German Petrol Stations Must Offer EV Charging – But Is This The Wrong Strategy?

One of the most reported stories of the last few days has been about Germany obliging its petrol stations to also offer electric vehicle charging. This news has been met with almost universal positivity by EV enthusiasts and early adopters, alongside the question whether the U.K. should follow suit. Certainly, for Germany to reach the total of 70,000 charging stations cited for mass EV adoption by BDEW (Germany’s association for the energy and water industry), there needs to be a radical shift. In December 2019, there were only 23,840 charge points in Germany, and still only 27,730 by March 2020. But is this really the right strategy to lure people over to greener zero-emissions vehicles from their internal combustion engine (ICE) fumes belchers?

Most of us have a fundamental misunderstanding of how EVs are different to ICE vehicles. We think of them as just cars with an electric engine. But they’re more like the way a smartphone is not a more talented telephone. They don’t just do the same old job better; they fundamentally change our lifestyles. With a smartphone, we spend far more time using social media apps than we ever did making voice calls. With an EV, perhaps the changes are little more subtle, but there is a difference from our traditional cars and how we use those.

With an ICE vehicle, we park it outside our house or flat, and use it until the petrol gauge approaches the red zone, then we take a trip to the nearest petrol station to top up the tank. The problem that the traditional car industry has is that they think we should be using EVs in an identical way, and Germany’s new legislation assumes the same thing. But just for starters, one of the first prerequisites most EV adopters will consider is home charging, which changes this dynamic completely.

The other issue is how long it takes to charge an EV, which is seen as the most significant problem to be solved before mass adoption can take place. You can drop into your local petrol station, and assuming there is nobody else waiting, you could be in and out in five minutes with a full tank. But even on the very fastest EV charging currently available, Ionity’s 350kW network, it’s likely to take more than twice that time to get your car’s battery even to 80%, let alone completely replenished. These 350kW stations are hardly common, with just four in the U.K. so far. Anything less than 350kW will take a fair bit longer. Using the popular Audi e-tron as an example, this will take 30 minutes to get to 80% on a 150kW ultra-rapid charger, 45 minutes on 100kW, 1.5 hours on 50kW, and a numbing 4 hours on 22kW.

According to Zap-Map, of the 31,799 charging connectors in the U.K. on 8^th June 2020, only 876 were ultra-rapid (ie 100kW and above), and 6,212 were rapid (over 25kW). The remaining 24,711 were 22kW or lower. So in the majority of cases, your Audi e-tron will be taking at least 45 minutes to charge up, and more likely hours. That’s not a quick trip to the petrol station like we used to do with ICE vehicles. You could, of course, aim to have ultra-rapid chargers everywhere. But is Germany really going to be installing 350kW chargers in all of its petrol stations? Considering the costs involved, it’s highly unlikely. Ionity is pricing its 350kW network at 69p (88 cents) per kWh for ad-hoc users. That makes electricity twice as expensive per mile than a decent diesel car for motorway usage.

This is fundamentally the wrong way to look at EV ownership. We’re not going to be using EVs like petrol cars, making a special trip to charge them up. A lot of EV users will be doing the majority of charging at home and only occasionally having to charge them elsewhere. But when we do, we should consider what most of us actually use our cars for (outside motorsports) – going somewhere. Our journeys have destinations where we spend some time doing something, be it shopping, eating, or entertainment. This is where the charging should be focused, where it won’t matter if it takes an hour to refill. If you’re going to the nearest shopping mall or supermarket, you’re going to be spending an hour or two anyway. It won’t matter if the charger is 50kW or less. Your car will still get plenty of watts into its battery. Even on long journeys, service station stops for rest plus some food and drink are a necessity. So again, your charge doesn’t need to be five minutes long.

In a world of electric vehicles, it’s likely that petrol stations won’t have been switched over to being EV charging stations. They’ll be extinct. You won’t make a special trip to charge up, you’ll work this activity into your existing lifestyle. Chargers need to be installed on this basis, at the focal points where people go in their cars and park for a length of time – shopping malls, sports facilities, entertainment hubs, and motorway service stations. This is, of course, already happening. But making petrol stations switch over is not the route to more rapid EV adoption. The focus should be bolstering the number of charge points at our natural life destinations instead.