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Where Can You Find an Electric Vehicle Charging Network? Estonia
MatthewVD writes "How hard can it be to find an electric car charger? So hard that New York Times reporter David Broder had to drive in circles and drain his Tesla's battery. Charging infrastructure has been ultimate chicken or egg problem for electric cars adoption but finally, there's a good test case. In Estonia, drivers need to travel only 37 miles to reach a CHAdeMO quick charger. There are 165 of the direct current plug-in chargers, that can charge a car's lithium battery in 30 minutes for an average cost of $3.25. The question now is, will the electric vehicles follow?"
And it's only a thousand kilometers to Estonia!
That's almost as big as West Virginia!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
David Broder was the White House correspondent for the Washington Post for many decades, who passed away a couple years ago. When I read the summary I thought, that can't be the same guy who got into a pissing match with Elon Musk!
I just recently got back from the Netherlands and it amazed me how seriously they take charging points, they were everywhere. Along with high rise bicycle parks. I suppose when your country is mostly below sea level you take global warming and conservation as a proven fact. Simple countrywide risk management I suppose.
The Broder story was BS. It has been pretty soundly refuted from Tesla and other reporters. I guess the people approving these stories don't actually read slashdot...
Seems like this is something technology always deals with - cars and roads OR cell phones and cell towers - early adopters always have difficulties. How is this surprising?
So, is that an average cost of $3.25 per gallon of amps? Or $3.25 per litre of voltage?
Estonia now has three charging stations for each and every electric car in the country. Good Job!
Torque...
Does anyone else find it slightly ironic that Tesla's charging stations are using direct current...
Sounds great on paper! Not so great when you consider that our electricity here in Estonia comes mostly from oil shale which means there is no environmental advantage to electric vehicles. So all of this in the end comes down to fuel cost - getting an electric vehicle only makes sense if you are rich enough to be buying a new car (most normal people over here buy 5-10 year old used one), but if you are rich you don't care how much fuel costs.
Honestly Estonia is one of the worst countries for this recharging network...
On the other hand all of this came from CO2 emission license thingy sales so it was almost free and we did not have an alternative anyway...
Personally, I think that while fast chargers are important, they're not critical. I think the critical thing is to drop the price of the cars. A $30k EV with the capabilities of the Model S(range, passangers, weight, etc...) even if the interior isn't as nice would be a HUGE jump.
Basically, as long as people can point out valid down sides to EVs, you have to be able to point out upsides - and the core one would be 'money saved', while maintaining superior performance in as many other points as possible - comfort, power, ease of use, etc...
EVs pretty much win on the other features - modern ones are often as or more powerful than their competition(electric motors scale up well), they're quiet and non-polluting so the 'comfort' angle is addressed, no shifting at all makes them easy to use. EVs are great except for one big problem - the batteries. They're too expensive for not enough capacity. That's improving, but it's going to be a while.
I don't read AC A human right
Estonia gets 90% of its power from oil shale, the filthiest of the fossil fuels, so it's apropos to consider what the GHG balance here is.
If you're looking for USA changing locations, search your Droid/iOS app store for "Charge Bud". Has a list of charging points.
I'm sure there are other resources for that data as well.
They are a little country that does a lot of things right, and lead the way in technology in many ways. I think it's great that they do this, and they deserve credit accordingly. However to say that this would scale to other countries of larger size is fairly disingenuous. Places like the United States are much, much larger and a comparison between the two is effectively meaningless.
Submitter also fails to mention that the NY times journalist was looking for a charging station that was poorly lit at night time. The journalist had his failings in his story, however it's intellectually dishonest to say that he was trying to run down the battery while looking for a recharging station for a moment.
So hard that New York Times reporter David Broder had to drive in circles and drain his Tesla's battery.
You realize that Broder's story was thoroughly, totally debunked by Tesla, right? I mean, there was a story on Slashdot about it.
Finding God in a Dog
The only problem is that they just won't be popular on the drag strip because they don't have the chest thumping, soul warming throaty roar of 8000HP engine.
That can easily be overcome in an era when you can download ring tones and multi-kW sound systems are cheap.
The traction control, though, is in the "Fucking awesome" category of a well done electric dragster. Less than an inch of wheel slip before the pad sticks again.
No wasting time on gear shifts either. In all fairness though drag racers are the only people that have good reason to slip the tires - heating them up increases traction before the start of a race.
Fake noise is stupid.
Not if it brings in the fans. You think dragsters pay for themselves?
In states with a lot of sunshine, it would be nice to have solar panels on electric cars. It won't do the entire job, but would reduce the need to find a non-home charging station.
Table-ized A.I.
To be fair, they're trying to make a point with Earth Hour. Weather you agree with it or not, really doesn't matter. They're attempting to, through action, bring awareness to their arguments. An hour without lights isn't going to save anything, but you'll note everyone talks about it. So sounds like it's working to me.
They are also encuraging the purchase of eletric vehicles. Sure there are bad points to them, but they're generally cleaner than a normal car, or at least will be/would be with more investment in things like efficent battery designs. Hard to do until they're a major player in the market, hence the wish to push them as an agenda item.
You could take pretty much any two points from any political group and look at them in a vacume and declare them idiots for wanting both. All you're proving is you listen to too much talking heads on TV rather than coming up with rational arguments.
And I dont even nessisarily agree with any of it, but at least I can see what they're trying to accomplish.
maybe you're confused with the Elbonia in Dilbert strips. Estonia is much different, it's a land of lakes, fens and bogs, not mud. the difference is plants and moss grow in that glop. Also, they don't wear funny hats, except when it's cold or to sporting events.
The fake noise suggestion was meant tongue-in-cheek, but you never know. My complete inability to predict what people will buy explains my wise decision to never go into consumer marketing. As for "drunk rednecks", if you get 'em drunk enough they won't know.
I've never understood why jet cars aren't more popular though. They make anything w/ pistons look like a joke, and they look and sound awesome.
Nope, must of missed it.
Still, that would be in the 'improving, but it's going to be a while' category. Having followed the links, I see no mention of cost, longevity, charge efficiency, amp capacity, charge rate, and such that I'd expect to see for something that's 'almost ready' to be manufactured for use in EVs or even just phones.
It's neat technology, but until it's developed into a commercial processes, it's just 'neat', not 'practical'.
I don't read AC A human right
This story has been proven false and hundreds of others with the same car made the same trip no problems. Go fuck yourself. This if slashdot not fucking fox news, You should lose your mother fucking account.
the filling station model is just wrong for full electric cars right now...I know it seems like a good idea to work up from the existing filling station infrastructure and fill in gaps with more of the same, but over and over we need a new infrastructure model to deal with limits on storage...not charging stations like filling station....power while moving is the trick. A new infrastructure. Keep the battery in the car for making the system easier to put together (not having to constantly power the car, but not relying on the battery to get you all the way to a filling/charging station). Overhead power lines, buried inductive cables, something. Bonus points if you paint chevrons on the powered part of the road to look like turbo boosts in the old driving games.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
And though it's somehow possible to create shale oil from oil shale, then it's impractical to then use shale oil to power a power plant, instead of burning oil shale in the first place. A filthy natural resource as it may be, it's one of the few reasonably safe energy-producing natural resources that we have an abundance of. The other energy-producing resource that can be mined is not an option.
We're also striving to use more wind and solar and hydroelectricity (hydro on a smaller scale).