Random EV thoughts.....

Tends to be a mix of both IMO. Local councillors are often also local business leaders and may have interests in several local companies. They do however have decision making capabilities over where council finding goes, so it's quite easy for them to direct it towards areas where they have business interests

Councils tend to just go with whatever supplier is closest/easiest and don't seem to have much expertise when it comes to procurement or good fiscal conduct

And so out of that we get a €30k AC charger where the charger represents about 15% of the overall costs

Also note there were no fees for consultancy or services listed, only physical work and hardware. I'd be surprised if Laois CC got away without a single consultant being hired

Are you sure about councillors having a say in where the money is spent? I’ve never personally come across a council contract where the elected councillors were involved at all, they’ve all been done by permanent staff. Perhaps the smaller councils are different though.

What I do see in work is councils copying tenders issued by other, larger councils resulting in requirements that are beyond their actual or reasonable needs.

The worry is that these pilot projects form the basis for the conclusions and the recommendations for all the LAs.

I find this an exaggeration. But anyway the consultants who did the Dublin EV strategy document, Element Energy, recommend rapid charging as priority

Reasons below:

I think AC is best used as a hook to bring in customers, like a hotel providing chargers for guests

It can probably be profitable if done at scale, for example putting AC charging along a whole street. You'd minimise the cost of installation and give yourself a large base of chargers to sell kWh from

Assuming it's battery owned, and even then its probably a little overpriced. Zoe is a great second car, but I'd suggest getting the battery owned version and the 40kWh

I hear ya, we have a model X and the range on our second EV Ioniq 28 is being wasted so I'm considering trading down. We own the ioniq outright so perhaps that makes it easier.

The 41 kWh was only launched in October 2016 and was only available RHD from 2017 (UK deliveries started around March 2017 and Irish deliveries April/May).

Check with Renault to make sure it isn't battery leased or that the lease has been bought out. If the lease has to be bought out, get a quote from Renault for that, and demand a reduction of at least that amount from the asking price.

Determining a decent price is difficult as there are so few available for purchase and demand is high.

E is 3 for the social media wizz.

Folks;

For anyone hymning and hawing about ordering a car with an expected delivery date some time in 2023, there's a whole lot of folks that ordered Teslas over the last month or so and are being told to plan for delivery at the end of August (after the Tesla website initially suggested delivery in Q1 or Q2 2023....), and some of us are turning this offer down, holding out for a 2023 car......

So if you ordered a new Tesla now, there's a good chance you could be driving it in 7-8 weeks.......

Was it a deliberate attempt to emulate Ford? Ford effectively defined a generation of cars with the Model T, Tesla did the same in many ways with the Model S

Ah I just ordered a poverty spec RWD, mainly as a speculative measure in case of a price increase….. I’ll see where I am in January and if it’s worth upgrading to what is essentially a very different car to my 2020 SR+

I do worry too that local authorities see EV chargers as a burden they don't want to have, and the numbers game they don't want to own. I wonder would it be viable to roll out a whole street of on street chargers in town centres in Dublin. As in could they give an exclusive deal to a commercial company to say roll out 10 chargers (5 posts) next to each other in prime locations. The tender would need to include exclusive EV parking, pay parking could be factored into charging cost or separate, and if every town in Dublin had an exclusive contract for say 5 years, it might be viable. Take Bray for example 2 X double heads on seafront 4 cars can charge) next to seafront 2 other posts, so in Bray alone 8 cars can AC charge all within walking distance of seafront and main Street. It's also close to dart station. These are all ESB units with free parking for EVs actively charging. Sometimes all of these 8 are in use at the weekends. Why not replicate the set up in every Dublin "town" or village. If it's not viable then give more incentives, but a large tender for say 10 town locations where 8 cars could charge would be a big start. I am worried about council's attempting to roll out DC chargers as in the UK and Germany they have tended to be very single unit and often broken for long periods.

Can’t beat a good bit of American lunacy. A bill going through North Carolina to scrap free public charge points unless free gas pumps are installed alongside them.

https://www.teslarati.com/north-carolina-spend-50k-trash-free-eve-chargers/