True cost of "filling" an electric car?

[bert]

An interesting analysis from today's telegraph

[Tim Watts]

Not too much danger of that happening anytime soon - and you can always cut the plug off (or run it through a signal blocking filter) - as the mains, unlike USB, does not need anything to declare its intent before supplying power.

[Thomas Johns]

Do that and it doesn?t charge at all, because the protocol doesn?t even start.

But the car does need to signal what voltage etc it needs.

[John Rumm]

Using water to move the heat about is ok, in that it presumably lets them make use of a conventional heater matrix and ventilation system. Heating the water resistively from battery is less good, and doing it with a heater that you can't turn off even in summer seems daft.

[Tim Watts]

Hi Rod...

[John Rumm]

On the leaf they clearly don't... For example, the real time readout from the diagnostics show that the in care display speed is both averaged, and also scaled so as to over-read. The unprocessed speed is accurate when measured against a GPS, and shows far more small variations.

Again the diagnostic readout will allow you to read a battery health figured based on recent full discharge results. It provides for more detail than the much cruder limited number of "steps" shown by the car. FWIW, on my mate's car it has dropped from around 92% capacity when he got it, to about 87% now.

[whisky-dave]

depends what you mean by anytime soon.

then how will you plug it in ?

which makes it easier to do. Like they do with those TP link ethernet extenders.

[charles]

yesterday, I drove just over 400 miles.

[Mike Barnes]

My guess is that when this takes off in a big way (not for some time yet, IMO) electrically powered vehicles will be fitted with devices to log their electrical energy inputs. The excise people will be able to read the logs, and charge (!) accordingly. Just a guess. I'll leave the details to your imagination.

[Tim Watts]

And put a non smart plug on it.

USB works the way it does, because it was designed to and the host is always in control of the power delievered, unless the "host" is a dumb USB charger.

Mains was not designed to have smart delivery and regulation of power, so it's not going to happen anytime soon.

To make it happen, you are going to have to mandate that every socket in the house and probably lots of other places have smart controllers in as standard - and that the car manufacturers all agree to use the same plug and protocol. That's not even true now with cars, other than most to manage to have a 13A a common factor.

Then you'll have to make sure that no car will allow charging unless it is plugged into a smart socket - which will go down well with people stopping over at a family member's house.

Like I said, not happening anytime soon. Possibly ever. It's virtually impossible to tax car electricity (the core point) specially compared to "normal" electricity as you cannot mark it in any special way like fuel and it's too easy to circumvent.

[Tim Watts]

That would be the only idea that might just work. But I don't see it happening either, as by the time the government have thought about it, the market will have a considerable number or non metered electric cars in circulation.

It would be more easier to, after a certain point, whack the VED up until the thing costs as much as a petrol car for some typical average use case.

[tim...]

what is the relevance of that to the point in hand?

tim

[whisky-dave]

Wont make any diffence as the smartness isn't in the plug it's in the device.

yes I know and I'm betting appliances could be run in a simialr way or at least logged in a simialar way.

They already transmit stuff over the mains for teh above and years before that you could have intercopms using teh mains to carry the speach signals.

If it's law they'll have to just like every mains plug has to have 3 pins. Try legally buying a UK kettle without the IEC kettle version in use.

No problem there, but of course you wouldn't have to make such a stupid idea.

- which will go down well with people

What happens if a car manufacureter decides it won't follow the standard for pertol caps and they make a differnt size nozels which can;t be used in gagare forcourts.....

Proves you donlt know much about it that's all.

No it isn't and it's already been done with E7.

You can plug anything into the main but yuo won't get the E7 rate until the meter in yuor house tells you you can.

[The Natural Philosopher]

So they will tax batteries or something else, instead

If it doesn't move, tax it, if it moves, tax it.

[John Rumm]

When you think about it, many of these cars have a 24kWh battery - the same energy density as 2L of petrol. So if you allow for the inefficiency of the petrol engine, that's like never putting more than about a gallon and a half in your tank.

Mount the windmill on the roof, then you can generate lekky while you are driving ;-))

[John Rumm]

Just make it a condition of insurance that you have a black box fitted to the car that uses GPS to track its every move. Then they can road price etc based on distance travelled. You can hear the control freaks wetting themselves!

[charles]

It means an electric car is no bloody use for the sort of driving I tend to do.

[Tim Watts]

Nothing like the same problem. The E7 simply records the whole house's consumption and switches the recording to a different meter for a specified period (be it time based or radio-switched).

How exactly is that related to your meter recording how much your car takes to charge, separated out from all the other load?

And even if you mandate that the car line signals over the mains wiring to the meter[1], how does that get around:

a) Blocking the signal with filters?

b) Putting a big UPS in the way and charging that, then using that to charge the car (tedious perhaps, but nevertheless).

The only sensible idea is mandating the meter is built into the car itself. All this talk of somehow making the main house meter record "car taxable" and "non car" consumption is nonsense. It's non trivial, too easy to get around and too costly to implement.

Look, the bloody government can't even get "ordinary" smart meters right with a single standard. How the hell are they going to pull off a stunt like this?

I think it's you who hasn't thought this through!

[Tim Watts]

Yes, yes I can :)

[Tim Watts]

That would be another angle.

All I'm saying is trying to split the charge at the house meter is complete nonsense - especially as there are loads of easier ways, as you just highlighted to add tax to an electric car :)