Getting the best from charging your EV in the UK - Tesla and Non-Tesla electric vehicles.

hello everyone i hope you're all well so my name is richard simons and i've been driving electric vehicles for six years now um throughout the uk long distance travel and i found it very simple and easy but there's a few useful tips and tricks to know to really make it even better and a better experience for charging your electric car so if you're about to undertake your summer holiday journey or you're about to get your first electric car i think you'll find this video very useful because i'm going to share with you some simple hints tips and tricks that'll make everything much easier and not too daunting at all so in this video i'm going to be speaking in a segment about tesla's because there's a tesla's have kind of got their own charging network and there's a few things that are useful to know regarding testers but i want to make sure we cover all electric vehicles whether it's a van porsche tycoon ld gts vauxhall corsa ease they're all actually very simple to travel long distances in these days so there's going to be a bit on both but first before we start that and your long distance journey let's just talk about your home charger and destination charges right so before we get into march 201 kilowatts and such like firstly most people electric car would normally charge at home i do know owners that don't and they purely rely on public charging but actually most people would charge at home and that's one of the benefits of electric cars is that you don't in your day-to-day driving actually even need to worry about public charges you've got a full tank of electricity every morning so your home charger might look something like this or this or this or you might have a commercial socket like this or a single phase 32 amp like this or you might even just use a three pin socket and plug but the reason you wouldn't really usually use one of these you'd normally get a home charger installed looking more like one of the other ones although they're actually a little bit out of date now but uh a home charger dedicated home charger for your car is worth getting um because they're normally just more powerful this is just 13 amps whereas you can normally get 32 amps out of a dedicated car charger and it's just quicker so most this video is about charging speed and that's really the goal you'll be able to charge nice and fast so we're going to cover that as well in a moment with public rapid charging but at home you'd normally get a box like that and in the uk with some government subsidy they're usually about 350 pounds fitted although i have known people just fit those commando sockets much cheaper there are various options available to you including you know nice tesla destination ones for teslas and other cars they can be used on as well but you have to buy them and then pay to install them so there's a few options out there but a home charger changes the dynamic of everything and the trouble we have with most of the kind of press who try an electric car is they usually don't have home charging so they're always kind of on the back foot and don't have a fully charged car every morning or when they're about to do those long trips and therefore they usually make a meal out of how you have to stop and charge all the time for most people with an electric car it's never an issue because every single morning you've got a full tank now whether that's a car of a range of 80 miles or 380 miles that's what you've got every day and actually public charging doesn't usually even apply for most cases but then there's public charging so again let's come on to the rapid charge in a minute but what you will find with public charging now loads of supermarkets hotels gyms all have usually some kind of socket available that you can plug into and you probably need a cable a bit like this this is a type 2 to type 2 cable and you can make use of those what are we called destination charges so they're not sort of super rapid but they can top your car up nicely certainly if you're staying at hotel overnight really fully recharged overnight and if you're staying at someone like tesco well some of them have got rapids now but what they call a seven kilowatt uh charger is normally a kind of speed where you can add in a tesla model three like this about 25 miles for every hour you're plugged in so if you're gonna be in tesco for ten minutes not much point but if you're gonna be there for a couple of hours then you may well do so however what i would say to that is if you don't need it don't use it if your tesco is one mile away from home you probably don't really need to use it don't use it just to get that parking spot in the car park save it for somebody who maybe doesn't have home charging and therefore when they do their weekly shop at tesco they can plug in for a couple of hours with their nissan leaf renault zoe and get a pretty good top up for example okay so now onto the nitty gritty you're doing a long road trip and you will need to use public charges ideally nice rapid charges to recharge your car when you're going on holiday to cornwall for example so um first of all i want to talk about tesla's because there's a few slightly different things with tesla's to the other cars i will come on to them in a moment so with testers like a model 3 they have what's called a ccs port and the ccs port is a very generic port that most rapid chargers now have that's now the new standard it's become