GoFast Charging

Yesterday I had a chromebook, an e-book reader, warm clothes and a coffee. My plan had been to drive to a charging point and spend some time walking, and some time reading or writing a blog post. Instead I drove by McDonald’s and saw that the GOFAST chargers were free so I parked the car, plugged in the 300 Watt charger, swiped the TCS e-charge card and started to charge. Within about 25 minutes I was at 80 percent charge, Within 33 minutes I was at about 87 percent.

In the past I have parked the car in a garage and I have waited for 8-10 hours for the car to charge. In other situations I have parked at Signy Centre and waited two hours for the car to charge and that felt fast. This time I plugged in and within 25 minutes I had a charge that was almost full. In this situation you could easily drive to the shops, do your shopping, or have breakfast or lunch, return to the car and have 200 kilometres of range.

In theory I could have taken the opportunity to eat at McDonald’s or I could have gone to Porte De Nyon to get a few things. I had no desire to go into McDonald’s at ten in the morning. I had no need to shop.

More Versatile

Fast charging is convenient because it saves time but inconvenient because it costs more. The difference in price is not as pronounced as it used to be. It’s 59 centimes per kilowatt hour, rather than 23, or less if you charge from home. According to Le Chat by Mistral the distance travelled on one franc would be 16km with an electric car charged at this cost, and 10km per franc with a petrol car. This is just an estimate of cost via an LLM rather than a real world comparison. Even if 13 CHF for 200 kilometres feels like a lot it is not as bad as a petrol car.

Of course this figure is wrong, because I went from around 26 percent to 87 percent. If I had stopped at 80 percent the cost would be lower.

And Finally

My concern has never been about range. It has been about charging time. I have spent entire days waiting for the car to charge. Once I got the tcs e-charge card it opened up my opportunities to charge the car in more locations with shorter wait times. When you consider that you can wait from half an hour to 59 minutes for an hourly train, waiting half an hour to top up an EV is reasonable.