW, which means that a typical EV can take up to 12 hours to charge, and even some older public charging stations can take up to 6 hours to charge a car from empty to around 80 per cent.
This is rapidly changing with the surging popularity of rapid chargers. The most commonly found public charging rate is 50kW, which cuts charge times to around an hour, but 150 and even 350kW ultra-rapid chargers are coming onto the market with full batteries available in mere minutes.
Some EV prototypes can fully charge in less than five minutes, so the issue of long charging times is disappearing quickly.