Not too far from me (well, one of the two very nearest point of the motorway (i.e. freeway) network) they built a charging-carpark in an awkward slice of land between other properties - probably previously reserved for light-industrial use but nobody could quite get an acceptable building into the gap. I think they started laying it down a few months before the pandemic, though I don't recall much work being done on it for much of 2020 and it seems not to have opened its gates to the expected 'tyre-fall' of users (those zooming up and down the motorway), assuming it even made its way onto any of the apps[1].
Passing by it just today, though, I noticed a whole lotta vehicles parked up in it. No sign of drivers, as I drove past, in or out of the vehicles. Nor did I confirm a glimpse of any actual charging cables snaking around from 'charge boxes' to the vehicles. Which were overwhelmingly vans of a particular utility company (and not an electricty one!) that I know can be electric but my cursory glance decided they were fuel-type vintage rather than actual electric models. So I'm wondering if it had fallen back to be a handy secure parking area (gates were closed) for currently unutilised units.
So, give or take the Pandemic Glitch, there's not yet the critical mass of need for charging stations (or this one failed to fully jump up onto the bandwagon, maybe losing out to other facilities). EVs are not unknown around here. One household along a street I sometimes pass (relative new-buildz, but with only on-street/parking-strip parking) had a works-van half up on the pavement(/sidewalk) at times, charging via a barely-long-enough cable passed through a front window, though I think I've not seen that for a number of months now so maybe it was a failed trial or just a less convenient method now replaced by a dedicated workplace charging-stand.
And I've found a small but notable number of EVs wending their way up country-lanes that I walk along... Notable by the hush to them. Not too silent, for me, but I'm already primed to keep an ear out for random cyclists. If there's any problem at all, then its the electric bikes with clearly maximum power-assist making almost as little noise as the standard ones but going up hills at almost the speed of an unreckless car; and generally faster than a tractor, with its even greater noise/advanced notice of proximity. ((Not an argument against EBs, or indeed what dd said they wanted to do, before editing it away, but I do think that inconsiderate/simply unaware "people on bikes" have gravitated more to EBs (after most of their life having never developed any cycle-sense) than prior cyclists who might have decided that their next model (or the one that lets them return to cycling) is going to have a handy way of mitigating the fact that they're not quite as youthful/masochistic as they once were.))
[1] The way I hear it is that you need to subscribe to multiple ones to infill your coverage. It'd be like having to preregister with Esso, Shell, BP, Texaco[2], etc, before you can be sure of getting fuel anywhere. Currently driven by brand-loyalty and a bias towards sellers'-market, no doubt, more adding punitive 'non-member' rates than giving a carrot for brand-loyalty. Since the days of village blacksmiths starting to stock up on petroleum for those new-fangled self-propelled carriages, I think the only equivalent for fuel is the more incentive-driven "fuel card" for HGVs/company cars, tapping into the market for bulk B2B diesel sales with the additional handy feature of streamlining the way the Accounts Department handled VAT(/'sales tax') claim-backs on high-volume business usage.
[2] Is Texaco still running? I used to 'collect' petrol-station names when I was young. You could find some rather novel limited-territory retail/wholesale/whatever brands in various subregions of the UK, as well as a smattering of the more widespread ones. Is that Rix lot still going, I wonder? These days, though, the market has really changed. Often what might have been a minority-brand station is now signed as "Hand Car Wash", whilst you often don't know who is really behind Morrisons/Tesco/etc fuel stations[3] unless you happen to spot an unrebranded tanker topping the site up, with the 'petroname' decals upon it (or maybe the cab unit, if the logistics meant they had to mix'n'match) instead of the grocery-chain colours.
[3] Mostly on or next to the 'retail park supermarket' site itself, though I know one "attached" pump-place half a mile down the road from the obvious megamarket building, perhaps forced to adopt an existing site rather than allowed to carve out a corner of thousand+ space carpark (of mixed greeny-brown prior land-use) to install a new one. But why am I going on about legacy hydrocarbons in this thread? Dunno.
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Topic: EV Owners and Interested Parties Thread (Read 1963 times)