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.
You're not going to have multiple high power chargers in every petrol station while BEVs make up less than 5% of total cars on the road.
I think if I was doing regular trips requiring a ferry not sure why you wouldn't just get a diesel and let that be the end of it.
Why did you get an EV in the first place.
Yeah it went from severely crap to crap. We need multiple High power chargers in every petrol station so you know wherever you go you will always have high power charging near by.
It's not good enough so that I don't have to take the outlander at times and if I were to travel on the ferry somewhere I'd definitely not bother with the hassle.
The public charging situation has improved a lot in the past couple of years. ESB have a few new sites and upgraded a lot. County Donegal has a lot of multiple units sites and Bundoran has a new non esb charger. That said the number of new EVs mean peak times will still see problems. If public charging is more expensive on longer trips and you have access to Diesel then it probably makes no sense unless you are guaranteed >100kW real world charging speeds. In terms of a new purchase Diesels or EVs still may be bad investment compared to say a 3 year old haggled bargain from a non dealer.
I think the tax should be much lower on Petrol than diesel to further encourage the move from diesel, but the Government/Greens are very anti car in general and in their minds the best approach is to tax the cars off the road without proper cheap alternatives. Sure Ireland is going to save the climate.....
There is a thread here on boards in the regular motor section on HVO100 and I'm delighted to read that it's Euro6 compatible with existing and some older cars. That's really good news and a proper viable alternative to Diesel.
https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058325413/hvo100-diesel
As always thought there are some disadvantages, in some cars there's an efficiency hit so it uses more fuel but in others I've seen reports of better mileage but it's the same price as regular diesel and this is really disappointing and probably subject to the same tax, you'd think the Government would use their brains here and understand that making batteries is probably much less environmentally friendly than using existing cars and a renewable fuel source.
Just shooting the breeze here - but as we know a lot of this comes down to competition in the marketplace. In the past it was acceptable to operate on best-effort basis - that's cute when you effectively have no competition and early EV adopters have a huge tolerance for a failure or two - especially if they are getting the energy for free (as they were until 2020). As @liamog was saying, the equipment back then was almost cobbled together and standardisation of DC chargers was in it's infancy, and if I had to guess, hardware was being updated so rapidly that it was difficult to keep spares - plus they didn't probably have a quality team looking at failures or even managing the spares process. But that's all ok in the early years, but that quickly becomes unfunny when customers are paying for units. We saw that in this exact thread back in 2021. It's amusing to look back and see that eCars have made progress here. 😂
SLA’s will include the availability of spare parts. And are more than just pieces of paper. Financial incentives/penalties are a common feature
I’m very much familiar with ESB procedures ;) SLAs have most definitely come into it for ECars, in the past they didn’t have one.
Diesel was a disaster for our short urban journeys. If I wasn't getting EV I'd be getting petrol.
We use the Diesel for longer trips away from the East, once you go South East, West and North West it's a disgraceful situation with a complete lack of high power chargers.
I have a good bit of range in the id3 tour 5 and it meets most of our driving needs but the key here is most and that's the main issue, most still isn't good enough.
I have to admit if I were going for another new car I don't think it would be EV due to cost, Range, Recharge times, infrastructure etc. If I had to change tomorrow I'd be going back to 2nd hand diesel and saving a lot of money in the process now that I don't have to drive as much as I used to working from home a lot more.
Never made sense to me why public chargers don't all accept bank cards as a minimum. It would be so much easier. Loyalty card should be an extra.
I've only got an EV recently, and 95% of my journeys are short local journeys. But in Dublin there seems to be lot of new chargers. Seems to drop off rapidly once you head out side of Dublin. But its second car. If I had one car, and/or did a frequent long journeys, or had no home charging, I wouldn't go with a EV.
Complaints to ecars for what they are worth are
ecars@esb.ie
complaints to the energy regulator can be made to
customercare@cru.ie
Absolutely 100%, this is why I think synthetic fuels and HVO100 will really catch on, especially if Toyota are on board. + Synthetics will start to appear in the coming years.
The Rex gave me 100% independence from the Network and I could drive around on Cheap electricity for most of my driving, having 100% synthetic or Bio fuel engine would have been great but I still had the option to charge at DC chargers but it was great having the ability to avoid slow charging a cold battery.
All this is good news for many people who can't afford EV and who have no hope of charging at home/work and for those who don't want the hassles of using a public network and waiting on charging, but I would never advise someone to rely on work charging. People will get to run their cars for years longer which will be more beneficial to the environment in the long run.
Mod Note: There's a thread for the SEAI fuel price comparison posters https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058342040/seai-fuel-cost-comparison-posters-at-petrol-stations#latest
I still think running an ICE as a backup like the BMW i3 Rex was the best idea ever, you could bring that car absolutely anywhere.....no need to hang around at chargers
HVO100 is starting to appear now, CirckeK have it in Tinryland off the M9 but what cars can use it yet ? not many perhaps but if Toyota are starting to make HVO compatible cars and if this fuel catches on there can not be an ICE ban in 2035 because we will see Synthetic fuels or Efuels appear also and these can are 100% compatible with all existing ICEs without modification + home heating and Aviation.
