Ev

Imagine, it’s Monday morning and people are rushing to work or to the shops to get food for the week ahead. You turn up early at the shopping centre. You see that all the chargers are free so you check the price. Thirty Three centimes per kilowatt hour. You see a fantastic opportunity so you park by a charger, plug in the charging cable and start to charge.

This might trigger you to say “Who cares?” and I’d answer that thirty three centimes per kilowatt hour is a good deal. In other places it goes from thirty nine centimes to eighty centimes, if not one franc twenty per kilowatt hour.

I noticed that when I park above ground in a zone with good mobile coverage the car sends its data to the Leapmotor app when parked. If I park in a basement where there is no cell service and when I park on the surface where there is no cell service then the car thinks that I am still driving until I park where it has network coverage.

It can be extraordinarily frustrating when you live in an apartment and park the car underground to charge. Not only does the app say that the car is “driving” rather than parked and locked, but it doesn’t log charging events. The result is that unless you go out of your way to charge where there is cell service car apps are just decorative, with no value or use.

It’s a very easy habit to pick up, once you find an affordable EV. The EV habit makes tremendous sense. When I learned to drive petrol was about 1.21 CHF per litre, and when I was driving the most it went to about 1.71 CHF per litre. Recently, due to recent electoral choices petrol has risen to between 1.98 CHF to 2.20CHF per litre in Switzerland.

When you see this price increase it means that your fuel costs from 70-100 CHF per refuelling stop. Even with the petrol scooter it went from 6 CHF up to 9 CHF. Within this context it means that driving to Geneva with the scooter doubled in price. That’s a discernable difference. That is quite the psychological wall.

It is easy to think “I fill the my car once I reach a quarter of a tank, and to keep that attitude once you get an EV. With faster charging cars this works well but with others the concept is flawed.

Today I drove to Geneva and back to drop into Digitec to drop off the Garmin Forerunner 570 because I noticed that transparent plastic of some sort was trying to escape from between the glass, and the rest of the watch. In the process I drove an EV.

In the last two days I noticed several posts speaking about an upcoming tax for electric vehicles that will charge people per mile driven, as there is with petrol cars. In theory people will be charged a flat fee for the first year, and then per kilometre from then onwards.

I don’t see how this would work in practice because of two things. The first is that if you’re on a road trip you’re using public chargers and the price to charge is from 38 centimes to 1.10 CHF per kilowatt/Hour. In other words a scale could already be applied to “tax” people straight from public chargers.

A modern village is one that has parking on the outskirts, so that you can drive to it, park on the perimeter, and walk in, to hike, run, cycle or other. It also includes affordable slow chargers where you can park for as long as it takes to charge to full.

Such a village is modern because it reduces the need for traffic to transit through it. If people can visit the village without driving in, then it becomes like Italian citadelles, but also like carcasonne, Yvoire and other villages and towns. Even Morges has this, to some degree.

I write this as a joke, rather than as a serious post. I have access to two EVs. The first is a Fiat 500 that has a potential range of 180-200 kilometres although in Switzerland with the hills and more the range is theoretical, rather than practical. The second option is much smaller and can be taken in a lift or on a train. That is an e-scooter. By e-scooter I mean one of those that you can stand on.

Someone suggested going to see Sinners last night so I went with the EV. I plugged the car in, started the charge and went up to the cinema. I went to see Sinners for the main reason that I haven’t seen an imax film in a long time. I haven’t seen a film at the cinema in a long time. Having said this I was at film screenings several times a week ago.

I know of two chargers that I can use when shopping. One of these costs 2 CHF just to connect, and then the cost of the charge. At the second shopping centre I can plug in for five minutes, or two and a half hours and I will only pay for the charge. Not having a connection fee makes the cheaper option more attractive.

If people want to charge quickly they have four fast chargers outdoors, by McDonald’s but if people want to charge slowly then they have the cheaper indoor parking chargers.

Yesterday I drove an EV from Nyon to Boudry and back. The journey took about 40 percent charge for each direction for a total of 80 percent charge. Keep in mind that this is a fiat 500 with a small battery rather than a large one.

I routed the journey from Nyon to a 150w charging station and within 14 minutes I had gone from 56 percent or so to 86 percent. I then drove to the train station where the group was scheduled to meet and waited.