The key elements include six high speed charging hubs on motorways capable of charging eight vehicles simultaneously; 16 high speed charging hubs capable of charging four vehicles simultaneously; additional high power chargers at 34 current 50 kW locations; upgrading over 50 22 kW chargers to 50 kW, and replacing up to 264 locations with 528 charge points at the pre-existing pilot grade of 22 kW to next generation high reliability models.
Give it a year and it will be wrecked. Besides these cables being heavy where some folk will struggle, theres a good few peeps out there just bone lazy and wont bother hanging them up. Seeing it happen with the Applegreen ones already.
Ground markings in the coming days, where have I heard that before? 😏
Impressive cable length in the new charger in Westport…..
This is great news, there is a 38kV substation across the road from here so hopefully power is not too big of a problem and we can get 200kW chargers
There'll be Ionity hubs in Derry and Sligo soon from the looks of it so that's something for the longer trips
It would be pretty nice if one didn't have to travel to another county (or country) to find a HPC
Badly needed. There isn't anything faster than 50kW within 80kms as the nearest 150kW is Lunneys Service Station in Carrick on Shannon!
Looks like the 3/4 car "hub" in Donegal town has really started at pace. I think the grey thing is a new substation. Just up the road from the 2 charger laghy "hub" supemacs on site and parking is not normally an issue. Chargers seem.to.be far from normal parking so won't be ICEd as much.
They did in Mayfield, dunno what the plan for Obama plaza is
Pretty silly IMO, are they really so short of 50kW units they need to move them elsewhere and those units are better suited to slower charging cars like Gen1 Leafs
They haven't removed the 50kW triple head in Obama Plaza. Is that planned?
The pattern to date seems to be to remove the existing chargers
It'd be nice if they swapped out the 150kW unit for 3 more 50kW CCS+Chademo units for a total of 4, and made the 4 (hopefully) 200kW units into CCS only
I had an experience once where the charger sh!t the bed about 2 mins into a charging session
Charger locked up completely, wouldn't charge and wouldn't end the session. Plug was locked into the Chademo port and the release switch wouldn't work
Had no choice but to hit the E-Stop to release the cable and reset the charger
When the charger reset it was still borked, don't think it was the E-Stop that did it but it probably needed an engineer to fix it
I wonder what this will mean, if anything, for the existing Blanchardstown "hub"?
It's not "will" it's "may"
Pulling out the switch again often fixes the issue. There's a small amount of times it doesnt.
I;'ve had to use the emergency stop a few times over the course of the years, and it never required an engineer to visit.
One stunning piece of information I learned recently directly from eCars is that if a customer presses the emergency stop button, simply pulling it out again will not reactivate the charge point. They need to send out an engineer to reset it. This explains the massive amount of the cars charger is not working along various routes.
Lots of folk hit it trying to remove a car that’s been there too long (in their view, rightly it wrongly) or because their can’t won’t start/stop charging and they think “resetting” the charger will sort it.
in any case there needs to be more education for the wider population, especially with the substantial increase in EVs on the roads, on both how to charge and the etiquette. We’ve a long way to go!
It's just the duality of use cases, I used to live in the area, there are many houses without private driveways it's great to see chargers in a location where you can get a decent charge whilst doing something else. eCars will make far more money from those customers who use the charger once a week than from the customers who want to charge 3 times a year as they pass through Dublin on their way to somewhere else.
I'm sure the N3/M3 service stations will cover the charging for people passing through allowing the D15 haters to breeze past without having to worry themselves about an adventure into the less prosperous sides of the city.
In the interest of my good health it's probably best to locate the charger as far away from Krisy Kreme and Boojum as possible 😂
Also it's probably good the chargers aren't in the best parking spaces, much less likely to be hogged
I absolutely agree that Ecars should be going for supermarkets and shopping centres. I think a lot of people are going to prefer charging there instead of some smelly forecourt or a run down motorway services
My main concern as I said is traffic, I'm not sure I'd be happy sitting in 15 mins of traffic after 2-3 hours motorway driving to get a charge
One of the few good things to come out of the forecourt operators lockout of eCars. eCars can now focus on putting chargers in partnership with shopping centres and leave the interurban routes to the existing forecourt operator.
I would of much preferred these units to go near the Krispy Kreme instead of PC World, better options that way for snackage whilst charging.
Some positive news, looks like an 8 car hub might be planned for Blanchardstown shopping centre
https://planning.agileapplications.ie/fingal/application-details/95289
The application doesn't mention Ecars specifically, but the picture of the charger and graphics for the spaces match what they'd normally do
I suspect this hub will get plenty of business from people in the area looking to charge, the current chargers there seem to always be busy
Not sure if they'll get a lot of people pulling in from the N3 though, traffic around there is usually pretty bad and they'll have the option of the Maxol charger in Mulhuddart soon. And the Airtricity hub in the middle of nowhere in Ballycoolin, if they're willing to chance it
I suspect they did not bother to fix them knowing they would be taking them out a couple if weeks later. A paper sign on the charger would be the least they should have done, along with flag them in the app as broken. I expect they may be removed this week. If not broken they can be used elsewhere.
I'm guessing they ran out of parts and didn't want to order more if the chargers were going to be removed soon anyway
Still bad form, they could have decommissioned the chargers anyway and replaced them with newer units if they ended up staying in those sites
Of course if they decommissioned them they'd have to report fewer chargers in service, but if they're broken then it can be swept under the rug 🙄
I tried Lusk Southbound week before last and it was dead. Seems they basically stopped maintaining them a while back when they went offline.
Might be that someone hit the E-Stop and never disengaged it. I've had to do it a couple of times when the charger sh!t the bed and locked the connector into the car. I always remember to switch it on afterwards
Also heard of a few people ending charging sessions that way, they must have some selective sight to miss the "emergency" part
And south since 17th July. Maybe they just gave up fixing them recently but bad form to have no announcement and no attempt to fix.
According to plugshare app entries for some of these sites some of these are already powered off with no advance notice.
I pulled the units out from OpenChargeMap earlier, for what it's worth. OCM does get used by some of the navigation providers, such as ABRP. Normally the providers sync to their DB via API once a week.
Very little notice, that's a disaster now on the M1. Expect queues over bank holiday and general chaos. I expect the physical units will be there for a while causing confusion. Missing units on app will cause more confusion. Things are getting worse before they might get better.
Yeah, I used to just connect up to the eCars chargers while everybody else was eager to use the new AG ones. Suited me fine with my Kona and 75kW recharge limit. Can't do that now - I'll have to join the queue with the rest of the plebs. 😂
I suspect you're correct, the Applegreen chargers there are still a single unit, so we're back down to SPOF on the M1
Roll on Ionity Belfast, at least we'll have reliable charging in NI (never thought I'd say that 😬)
Can't see it happening for a while. I expect Applegreen to upgrade Castlebellingham after the superchargers are removed
Damn, the Ecars chargers there were crap but the more chargers the better
Hopefully soon Applegreen put extra chargers in where the Ecars spaces are now