the standard and that's what just about all electric cars now will have and so they can charge at the tesla superchargers and all the other public fast chargers nearly all basically all the new ones so a tesla model 3 easy but if you've got a model x or model s in the uk at the moment i would highly recommend getting one of these this is called a ccs adapter the snx only have a type 2 port whereas one of these enables you to use ccs connectors now this applies to tesla superchargers and then the ability to use all the other charges now you've got to remember only tesla can use the tesla chargers but tesla can use all the other charges as well well i'll say only test you can use a tester charges there is talk of opening them up to other cars but that's probably another video so with a model s or x i highly recommend one of these a ccs adapter it's from tesla at about 240 pounds as i speak now and this enables you to use all of the new tesla supercharger sites and then all the other good fast public charges because they only have a type 2 port now i've been driving a tesla around the uk with just this connector for ages and the older tesla supercharger sites just popping absolutely fine tesla supercharger is much like a petrol pump you have a big red and white stool and you unplug it and you pop it in here and it charges fast however all the new tesla supercharger sites now are ccs only so there's a number of tesla supercharger sites which you can only use if you have either a model 3 or if you have one of these for your s or x if you don't have one of these and the car this model s for example would not be able to charge at any number of the latest tesla supercharger sites so that's one of the most fundamental things to help make at least driving a tesla long distance is much easier so tesla makes it really easy to supercharger like i said a bit like petrol pumps you normally reverse up to them take the handle off the the stool and plug it into the car there's no payment needed at the store uh with teslas you keep a card payment on your tesla account when you plug your car in it automatically knows to take the charge from your account and there are some teslas that are available if they're early enough with free unlimited supercharging but for most of them now you have to pay for supercharging as you go however you can gain some free supercharger miles don't forget by looking at our referral code if you're about to order a new tesla that'll give you a thousand miles of free supercharging for you and for me so um but there's a couple of things at the supercharger sites which again are important really so one of them is the urinal rule so this counts really for what we call the v2 supercharger sites these are sites where you've got two cables in the stool and you'll see the stalls numbered one a one b two a two b and so on now the pairs of ones share the power and the pairs of two share the power so if there's a car at 1a try and avoid plugging into 1b if possible go on to 2a that way you're not sharing the same power you would get a slower charge and the car you plug in next to potentially could also have its charge slowed down obviously if the site's busier then it's unavoidable but if you can avoid it remember the urinal rule and try and avoid going right next to each other if going next to each other is unavoidable try and have a look with the charges often people just sat in the car working on the laptops and phones and stuff the speed at which the green light is flashing indicates how fast it's charging so if you're coming to a supercharger site it's a v2 site v3 you don't need to worry about that's where they've only got one cable in the stool they've all got independent power but let's say you're going to have to park next to somebody you have to break the urinal rule i always try and have a quick look if i see a car that's flashing really fast green blinks that means they've probably recently plugged in the car's taking lots of power and you're not going to get much if you're part next to it whereas another car two stalls up might just be blinking quite slowly like this one in which case they've probably come towards the end of their charge and so plugging into them next to them wouldn't be so much of an issue now remember this um with teslas and really with most electric cars you don't really want to charge beyond 80 the charge curve it continuously slows down so the higher the state of charge in the battery the more the charge rate slows down and with just about every electric car by the time it gets to about 80 you're better off just unplugging and moving on if you're ready to go because it's already got another couple of hours of driving then so you may as well so the cost of fast charging your car now whether it's a tesla that shows the price of it here what that has cost or other cars and other public charges does vary so with tesla superchargers if you haven't got free supercharging of course then it varies between 20 something pence per kilowatt hour and usually 30 something per kilowatt hour and public charges are similar can be 30 per kilowatt hour can be more um so you need to be you know mindful of how much it's costing but typically it's still cheaper than petrol ads and of course you don't use them every day you normally charge from home where it costs you pence if not nothing so the cost of supercharging when i see this mentioned in the media that this trip has cost that of course normally it wouldn't cost anything like that