Q: Like many, I am renting and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Given our apartment complex doesn’t have EV chargers installed, nor would we take on the expense of having it installed in a property we do not own, to what extent would it be feasible to own an EV and charge at parking/petrol stations as you would in a petrol/diesel vehicle? After all, I don’t have a petrol pump in the underground car-park either. – Mark N, Co Dublin
A: Hi Mark, welcome to my world. I’m not a renter, but I do live in a terraced house, into which it’s impossible to fit a charging point, and my local authority seems entirely disinterested about trying to encourage any on-street charging facilities within anything less than a 30-minute walk.
The problem is that the entire ecosystem (pun kinda intended) of electric cars has been designed around charging at home. While rapid DC charging has always been part of the plan, the problem is that lithium-ion batteries aren’t designed to be constantly fast-charged (it wears them out more quickly) and fast-charging is expensive. The idea is that you do almost all your charging at home, and only use fast chargers for top-ups on long journeys.
All well and good, and the potential running cost savings from charging at home, especially if you have cheap night-rate electricity, or home solar panels, can be profound. On a good night-rate, most medium-to-large battery EVs can be charged up for around €10, giving you maybe 400km or even 500km of range. Compare that with the kind of distance you can go on €10 of petrol (about 100km in a very economical car, if you were wondering) and you can see why electric car proponents so often try to remind reluctant consumers about the savings you can make versus a petrol car, even if the EV is more expensive to buy up front.
However, we’re drifting from the point a little, as none of this is any use to you, or me for that matter. There are two issues with what you’ve outlined above. First off, while you rightly point out that you don’t have a fuel pump at home, the difference – currently – between electric cars and petrol cars is the time taken to refuel. No petrol-powered car will take you more than 10 minutes to fill up, from the time you stop at the pump to the time you get back in and drive off (queues for the till in the little shop allowing).
An EV, by contrast, takes at least twice that long – and using the fastest possible chargers – and that still only gets you an 80 per cent battery charge. if you’re talking about using slower, less powerful AC charging, you’re looking at hours. And hours.
Then there’s the cost. While night-rate charging at home can cut the cost of pumping up your battery to as little as 10c per kWh, the cost of public charging is at minimum four times that price. Assuming you’ve signed up for an ESB e-Cars subscription – €4.79 per month – then the cheapest public charging is 47c per kWh on what the ESB still euphemistically calls a ‘fast’ charger, the 22kW AC charging boxes that you’ll find at kerbsides.
Using a ‘Rapid’ charger, of between 50kW and 150kW of DC power (we’d definitely quibble with the idea of 50kW still being thought of as ‘rapid’) you’ll have to pay 52c per kWh (and remember that you shouldn’t really be charging beyond 80 per cent on one of these chargers), and if you want to go beyond 150kW, you’ll have to pay 54c per kWh.
You can do a little better than that, however. If you live near an Ionity fast-charging station, you can subscribe to one of that company’s plans for €11.99 per month, which cuts your rapid-charging cost from 73c per kWh to 44c per kWh – cheaper even than ESB’s slow charging rate. Plus, Ionity chargers are among the most powerful, so if you’re driving a car with an 800-volt charging system, such as a Porsche Taycan (or, more affordably, a Kia EV6 or Hyundai Ioniq 5), then you can do a 10-80 per cent battery charge in as little as 18 minutes, if everything is working as it should.
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So it can be done, and I know this for a fact because this is what I do when I’m testing new EVs. With no home charging, I’m stuck with public points, and I tend to use either a kerbside ESB charger for a few hours at a time for top-ups, if it’s a day when I can work close to one of the few chargers nearby, or I go to Ionity for quicker charges.
How does this all affect the cost of running an EV, though? Well, let’s make some assumptions. Let’s assume that there’s an on-street ESB charger near your house, and you’ve signed up for the €4.79 monthly subscription. Let’s further assume that you’re driving a Volkswagen ID.4, currently the best-selling electric car in Ireland, which has a 77kWh battery and a real-world range on a full charge of around 450-500km.
Let’s further assume that you’re not running the battery flat, but plugging in to charge with around 10 per cent charge remaining. So you need to add 70kWh to get a full charge.
The first good bit of news is that the ID.4 can charge at up to 11kW on AC power, so assuming that the charger is working properly, you can add those 70kWh in six hours and 20 minutes, roughly, so you won’t fall foul of the dreaded ‘overstay’ fees if you remain plugged into the charger for longer than 10 hours. That overstay fee can run to as much as €22.50, and while it’s claimed that this is to encourage people to use the charger properly and leave it free for the next person, really it’s a tacit admission that there just aren’t enough chargers to go around.
So, connect up, start charging, and just over six hours later, you have a fully charged ID.4, which has cost you €32.90. Which is a fair chunk. It’s not as much as a tank of fuel, but working off the assumption that €10 will get you 100km, at an average of 5.8-litres per 100km fuel economy, it’s getting uncomfortably close to price parity with petrol.
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What about fast charging? Assuming you’re using one of the ESB’s medium-speed 50-150kW chargers, and you’re sticking to the 80 per cent rule, then you’re taking on 54kWh of energy, which will cost you €28. Which is better, right? Well, no – because you’ve only charged to 80 per cent, so your range is now only 360-400km in real-world conditions. If you’d gone to Ionity, the same 54kWh, assuming you’ve signed up for the monthly subscription, would have cost you €24, so a saving but not a massive one.
So, to answer your question – yes, it’s feasible and it’s something that I do myself on a regular basis, although it’s certainly more costly than having a home charging point, and it’s definitely far less convenient.
The problem is this: we are being encouraged to buy electric cars, which is fine, and electricity is, essentially, everywhere, which is also fine, but neither Government nor private industry seems yet to have gotten it into their heads that electric motoring only really becomes practical when everyone has equal access to affordable charging. Until that happens, people like you and I are going to have to pay more, and burn up our free time with charging.
