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Sniffing substations will solve 'leccy car charging woes, reckons upstart

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Using an 11kW charger would take six hours to fully charge a Tesla Model S, ... from the 25 per cent full state.

That takes the way we run ICE cars, and assumes that you'd do the same with an EV, but many of these calculations are around worst case scenarios that are easily avoided. Why deep discharge your EV battery, and then be panicking to do a 75% recharge overnight at home? That's daft for most users. The logical way to charge your car is to do top up charging every night of use (or every other night), and then, across the electricity system the system only needs to supply one day's EV use. For the average company car that's about 50 miles a day (for non-company cars about 30 miles per day). Each kWh gets about 2.5 miles of range, so a business user would need to take 20 kWh (or 40 kWh every other night), and over say an eight hour charging period, that's either 2.5 kW or 5 kW load, easily within the capacity of most electrical supply connections to the home. The 3.5kW chargers are bit puny, the 11 kW too meaty for most domestic use, but a 7 kW charger would be a better compromise for the electricity distribution system.

Obviously road warriors doing 30k-50k miles a year will have a problem, but they'd need to use something like the Tesla superchargers anyway, because it wouldn't be practical for those users to try and plan a daily itinerary around battery charge state because every day they would be doing a full discharge of an 80-100 kWh battery.

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