The PAINS of Living with an EV! My WORST Experience Yet

hi guys i'm shmee hello and welcome back to the channel will you join me today with my slightly multi-colored porsche tycan that's sitting here in the garage in london currently with 24 percent of battery so i'm going to take it out to a rapid charger to get it topped up but talk a bit more about how quickly the world of these things is changing because believe me even in the time that i've owned this it has quite a lot especially here in the uk and i picked it up if you've been following about five or six months ago in the first month already drove a thousand miles learning the world of evs the charging infrastructure the good places and the bad places as a petrol head embracing that world and trying to understand it a little bit more you might be wondering about charging here and i do have to say this every time i rent the parking spaces in the garage here so despite there being lighting and electricity unfortunately i can't install an ev charger because i move spaces fairly regularly by the time i bit one i'll then be on another space and it wouldn't make any sense so for the time being until the arrival of the museum very soon where i'll be able to keep it topped up i had to manage with going to charging stations which is the case for a lot of people especially here in the city center street parked cars cars don't necessarily have easy access to charging points now like i said this world is changing fast and today i'm going to take it out to a new charger that wasn't even there when i bought this car and we'll talk a bit more about where it's all going and have my thoughts changed so far it is certainly looking a little bit multi-toned at the moment the volcano grey metallic paintwork at the front most of the car with the midnight green wrap and of course the panels that had to be removed after the unfortunate incident that happened at the front of this when it was parked where the gtr roadster is at the moment the gt4 is tucked into that very small space in the middle for the time being the one if we can say upshot as a result of that happening and obviously replacing the carbon fiber splitter is that around here in the boot of the car if we just come back and open this up for a second i have some original parts that i get to keep as an ornament as a display item this is really lightweight and flimsy by the way the original splitter but as you can see that was um very much game over with that crack that could not be repaired hence it being replaced and i'll keep that and find something fun to do with it along with some of the other parts that i've got for the time being i will be obviously getting it re-wrapped but because it's got softer paint it's hardened up enough now that i can take the car out without worrying about it but it's not ideal to wrap straight on top of fresh paint because then when you remove the wrap you can do some major damage to what's left underneath but of course thanks to the guys at acting coach works it is exactly as it should be looking magnificent again i just can't wait to get it back fully to its former glory now talking charging obviously it'd be wonderful to be able to charge the car up here alas that is not possible for me because even now i've been hopping around spaces over the last couple of days as well a little bit so i would effectively be the guy fitting ev charging ports to every single space for everyone else and while i would love to do that it is actually quite expensive so that's one to say for the future the good news is that with the museum i'll have a three-phase connection so i'll have the ability to charge the car very very quickly when we're there now fundamentally at the moment if we come through i think this car has literally 24 or so which is enough to get me to a new charger that i did go to the other day 23 so well 53 miles we'll get there with more than enough to spare to not have to worry about it but basically this world is changing new charging stations are opening up on what seems like a weekly basis they're getting faster they're getting easier and obviously it's a chicken or egg scenario do you get the cars or do you need the infrastructure to get the cars what's the point in building infrastructure if people don't have the cars so this is growing in a very quick way but for the time being let's take this one out then go get it charged up and i'll explain a little more now you might be wondering why am i heading out of london to go and charge up this car because on paper that is totally illogical well the center of london does not exactly have much by way of fast charging infrastructure there are a couple of 150 kilowatt charges but none of them are very conveniently located for me so to travel to them even though in mileage terms they are significantly less far than heading out of the city in terms of travel time they're not great because especially with afternoon rush hour traffic it would not be the best to actually get there so we're heading to the new ionity charging station at the beckham's field services on the m40 i went to one ionity charger first back at the end of last year at chobum services on the m25 and got an experience of quite how quickly it could go effectively i think it took about 30 35 minutes to take it from basically empty to nearly very full and obviously with charging batteries you don't really get them to 100 it takes a long time to do that last few percent and you also don't run them anything like down to zero because well nobody wants to get stranded it's not like with a combustion engine car where you can get a jerry count of fuel and top it up you basically have a problem if you get to zero percent i'm not sure how much margin for error there is when it says zero percent