For a two car household, one electric and one conventional is entirely feasible. Better still if they have garage or driveway parking and can install charging point. Initial cost and battery life are major considerations anyway.

Otherwise there are two challenges:

- routine charging where the absence of points is a real barrier

- journeys close to the vehicles minimum range with bad weather, delays, etc

The option could exist for hiring conventional for long trips, but this only increases the cost disincentive.

It took a friend of mine 7 hours to drive 150 miles from Cornwall via A38 M5, stop start traffic, queuing, driving lights, wipers aircon, radio etc in yesterdays horrendous weather. I doubt any electric car would have made the distance without the driver being seriously concerned.

I sympathise, as I make an even longer journey (275-300 miles) from my home in Hertfordshire to Cornwall on holiday. Roughly the same duration (including 2 breaks [one for lunch]), but normally with less traffic (I also go out of the school holidays).

I find that at each service stop normally has about 2 or 3 non-Tesla EV charging points (90% of the time I'm there they are all used), and about 3-6 Tesla ones, which appear to be mostly 1/3 - 1/2 used.

The large up-front cost of significantly increasing those facilities so that a larger number of EV owners could use rapid chargers mid-journey would have to be recouped from someone, and quite I suspect quickly, especially if solar charging improves in future years.

I certainly wouldn't want to have to wait near the max 2hrs mark at such service stops in order to ensure my car definitely reached its destination without grinding to a halt on the motorway through a flat battery. As you say, there are times when significant traffic jams mean (especially in very hot or cold weather) that someone in an EV could burn through their battery life very quickly whilst going practically nowhere.

If EVs could guarantee a minimum range of 350 miles in any condition (that's the lowest range I've had in my petrol car in the absolute worst conditions in the dead of winter), then that would certainly help, however I still think it's the charging infrastructure (I'm less concerned about generating capacity, as there would be less electricity usage to compensate because refineries would be using less) that's the problem.

A good idea would be to offer the pure battery EV an option of being equipped with its own generator, like this 20 KW gas turbine auxiliary power unit, run it on almost anything.

Roll up at the motorway services for a break, press the charge button, job done, it starts itself up, charges the battery while you are on your break, come back to car refreshed, drive on your way.

Good idea, Samsung are working on graphene batteries for mobile phones, and talk is they may use them for cars as they can be made part of the chassis/body, saving room and charging would only take minutes, discharge rate is much faster as well for power and acceleration, apparently they should be ready for the galaxy S11, then cars- if all goes well

A good idea would be to offer the pure battery EV an option of being equipped with its own generator, like this 20 KW gas turbine auxiliary power unit, run it on almost anything.

Roll up at the motorway services for a break, press the charge button, job done, it starts itself up, charges the battery while you are on your break, come back to car refreshed, drive on your way.

Agreed, Jaguar had the right idea with its Bladon gas-turbine hybrid prototype. Also, how cool would it be to own a jet car!

An electric recharging point is far cheaper to install than a petrol pump, so basically your motorway service station car park with have a charging point at large numbers of parking spaces if not all. It would be more problematic with traditional service stations, where space is limited, but ordinary car parking spaces can be used. Not trivial, but I’m sure it would not be a show stopper.

I spent a couple of weeks working in Sweden in July. The public car park outside the factory had electric charging points for EVERY space (at least 250+, maybe 500). All the hotels have at least 50% of spaces with charging points.

I also noted that at least 95% of the cars in the car-hire airport parking lot were Volvos and never noticed one pot-hole anywhere! But hey-ho, those Swedes pay lots of income tax, so they must all be mad.........................

Edited by nick62 on 20/08/2019 at 23:27

An electric recharging point is far cheaper to install than a petrol pump, so basically your motorway service station car park with have a charging point at large numbers of parking spaces if not all. It would be more problematic with traditional service stations, where space is limited, but ordinary car parking spaces can be used. Not trivial, but I’m sure it would not be a show stopper.

The difference is that I personally don't have to pay up front for a petrol filling station to be built. I live in a flat, which means the entire development would have to pay the entiore cost to install each charging station, assuming there's room (which there isn't) to install them all for EVERY space. Costs and disruption would include:

1. Getting a consultant to check for require space, also to see if the existing electrical infrastructure would cope (not everyone charges overnight from midnight) and to manage the contract and works;
2. Likely large amounts of communal gardens, roadways and pathways would have to be dug up/remodelled in order to install one EV charger for every space, including visitor parking. Where would all the cars park when this is being done? Parking is already very limited with no on-road space for vehicles, as the road are not wide and would prevent large vehicles such as delivery and bin lorries and emergency vehicles from getting about.
3. The cost of the chargers would be higher because they are remote from homes (flats and houses) as we have 'allocated spaces in car parks and thus they have to be robust and secure, more so than the more basic 'domestic' units attached to the side of a house (which only a handful of houses could do [most of ours are terraced homes]);
4. The Residents Association (in my case, private, run by the residents' nominated firm) would have to either borrow a huge amount of money (likely running into well over £500k, maybe over £1m if lots of groundworks and remodelling is required [likely]), triple (or higher) the service charge over 3 years, or take well over a decade to do the works, which would end up costing vastly more money and meaning certain residents pay but don't see a benefit for years.
5. Extra money would be needed per year for maintenance and repairs (including from vandalism).

A management and logistics nightmare. As I've explained before, the above is quite typical of most streets/developments with flats and terraced houses, never mind councils and public RAs who would have to borrow yet more money, and yet most people can't afford to buy an EV unless its well over 5 years old, when the battery effectiveness and longevity/reliability is lower and the replacement cost (compared to that of the value of the car overall) is prohibitive.

As I said before, installing many EV charging stations on motorway service stops is not cheap, and those owning them will want to recoup that money (likely loaned) very quickly, which means charging prices will be high, just like at their petrol pumps.

Note that at many service stops, thee car parks don't have gaps at the ends of spaces to accomodate any (never mind back-to-back) EV charging points, thus whole car parks would have to be remodelled to accommodate them, probably reducing their capacity by about 25%, maybe more.

Most already get jam packed in the summer holiday season, so the only alternative would be to make them bigger - more costs to get back by upping prices for chargeable items, which would prove unpopular, or even worse, charge everyone for parking, which would mean those without EVs not needing to be charged would subsidise those (richer) people who own them.

Nice. Going full-on EV for everyone is not anywhere near as easy as the greenies believe. I'm not being a glass-half-empty guy for my health - I'm bringing my insight in engineering working on construction projects to this issue, and believ me, those saying it'll all be plain sailing are selling you a bill of goods, mainly because they have a stake in the firms or wishing to gain [more] political power from decisions to implement such tech as quickly as possible.

See what a mess has been made of the wind and solar generation industry and the bad knock-on effects of that mis-management - the huge subsidies, the lack of benefit for ordinary people, rip-off dodgy workmanship on projects, wind turbines that barely work, power cuts caused when 'green tech' (frequently) goes offline, e.g. when its too windy or still days, or the sun isn't shining.