I've had my leaf for just over 4 months now, and it's been great!
There are several Ecotricity fast-chargers near here now (Cardiff)
including 2 in the city itself - but they could do with being spaced out
a bit better on the motorways (I guess we're stuck with where the
services are)
There's nothing on the A449/M50 if you're heading up to the Midlands
from Wales
Inclined to agree, even if they worked perfectly, I'd hate to have to
rely on them once there's more than a handful of cars running about.
The huge cost of the installations must mean availability will always
lag behind demand.
Yes, I've often thought it's daft to only have 1 car able to use a
charging point that
often has 2 parking spaces dedicated to it - you can't use both the AC
and the DC leads
to charge two cars at the same time.
High power AC sockets and lots of them would seem to be the way
forward, but somehow provision of charge points has become so complex
and communications dependent that they're possibly less reliable than
the Rapid chargers. I've given up on public charging altogether until
the situation improves
The comms is essential to let the car's battery management "drive" the EVSE
But it should be more robust
That's a shame, as Ecotricity's network has grown a lot even since I got
my leaf
(last Sept). But yes, the EVSE itself does seem to be unreliable & picky.
I often have to hold my card right up to the charger before pressing the
button
asking it to start a charge - or it won't recognise my card.....and this
happens with
both my cards.
Once the unit nearest me got itself stuck waiting for a user to finish
charging - but the user
had long since left! No amount of waving my card in front of it would
convince it
to turn on.... next day it was showing the dreaded "gears of doom".
Stupid software.
Made me wish I could find the main breaker and just reset it by cycling
the power!
Still, I love the speed of them when they do work!
And Kudos to Ecotricity for actually ponying up for installing all these
- they must
cost a fortune to install (imagine the cost of just the hardware, let
alone labour, testing & inpsection, etc)
The real problem is the fractured nature of the market here. Loads of
different
charger networks, databases, with not much talking to each other/sharing
of info.
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub
http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org
For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
