I wonder if any of you electric riders are having difficulty finding charging point tat are not in use?
Erk. Annoying.
I don’t use third-party chargers enough to know what the state of development is. Last time I used them, it required a number of different apps/accounts, and none of them had real-time info to tell you if they were working/available.
90% of our charging is done at home, or at Super Chargers, which now provide real-time info to the car, so if you need to charge on your route, it makes sure to take you to one that isn’t too busy.
was really enquiring about bikes …
Don’t worry son
So let me get this right. Electric charging points are different for bikes and cars?? Was not expecting that!
In other news, the council has just installed electric charging points in front of my house. Pretty empty most of the time. 
Are you making fun of me? ??
I wanted to know if owners of electric bikes had issues charging away from home
No I’m genuinely ignorant about electric vehicles, and i assumed Electric charging points would work for any vehicle.
Kinda, cars can carry around a bunch of kit that’s needed for fast charger, so they can use a standard voltage in. (though there are a few different standards of car charger)
With bikes, space and weight are much more important, so they cannot carry so much. I’ve not looked loads into it, but i think most bikes default to 3 pin 230v charging. In some bikes (like zeros) you can carry the adaptor to plug a car fast charger in.
No, that’s not the case. It’s the same experience for cars and bikes.
There’s some nuance, as the dominant standard changed from Type 2 to CCS not long ago, but essentially it’s all standardised.
- Type 2 = what all home chargers are and what slower public chargers can still be found with
- CCS = Type 2 + a few more connectors, allowing for much faster charging. You can plug a Type 2 connector into a CCS port. It’s backwards compatible, but will charge slower.
You can also use a regular household 3-pin socket to trickle-charge them. Manufacturers quite often charge extra for a 3-pin adapter.
Type 2 is probably still the common standard for electric bikes as bikes are too small to fit current CCS chargers on them (fast charging generates more heat, which means bigger chargers to accommodate the heat dissipation required).
doesn’t sound like utopia does it?
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There’s no such thing, and if we had it, then we’d be in trouble (re: Matrix rev 1.0) 
I have no issue with the car side of things, though I’m still waiting for enough range, and/or quick enough charging on electrics bikes before I get one.
and I am still dreaming of Hydrogen bikes - not because I think it is a dream - but you never know - fill ride fill again
Just spotted this article:
Ha ha my electric car is arriving in May!
TBF it was never going to last as a cheap option, the oil companies and government taxes want their pound of flesh.
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Not an entirely balanced article. For those of us able to charge from home, and assuming a very expensive 40p/kWh residential energy cost, it costs me 10p per mile of heavy footed driving when charging at home (it used to cost about 4p/mile before energy prices went up).
I appreciate that many do not have home-charging capabilities though.
Also, that’s just fuel/energy. The running costs are VASTLY cheaper for us with EV. No annual servicing is the big differentiator there. Insurance is about the same compared to our old ICE car. Obviously if you’re going from cheap ICE to new EV then that’s probably not comparable, but as much as possible, when comparing apples to apples, it’s much cheaper to run EV than ICE.
I’m thinking there is a far bigger running cost comparison to be made. For example, initial purchase & depreciation, battery/electric motor service life and replacement.
Would be interesting to see some real life cost comparisons after 100,000 miles of use.
The house we just bought came with an electric charger…
I’ve been thinking about EVs for a while now, while running my 2010 KIA. At the moment I do 3K miles per year (based on MOT certificates).
Whilst I am paying around about 16-17p per mile (very rough calculation), that would make it an annual difference of: £510 (assuming prices don’t go up a lot again - which they will).
I’m not really treating my KIA to heavy servicing, just the basics. The last couple of years I’ve paid c.£350 on servicing, so about £175 per year. Not including fixing a suspension issue (was only £100 anyway) etc as these would be similar across cars.
For me to outlay thousands of pounds to buy a new car, it’s not worth it and it’s not the best option for the planet… Admittedly might have been a different situation / thought process if I was considering buying the Kia today and was in need of car.
The other thing I can’t justify (@Jay you can dispel this if not right) is the battery life - afaik approximate life is about 7-10 years (before you see significant drop in performance) and the cost of replacing them right now is around/over about what I’d get for my Kia… I’ve seen for various cars asking £8k?
Don’t get me wrong, I really want an EV, possibly if I needed a small second car for town / short trips I’d buy that (battery concerns aside).
Tesla - lovely cars, but I refuse to support a lunatic.
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Well, speaking just for Tesla, battery degradation isn’t an issue for the vast majority of owners.
The battery is warrantied for 8 years or 100k miles, so whatever happens in that period doesn’t matter as far as liability for replacements goes. Beyond that you start to see some degradation, but perhaps not as much you might imagine, especially when compared to general consumer device batteries.
TL:DR: Real-world data showed that Tesla battery degradation was less than 10% after over 160,000 miles (257,500 km)
Taken into consideration, this feels acceptable because:
- I, like most people I’m guessing now won’t keep the car beyond 8 years old. We’ll finance it and give it back before then. People buying a car outright and owning beyond 8 years take their chances. That’s not for me.
- ICE engine performance deteriorates over time. I don’t know what the figures are, but I do remember laughing whilst watching programmes like Wheeler Dealer where they measured the power of old cars they’d bought and the power they output was sometimes about half of the claimed original, so it’s a different dimension of entropy.
- There’s way more than enough range in them. I’d be quite able to live with half the range if I had to without serious consequence. Losing up to 10% of capacity for a 160k mile car does not concern me particularly.
Though of course, asking someone to take on the liability of an aging battery in a well used car is not great, for them or the environment currently. But considering battery technology is improving at a rapid rate, I hope that there will be better solutions soon for long-lived cars, i.e. cheaper battery swap options, i.e. perhaps being able to trade your worn battery for a refurbished one for a reasonable amount.