Yesterday morning I plugged the car in to charge at Signy Centre while shopping and for the price of a coffee I charged the car by ten percent. I then went to the lakeside of Nyon to test the Service Industriel de Nyon (SIN) chargers and failed.
They were out of service so I drove towards Chavannes Centre because I thought of using their chargers until I realised that by the time the car is charged I would be driving through rush hour traffic.
Every single time I go from driving an EV to driving a petrol car I am struck by old fashioned and smelly old cars are compared to new ones. In this context an old car is any car that has a petrol engine rather than an electric motor.
I had to play musical cars just now, and put the winter tires into the petrol car, to get them swapped so that I can drive in winter safely.
After some trial and error I finally managed to get an electric car to charge at public charging points. The first success was at an evpass charging station where I was able to charge 13.1kW/h in an hour and 14 minutes using the app on my phone and a credit card for 8.48 CHF. The second time was with the TCS eCharge RFID tag that I ordered from the Touring Club Suisse for free.
It’s easy to drive a petrol car. You fill up, and 500-600 kilometres later you fill up. With Electric vehicles it is the same in theory. In practice it isn’t that simple. The EV charging market is fragmented and each company has a different app and possibly RFID tag. The result is that you can either be loyal and use just one app or you can have two or more apps on your phone.
I know that driving to the house where I charge the electric vehicle will take about 20 percent. I also know that driving to the shops will take less than one percent per drive. This means that if I had an electric car, and I had a plug at home, rather than a climb up the Jura, I would need to charge every week or two, rather than almost every time I drive the car.