and that might be something to try with the right support prepared in advance but fundamentally you don't get all that much range a car like this especially with cold temps at the end of last year was doing about 175 to 200 miles or so in total with a realistic charge cycle we could say so when we took this oh nice roswell's wraith when we took this up to with the amg gtr roadster up to pandora near birmingham we had a 250 mile round trip now obviously that being further than the range i tried out a couple of different things along the way and one of the biggest learnings that i experienced was that the traditional motorway service station infrastructure has just not been up to scratch it was basically installed five to ten years ago when the charging infrastructure's maximum output basically was about seven kilowatts so with your 45 minute time deadline that you're allowed to be there you could get only what five ten miles worth of range so utterly useless and the problem was although there are great apps from the different providers and also zap map and different things to find dedicated fast or rapid charging locations they're always a little bit off route which means you need to do a bit of planning you need to prepare in advance and you can't change let's say or be spontaneous during the day in case you don't end up finding a way to get the car charged to get it back home and that's part of this barrier to entry that i talked about quite so much in terms of everybody having an understanding of how to go about doing this it's okay for early adopters who are super enthusiastic who want to learn who want to understand but for people where this is a means of transport it's going from a to b they don't want to have to learn something more complicated than fueling up a car from a nozzle at a pump and then paying and being done after 10 minutes that's where it all gets i think a little bit difficult until things have been simplified and one of the biggest things even that changed at the end of last year here was that all charges require you now to be able to tap your card pay and go you don't have to have loads of different accounts because that was something i was even struggling with was you get somewhere you've got to make an account and you've got to deal with all of that before you move on but now you've got to be able to just tap your card pay and on you go and that makes things significantly easier i think we'll obviously gravitate towards a world where we know in advance what's going to be where so you don't have any surprises when you do get to the location but at the moment fortunately things are changing very very quickly and i said it's this chicken or egg thing but the charging infrastructure is growing so fast right now that the number of these fast locations that are popping up is mind-boggling in particular actually the first dedicated services station uh up near rugby in the midlands has now opened built for the purpose the first new services station uh in many years in fact here in the uk a bit like a main i guess intersection set of services that you might have on a highway in the us so this is marking a big big change and it's crazy actually because that's what i referenced at the time what i said was that the infrastructure out if you're going for a long journey has been lacking behind lagging behind and that's what's lacking from really making this work and already within months that's changing so i know if you fast forward a couple more years that's going to be gone and obviously it's not a binary one or zero it works or it doesn't work it's getting better and better and better all the time and the infrastructure is growing at such a rate and obviously this is a specific problem if you're either going to do a long distance drive or if you can't charge from home and in many cases people can charge from home charge up the cars at low rates overnight fully charged in the morning and you never have to go to fill up your car you know most journeys are not 175 miles or more long most journeys would be i don't know what the average actually would be but let's say 20 miles or something if you're driving 20 miles and drive 20 miles back when you get home you plug it in again and the next morning it's full so you never even have to fill it up at all you never have to stop at a petrol station it's only when you go much much further so imagine if every long drive you were going to do every service station everywhere had fast chargers enough uh charging points and they were all reliably working every time that would actually be a really good situation a really good experience because driving the car like this when you're just cruising when you're chilling when you're just driving along you know pop it on cruise control what are we 50 miles an hour set it for the right speed let the car do its thing it's so quiet and peaceful and this particular car is so lovely especially with this ride it is very rolls-royce honestly it's super smooth it's super quiet and when we get to the national speed limit side and i want to put my foot down to go from 50 miles an hour up to 70 miles an hour happens effectively instantaneously it's just tap the throttle and away you go wait for it wait for it go done that's all you're gonna get this car just absolutely gets a move on with a lot of torque 1050 newton meters 760 odd horsepower and yeah it's a big learning thing and i do wish there was obviously a fast charger closer to home but we will get there and then of course we're going to find out this is always the thing is it working properly are they fully occupied and am i going to be able to charge the car up without too much stress arriving now at the services we are down to 12 of battery you're going to pop up at 15 basically to let