it's only those days where he uses public charges and i've normally spent no more than 20 pounds on public charging typically between 5 and 15 pounds for the top-up that you need on that long journey that day one thing a tesla does really well is the route planning for you so you just put where you want to go and the car will plot it's recommended or suggested stops for that car on that journey and including consideration for the traffic so just put in where you go and the car will tell you where to go and what to do and how long you're going to be charging there for what sort of percentage you're going to have when you arrive at that stop now what i have found actually is and the more you drive your tester the more you can kind of often overrule the decision of the car now this can apply to other cars as well and i'll come on to that but here for example it recommends the first stop actually once you start driving and you've got your kind of economy averaging out nicely you might decide actually you've got enough and you can go onto the charger after that because the lower the state of charge the faster the car charges so when you get comfortable with the range of your car because the car will always leave a good buffer you can actually kind of ignore that go on to the next charger arrive there with a lower state of charge and charge faster so sometimes overruling the car doesn't do any harm now one thing to bear in mind with the teslas and all the other electric cars is real world range and i think um this is where tesla in particular can they they stay you know expected range of a car model 3 long range at 380 something miles but in reality it wouldn't do that unless you really really try so different cars calculate their predicted range differently but you've got to bear in mind that the real world range is often different to what the manufacturer advertises and it's much like in with combustion cars this car does 60 miles per gallon actually it normally does 45 miles per gallon um kind of getting to know your car and its real world expectations is really key to planning your long journey the testers and its route planning does take that into account and also leaves buffers but getting to know that range of your car in different weather conditions is a really important factor uh with your long distance journey well the testers make it all quick easy and simple and the supercharger is always fast but what about other cars so many other cars out there porsches audis renault zoes nissan leafs and there's a really good mixture of choice now and this is where i think one of the key things to know is charging speed so kilowatt hours is the size of your battery but kilowatts is the speed that your car can charge at i think it's really important to know what car uh what your car is capable of charging how fast can it charge so a porsche tycan audi gt e-tron for example can charge incredibly fast 265 odd kilowatts we've charged this car at which is very very quick indeed and in fact in the real world usually faster than the tesla's so the key to getting the most out of this car is to find those really fast chargers now the porsche and the audi are fairly exceptional we just did a video with the corsa e now the course e doesn't charge as quick of these 100 kilowatts that's pretty good still um but it means uh again you don't you know you want to find a 50 kilowatt charger 100 kilowatt charger so that car can get what it can take uh is the key to limiting the charging time needed oh it's a nice action on this isn't it so when i talk about charging speeds this is where i think i have found from my experience with anything that's not a tesla is to very much take into account anything that sat nav suggests with a pinch of salt so what i have found now it could be a thai can gt pole star did the same to me is when you put in a route the car often recommends charging stops and you think okay that's good i'll stop at those services and charge there but often it's best to overrule this and again a bit of experience with this certainly helps but let's take a pollstar as a prime example i was traveling down the m3 common route of mine and the car suggested i stop at a service station to recharge fine any new owner think fine that's nice and easy but those charges were 50 kilowatts and 50 kilowatts actually by modern standards isn't particularly fast it's what a rapid charger used to be and they're all kind of gradually being replaced and upgraded but there's still a lot of 50 kilowatt charger sights which if you're not in a mega rush to stop for a charge fine and in the poll start it would do the job but you could be waiting there maybe an hour now in the pollstar in particular this car does the same just down the road literally about five miles away was a 175 kilowatt shell recharge so much faster charger and certainly charges the pole star quicker and would charge this quicker and this is what's annoying because with you know a new owner they'll get their car they'll listen to the nav they'll stop at a charge and think this isn't as quick as they said it would be it's taken a little while here well again a bit of common sense perhaps and a bit of kind of logic knowledge and you know learning as you go forget what the car says it doesn't know about that show recharge down the road so go and use that much faster charge much shorter stoppage time and if that's what you need that's what you've got to find so how do you find these faster charges then and potentially