HVO100 and synthetics will fill the gap where EV can not meet such as fast fill ups and much increased range and it will work for those who can not charge at home, apartment owners, people who rent etc.
You can even burn Hydrogen directly in ICE with modification.
Interesting times ahead.
I think SEAI are being very misleading, while also not drawing attention to price gouging on some chargers.
Because they can, seai are advertising EV cost as one third the price of diesel using home charging rates as the comparator. ignoring that using the cheapest public charging rate , ev would be more expensive than diesel .
I emailed ecars and they said
Our pricing review will be completed soon and we hope to any relay price change, if any, to our customers in Q2 of this year.
so give it another few months and sure see
Yep. I'm driving EV pushing on ten years and there's a very strong reason I've avoided the public charging network for the last seven years.
Was grand when it was me and a half dozen other people in the country. Not now though.
Yes true, a lot of the earlier generations of equipment had a lot of annoying quirks. Pretty sure the majority of it was repurposed from the kind of stuff you'd use for power grids
Problem is some of the current equipment also seems to have a lot of quirks
But with more dedicated charging equipment being manufactured they're steadily improving
One advantage Tesla probably have in that area in a they have a much shorter development cycle because they have all the charging data from their cars and can see where the errors are coming from
It's worth considering that there's a lot more incentive for Tesla to keep their SuC network operational than there was on Ecars historically
So the might be willing to do stuff like pay more for faster parts delivery or have more spare parts staged in reserve
It'll be interesting to see if they have the same attitude towards 3rd party networks. Often they depend on the supplier (Tesla) to maintain a stockpile of spares, but parts that are sitting on a spares shelf take away from the number of chargers you have built.
So will Tesla try to maintain more chargers on the same number of parts? Will there be a pecking order if parts are in short supply?
We'll just have to wait and see what happens
Using public chargers can be a frustrating experience, at least the ones at Circle K M9 Tinryland accept your bank card, this is the way forward as having multiple apps, cards etc is infuriating.
I'm surprised Easygo chargers don't accept bank card, you have to top up the app, it's a joke, you don't go to petrol stations all across the Island and pay in multiple currencies or need to do such daft things such as use apps so why should EV owners put up with this ?
It's a pity Easygo don't install more 100 Kw chargers than 50 Kw.
We still take the Diesel on longer runs, if going to the South West, West and North West, for example, we went to Bundoran recently and just took the Outlander, it's just so much more convenient and EV is never going to match this level of convenience because there aren't multiple high power chargers in every petrol station and EV range is still a fraction of ICE range, you'd need around 150 Kwh @20 Kwh/100 Kms to be comparable to ICE.
The original network handed to eCars by the CRU was made up of units that were seemingly pieced together by suppliers. The replacement programme implemented in 2018 consisted of new tenders that included supply of equipment and supply of spare parts.
DC charging equipment is a lot less experimental than it used to be so should be more stable and with an easier supply of spares.
The unfortunate thing about SLAs is they're just a piece of paper at the end of the day. They're supposed to guarantee a good level of customer support but quite often don't
Usually there's a guaranteed response time, but the response can literally just be acknowledging the request and providing some boilerplate debug steps
Parts availability seems to also be an issue, plenty of Ecars units were broken for ages because they couldn't find parts for repair
With more companies manufacturing quality charging equipment then there might be more of a push to provide good customer support as a selling point
I would have thought the tritium units that easygo and others use tend to be cheaper and less reliable. One issue ecars had was that in the past being free and a virtual monopoly their chargers got heavy use and abuse, and they were in place so long they became obsolete and replacement parts became impossible to get. Combined with single units per site was a recipe for unreliability.
Tesla superchargers seem to have reliability issues too but as they only have multiple units per site and they often have more than needed, and they can mark them out of use on the car navigation app. As they are so standardized they are probably easier to fix and easier to have spares ready to go.
eCars- being of ESB extraction- will take an engineering approch. I'm hoping that these days SLA's come into that conversation. It didn't in the past.
They’ll. need to offer a good SLA. That’s one thing ECars learnt over the years.
Ecars will go with whoever gives the better price, if Tesla charge less than whoever their current supplier is they'll do it
Their payment gateways might be more streamlined also.
I remember reading an article a while back which said Tesla are able to install fast chargers at a vastly lower cost than competitors
It was based on the applications for US subsidies, they have to disclose the installation costs and charging power
Now to some degree that's because Tesla have used their car business to subsidise their charging business, but that's likely reflected in lower equipment costs which can also be passed on to 3rd party buyers, giving them an edge in the charger market
I think a large part of it is that Tesla have significantly ramped production of Superchargers and also have a lot of experience with optimising production and installation costs
Tesla have started offering their V4 Superchargers as OEM equipment. It's possible this could also reduce charging hardware costs for operators. If the operator doesn't have to spend as much on reliable equipment they can lower the unit costs. Maybe eCars could use these at some point instead of the very large 4 DC chargers they seem to favour.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://www.boards.ie/applications/dashboard/design/images/banned.png)