you know that you don't have much left and then you start to get them more increasingly regularly of course as it goes down from there but a few people asked before when i ran it down to three percent before going to charge it why i didn't preheat the battery and one thing that i've learned about this is in the charge settings when your battery charge is too low you can't pre-cool or heat to prepare it to charge up a little bit faster so this is basically going to be a case of pulling up plugging it in and i guess to get it up to 80 percent or so from this is probably half an hour or so it's not a crazy amount of time and i'll pop in go to the facilities buy some snacks and then it's not really oh hello nice 991.1 gt3 cool can't complain nice cars about i think we need to head through here because this is one of the other things is how easily you can actually find the charging points when you arrive at the services it's not the same as obviously the petrol stations which you can spot from a mile away because they're typically pretty tall and have all sorts of markings and signs to point you towards them i have been here before so i do know where i'm going it is very very busy actually around here at the moment but let's head on through this is where i'm slightly self-conscious whether people are wondering why on earth this car has multiple different colors on it but the last that is the way of life let's see if there's going to be a free one here we have to go kind of around let's go this way like i said it's a bit of a maze i don't think there is you know i think i'm going to have to wait a little bit perhaps oh this is not ideal but that is part of the point i guess i've been trying to make let's see there is one i don't know if it's connected yet let's pull in here and because of where the charging points are on this you have to get really uncomfortably close to like the barriers uncomfortably close to be able to reach which i don't particularly enjoy and then obviously the parking sensors are going crazy so what are we down to 12 percent let me hop out i'm gonna plug this in and go see how we can do right wish me luck let's hope this is going to work we've got a few other cars lined up here as well i'm gonna come around towards this side where the device is of course we need to open this we need to open the lower flap because we're going to be using the full charge connect take this unplug it he says there we go come round carefully not to damage paintwork wherever possible although very very hard to do and then twist this until you can get it in which again i can't really do one-handed this is not the easiest thing there we go plugged in connected oh oh that wasn't there a second ago that's come up [Applause] what was i saying what was i saying hey about these this is case in point charger not functioning unfortunately let's pop it back that is typical so i need to wait until somebody's finished wonderful don't know what to tell you guys you've watched it first hand this is this is part of the problem this is a big big part of the problem i've moved positions round two let's see if we're gonna get any luck here but i don't think it will because i think at the moment only the middle two of these are in operation basically because they're new and not yet running at full capacity so we will give exactly the same process again and see where we can get to so we've picked something up here get rid of that um at the moment it says it's working so grab this pull it out let's see if we're gonna have any luck it still seems to be working up to this point just a little bit fiddly to get it all the way here plug it in let's see no this one's out of order as well so it looks like we're gonna have to wait until we get to one of the middle ones available now this is where immense patience is required because of course we've got to wait until one of those two becomes available the tesla just plugged in he was here before me so he will be a little while zoe thankfully is now approaching 90 so that won't be too long until i can pull forwards i know in the future all four of these will be operational but one of the biggest things about this then is what happens in a year's time when there are double the number of evs on the road do they all of a sudden need to have eight here and even those will be fully occupied most of the time well how's that going to go and i think that's this chicken and egg thing again it needs to go perhaps even faster than it is to get this up to scratch to make this work because eventually if you're sitting here queuing for a charger you've reached the maximum parking limit which i guess is two maybe three hours i probably need to go and have a look i hope i'm not going to be here for two hours but you never entirely know how long this might actually be before we can get this car fully charged up and it's not ideal quite frankly this is not ideal but i suppose when the zoe is finished i will be able to pull forwards and we'll uh get it a little bit higher than the 12 we currently have right third time lucky let's see this one we know is at least working so let's go and try it i feel like this is a lot of deja vu but let's go give it another go see if we're gonna have luck here gosh it does look hard having the gray against the green but let me squeeze around we will firstly go and open this again doing this quite a few times getting very used to it grab this it says connect hopefully all is well make sure it's pulled out from up there so we've got enough reach plug it in there we go you can't really avoid this kind of leaning on your car you've got to do it whether you want to or not connected start do we need to do anything should be open at the moment just in case so i've lit my card um we know from before that