overall what the car recommends well this is where non-tesla doesn't do any harm to just do a little bit of research before a long journey i'm sure the software in cars will get better update improve but there's some really good apps out there now so there's an app like this called a better route planner and here you can put what car you've got and what percentage of state of charge you're going to leave with and it will plan a route for you and it's pretty good at optimizing this this will say well this is a fast charger use this one ignore that one that's slower so this will plan a pretty good route for you on a journey and then i also use an app called zap map and in here again we've got filters here so if i'm driving the thai cam for example i can filter only charges over 100 kilowatts and it will show me those really fast charges you can even filter here just a super powerful 350 kilowatt charges of which at the moment there's not as many but there's more coming every week so this is really good to see and here for example if i'm doing a route from the south coast we are up to anywhere in the north of the midlands rugby services has been a really good stop grid serve are replacing all the ecotricity points and most of the services are good now and easy to use but actually here we've got this super powerful 350 kilowatt charges which are very quick we just need more of these to maximize the current charge speeds that you can get on cars like the etron gt and the porsche tai can so when you do get to the public chargers normally they're just apple pay contactless debit card payment very simple very easy often you basically connect the car swipe your card there's often a minute or two where it just says communicating with the car just be patient leave it wait till it shows that it's charging and then go away and have your coffee and lunch and answer some emails watch a good youtube channel called alzheimer's istv something like that there's always something to do when you're just stopping for literally 30 40 minutes very very need to stop any longer than that but one sort of point with those charges although contactless payment is now the norm um and they all work and they're very simple and very easy we used to have all these cards for different kind of you know shell and bp but really the contactless payment really always works if you use them regularly it doesn't do any harm to sign up or you know and their app or whichever the charger network you're going to use whereas ionity instaval bp pulse and i've just had i think it was twice where the contactless payment card reader didn't work so when that happened i could start the charge for my app so it's kind of a good backup to have them on your phone just in case you're needing but usually just dead simple work easily and with ionity by the way i'll bring them into the topic because they're quite expensive 69 pence a kilowatt hour um but i get it basically um you know it's not for everyone if you've got usually an audi or porsche or even the mercedes actually you tend to get a card at least for the first year with a subscription so you're you only pay 30 pence we could always use the same as a tesla's um but it is quite expensive now if you need it they're there they're not busy there's not loads of people using it just because the charging is cheap and free they keep them available so at least it's there and certainly if you'd run up down to the porsche tycoon you want those fast chargers like that available so um yeah i honestly it'd be nice to see consistently cheaper prices but then we need more stalls please you know so i get it with them um so there we go uh let's wrap it up from there uh now public charging with an electric vehicle very simple very easy a little bit of planning bit of knowledge about your car and what charging speeds mean other than that straightforward there's always something to do when you are waiting i don't usually wait for one about 40 minutes or charge to more than 80 so i don't think you have to do either of those there we are let's call it a wrap don't forget to subscribe to our channel hit the bell icon if you haven't already to see more videos as we go and we've got some good things in the pipeline to show you so stay tuned back soon with more when you are away from home and you're staying you know in a hotel or chalet or lodge i always try and book a place with a charger so a lot of modern booking sites you know brooklyn.com or various other sites are available there's usually a filter now to filter by accommodation which has electric vehicle charging again just look at what charging speeds they are i've known people advertise that it's just a three pin socket fine if you're staying there for a few days you're not using the car much but actually most sites now have a seven kilowatt odd charger similar to the power of the ones you get at home and it could be a tesla destination charger now whenever tesla destination charges what i would say is usually there's two or four or six of these some would be tesseroni and some would be for any other car as long as they've got a type 2 port but otherwise it could just be a socket like our other connector over there in which case don't forget that type 2 to type 2 cable so staying away try and book hotels which have taken the effort to put electric car chargers in i think it's worth rewarding them for doing that

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Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021