Lars997:
I was not intending to pull this thread towards an EV thread.
Nevertheless - Just my experience the last 3 days where I had my Hybrid on a business trip to Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart proved that the few EV stations we are having in our cities are overcrowded. I did see Tesla owners lining up and I did see frustrated EV owners not being able charging up their cars. The whole experience here in Germany is a mess. i.e. The EV apps are showing stations available which matter in fact are in use, some of the EV stations are made for compact EV cars, no chance for a Tesla or my big Volvo. And - there is a hick up with too many different plugs. The Typ2 plug seems to be standard but 35% of all chargers are using different plugs. And - owning a Tesla you might even face the problem that chargers are having a low output and delaying the charge time.
I never said anything against the Tesla I just say that it is way to early to seriously and doubtless drive an fully electrical vehicle today. The drive must be planned and managed. You for sure can work out a way to use the range but you must plan your trip as you must be patient to wait until another drive might empty the charger sport, etc. For a car used on business trip it doesn't work. In business you must have a reliable time-management, and a volatile charging experience just doesn't allow that.
Haha, yes, this thread has went way out of bounds. We should have a separate thread instead. But anyway, we've already destroyed this thread so why not continue
I've said it all the time... Tesla is the only alternative that works because of the Supercharger infrastructure that both is very quick for charging, built out with good network coverage and with a few rare exceptions no waiting times for charging either and no cumbersome payment or cables. Stop the car, plug it in and do your thing. Extremely convenient.
@Lars - I think your experience is a bit skewed since you're running around in your Volvo hybrid and Volvo does not have a simple dedicated charging infrastructure setup for you and you have to rely on a plethora of public options from energy companies, that all have their own way of managing payments to mention one thing that can become a nightmare for the customer. The Volvo hybrid has an onboard charger capable of 3,5kWh which mean that the battery (9kWh) will charge up in 2,5-3 hours. And for this effort you will get about 25-30km of range! Honestly, I would never bother the hazel to charge that thing up in public. Fiddling with apps, cables, payments, reading instructions on charging outlets, etc. It clearly is not a good alternative, I fully agree with that and if I had your Volvo I would never charge it in public charging outlets. I would probably plug it in overnight at home and when the battery is out the next day I would continue on fuel.
Compare the Volvo charging rates of 3,5kWh with Tesla Supercharger that is at a rate of 150kWh (Actual charging speed for a car is about 115kWh). So about 33 time faster charging than the Volvo and many other of todays EVs. Then also take into account that the infrastructure is almost 100% fault free. Superchargers are never down and maintenance free more or less.
This is another reason why I see very hard times for other manufacturers except Tesla. Today there is no good charging infrastructure and I doubt that e.g. the German car manufacturer will be able to build up something in 3 years that is on par with Tesla superchargers. It will require a lot of effort and they for sure don't have any experience in this domain. Also it will take a lot of time since many companies will cooperate around building the infrastructure and creating those agreements will take TIME. Being big companies is not a good thing when big structural changes are needed and a transformation like this will and take a lot of effort. And it is not even sure that they will succeed with it and the only option is to continue developing the existing platform and give away sales to other more innovative companies.
Problem with e.g. Mission-E timeframe is that the 800v chargers that Porsche says will fill up the car in 15 minutes. I can bet that those chargers will not be everywhere because they are both very expensive and quite complicated to install. They will be on few locations and most of the time a Mission-E owner will have to stop and charge the car up on much slower chargers. That will become a big issue for the owning experience of a Mission-E, at least when the car become available in 2020. This is probably also why Porsche plan rather low volumes initially.
If Tesla continue the expansion with charging infrastructure and launch of Model 3., Model Y, etc, I think they will grow to be a much bigger company and take sales from all the Germans (they already do with Model S/X). Then they will offer both high end models with good performance and range and also a entry level model with a competitive price point and also having access to the already well built out infrastructure for charging. Tesla will of course build out the charging infrastructure much more aggressive and they for sure already have the knowledge and know-how. And it is also proven that they have a interesting case since they hire a lot of skilled people from other car manufacturers to up the game in domains where they're currently behind (interior design to take one example).