currently these are only running 150 but 150 is fine that's very very very fast there we go preparing to charge setting up communication with the car hopefully this isn't going to take too long and then we'll see whether we're able to get some decent speed out of it that's going to be the big question i guess at the moment this is just lining things up getting them ready i really don't like this i need a better solution to this obviously with cars that have charging ports right at the front you don't have that problem or right at the back even but um this is not ideal especially when it's not wrapped obviously these are kind of rubbery so they're not going to scratch in theory but you never know something could go wrong okay 11 it says let's uh keep our eyes on this and see how well it makes some progress this certainly isn't the best it's going somewhere but 2.4 miles per minute is going to be well that's just over an hour to fully charge it up now we won't get it to 100 because it's not worth waiting all of that time but in the meantime kind of on theme slightly this car is called the taikan turbo s it does not have a flat six but nonetheless we do have some cool designs in the chairs by ximen50 shop do check these out the flat six collection obviously new shimmy mobile gt4 and an extra edition as well which i kind of like quite like the ford gt heritage style we did before but for the cgt so check those out all in the cheers match me on 50 shop link is down below meanwhile i'm gonna be waiting a little bit longer for this to top up a touch more i just noticed that this has stopped charging pop out of the car and um charging error the car detected a problem i have absolutely no idea what that could be after 27 minutes we've got 29 kilowatt hours it's 44 so 33 and 27 minutes that's not ideal and now clearly it's doing nothing so i guess i kind of need to unplug this it's already actually basically unplugged there and see what happens do we need to press ok on here try it again plug it in lights back on that's at least a start great lovely lovely i feel even more guilty because there are other cars around obviously waiting to charge new vw id4 um i just don't know why this has gone wrong what if it's just me no the one next to me is charging properly i hope my car's all fine and i hope this is going to work all fine it's that nervous moment of can it start again or are we about to have a uh despite best attempts at showing that this works and it's all fine are we about to have a complete nightmare and i'm gonna have to come back and do it another time to charge charging so we're back on charging that is in some form successful positive oh there's another tesla pulling in um unfortunately there's quite the uh traffic jam and not the charges which is disastrous this disconnected again i can't tell you why i've just tried to plug it in third time now so let's see exactly what happens but one of the unpleasant things about charging evs especially here in the uk is that of course we don't often have the best weather and now it's starting to rain and unlike at a petrol station where you'd be under the canopy over the top you're completely out so you've got to deal with all of this when probably quite shortly it's going to be pouring with rain i'm just going to hope that it works properly but i really needed to get this to more than 51 so justified coming out for a couple of hours i need a lot more charge than that that won't be enough because by the time i get home it'll be back down to 40 and that will have been completely and utterly pointless this isn't good it still says zero kilowatt what is going on here no idea what is going wrong here but it is time to give up car detected a problem unfortunately we will go try somewhere else my point about why this doesn't work is quickly being proven again close that not ideal they are clearly preparing to put in two more just here everything's ready for that but now somebody else coming to join the lineup unfortunately not getting anywhere i presume that charge is going to work for the next person but for me it was not frustrating but there is another charger not too far away being on the map so i guess i'm going to head over and try it the merc eqc has pulled in as well they're going to have to wait for that zoe that's arrived this is not what i wanted today to be actually i wanted to show you guys one of the positive experiences and how well the infrastructure was growing at the start of this video and all of a sudden i find myself now navigating to the next charging point because this has just not gone well and i have no idea why mine couldn't connect it worked there for the next person but i tried what three times with this and i just wouldn't read it so i guess that's game over maybe i used or charged up as much as i'm allowed to or something like that there were no signs that say that there was a maximum for now with 51 i don't want to go straight back home because that would defeat the object i basically wanted to get this to 100 but i will now do some charger hopping and go and see what i can find whereas i could have just pulled in there spent 10 minutes and had a full tank of fuel in well any one of the cars in my collection so i i said i would bring you guys along i said from the very beginning that i would share the honest experiences of this and i know lots of people who do really like evs will hate me right now and i apologize to them but this is my real experience today of it not working and obviously now with a significant mood dampener considering the weather unfortunately i'm persisting with this because i really really want it to work we're here at the bp and the bp charge master ev chargers are typically pretty good um depending where they are i suppose pulling in here towards the back somewhere yes i can see them let me squeeze through really refueling at the moment and go and see if we can have any better luck with this here in the eevee charging stations bp pulse okay um i'm gonna have to do a bit of a wiggle they're never easy to park in these places like this this is just how do you get into this bay like why can't i reverse into it um i'm gonna have to do a bit of a wiggle as their sign just goes flying across the car park thanks to the weather um let me try and see what i can make work here oh wow this is a nightmare okay probably not helped by that person who's not supposed to park where they have okay right every finger and toe is crossed then right up to the curb there we go to go and see we've gone down one percent so that's not too bad so go and see if i can make this one work this must be something like the fourth or fifth attempt at this let's um go see where we can get to this time around i think i'm going to take this go plug it in that is a little bit twisted get it plugged in here and then go and start the service this is also another problem is it because it's slightly wet that's not going to open is it really doing that to me there we go a bit like the mclaren 12c days with the swipes that never worked properly oh gosh this is a stretch see this is what i was talking about that isn't quite long enough to get it and it's not like i can go much further forwards there with the splitter maybe if i pop the lift system up can i get this in can i do it wow that's it no okay bear with me a sec i guess we're gonna be shuffling it forwards no fun this is turning out to be a little bit of a challenge because that's pretty close to the front and this car does not shuffle gently oh i don't like this i'm just gonna hope i don't hit it okay stop beeping it's all good let's go try again my gosh i'm doing my best here i really really am trying to do my best to um make this work that's still open all good okay i probably should have put the plastic flat back up but it is what it is let's try again see if i can twist it in this time still difficult there we go oh my gosh that is maximum stretch i don't think like that would be that easy for other people to necessarily do right see look how expensive it is as well 40p per kilowatt hour and minimum of pound 50 per session let's start tapped my card on the machine heard a beep sounds like it's working maybe maybe not please wait maximum about 30 pounds great that will go very quickly you're allowed to start charging i heard a click from the transformers it looks like we're working 175 kilowatts so if we get that that's perfect preparing to charge setting up communication with the car come on please work please and give us some ludicrously fast charging speed that would make life very helpful right now it doesn't look like it's doing anything don't tell me it's gonna have another error of sorts and i'm not gonna be able to charge my car charging charging charging charging that's good okay well charge is good so that hasn't hit the curb thankfully it is super stretched [Music] and um let's see how it goes this is doubly rubbish we've got 54 it delivered me a little bit of charge but we've got an error again so i'm gonna have to pack up the good news is 54 is enough to get it from here to home to the porsche dealer which it looks he says is that going to release it looks as if it's going to have to be my next plan wonderful i don't know what this is i don't have a clue what's going on all i can see is that it's not charging and to be honest that combined with this weather right now which is windy and miserable and all sorts of awful has made me a little bit annoyed by this experience a little bit is or basically an understatement but what do we have we are at 54 i'm going home as the weather continues to get worse and worse i just can't get my head around how bad my luck with this seems to be the thing that's good though is wow it's just how quick this car is and how good it is actually when you drive it when you drive it properly and you chuck it around regardless of conditions it just picks up and takes off like a rocket that's onto the motorway foot down you get no sense of that through the video but in in that kind of acceleration scenario that's faster than any of my other cars just the way it's straight on the torque obviously in gear or the equivalence of in gear it just it just goes the 40 to 70 mile an hour speed is ludicrous absolutely ballistic um but like i was saying i'm going to have spent what three hours on this in total including driving there machines out of order waiting charging a little bit slower than you would like them to be machines going wrong going to another one going wrong again and now going home and now in the rain and as much as i try and be positive and optimistic about the ev experience this has not been good even for me this is going to take some like pushing through to not just say right i'm selling the card done because this doesn't work you're watching and living with me here as it doesn't work prove that it doesn't work and if anything you know i would quite like that this becomes the relevant parties can see this and to see a real world experience and i don't know the people who set decisions as to how these things are done actually driving a driving evs themselves and living with it other than the theory of it but i'm trying my best here and it's very very stressful very frustrating and i'm not sure if my patience is going to be able to last through it parked back up then on one of the lower levels of the garage after what has categorically been an absolute failure of a day there is no other way of describing that little outing now i have just been amusing myself with the obstacle course that is climbing out of the driver's seat of the thai cam because of course this car is right hand drive and it's a narrow space and i've parked it literally right up against the wall not exactly it's just unlocked not exactly a lot of room here especially as the mirror was coming past the concrete and metal here of the pillar and in fact i think i've got it pretty well in towards the back as well not a lot more room that i could have used there and interestingly a little bit of space should the neighbor return there hasn't been a car parked alongside me here for quite a while but always just in case especially after what happened to that corner we don't want anything to happen so it's as far back and across as i can get it and still hangs out the front of the space because this car is huge in fact it is not the easiest thing to climb out of either don't forget we do have these designs in the cheer shop having to climb over this very high central tunnel to actually be able to get out of the thing slide the seat right towards the back and climb on over but hey it works at the end of the day what can i say though about today's experience well i started it by saying that it's frustrating obviously not being able to charge at home because you rely on third-party charging infrastructure you rely on going somewhere where in theory everything should work now i don't know if there's a problem at the moment with this car or if it just had enough with the charge that was going on i've not experienced this before i'll have to clearly try it again and perhaps take it to porsche and see if they've got any input as to why that wasn't working i took photos so i'll send that to the teams to see if they've got any feedback and do some reading as well because you never know with these things but long story short the fact that arrived some of the machines were out of order having had to drive there in the first place machines out of order a bit of a queue with more people waiting than there are actually machines present to use not running at a huge speed i mean it's got about 100 kilowatts but it could go even faster so what in half an hour i think we had about 30 simple mouse if you wanted to get it completely full you're going to be there for an hour and a half or so and then obviously the problems coming up with the error or whatever that was about i wanted to show today that this can work if you're patient with it and i'm not going to completely give up on it yet but i certainly think the key takeaway here is that there's a lot more still that needs to be done and i know it is being done as i said when we were driving out the growth of infrastructure right now especially here in the uk is very very fast and yes there are multiple different ways of looking at this if you're in norway or the netherlands you have great charging networks don't worry about it if you're in the us and you're running a tesla same story if you're in the uk and running a tesla it's a bit better for sure teslas can also use the points that we've been at as you saw earlier but there's still so much more that needs to be done before this can be completely relied on and while i'm not an early adopter eevee i'm not an ev purist i'm a petrol head for sure i'm trying my best to give it a go to take this car out to learn all about it but clearly until i can charge at my own place which will be coming in a month or so this just doesn't really work you know i'm going to take this at some point on a long road trip i'm going to take it across europe and get a better experience at some point when i can take the car out of what all the different countries and their infrastructures are like but here right now at the time of filming this video you have witnessed with me today some of the problems of running an ev and some of the frustrations that you just have to kind of live with manage and try and keep being optimistic and believe that down the line it is going to work i do see a space for these i do think if you're running a small city electric run around absolutely perfect you're not polluting on the streets great quiet easy experience small car you don't need much charge you don't need a big battery it charges up quickly there for whatever you do but for long distance drives and for so many other purposes i don't think we're there yet and the uk has some big targets in terms of taking cars that are purely combustion engine off new car sales in 2030 so hybrids only or fully bees and then from 2035 being full electric only to get there there's a lot more that needs to be done the pace is happening fast let's just hope for no more experiences like today i'll try at another point another time see what i can what i can do whether there is a problem but that is it for now a slightly defeated one at my end but thank you very much for sticking with me and for being part i guess of learning the ev world thank you very much guys your support is appreciated as always that's it for this time and i'll see you again very soon cheers you

Channel: Shmee150

Views: 525,161

Rating: 4.8198271 out of 5

Keywords: EV, Electric Vehicle, Electric Car, Electric, Car, Charging, Charge, Disaster, Problem, Fail, Issues, Bad, Experience, Porshe, Taycan, Turbo S, UK, England, London, Problems, Infrastructure, Progress, Future, Thoughts, Broken, Failure, Shmeemobile, Shmee, Shmee150

Id: XwevvreoNjE

Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Super901]

It's clear the infrastructure isn't in place yet in Briton or the state, but it's coming.

On the other hand, I installed a 30 amp dryer plug on the outside of my house and ran a level 2 charger from it. Every morning, I wake up to my fully charged VW eGolf.

[u/kort677]

the guy is an AHOLE.

anyone who buys an EV without a dedicated place to charge is foolish.