It came up in the news today, that Chancellor Merkel is 'promising' to deliver one million public charging stations by 2030, across Germany. So the question ought to arise, would this change the public feeling about battery cars?
Lets be honest about the hyped-up goal from roughly five years ago that the Chancellor made....that a million battery cars would be on the road in Germany by 2020. Right now (using December 2018 numbers), Germany is sitting at 198,000 battery cars. In the first six months of 2019, they were reporting around 31,000 battery cars, so you can anticipate 30,000 to 35,000 for the last half of the year. That would total to around 250,000 to 260,000. That million-car point? You might be lucky to predict it occurring by the end of 2025.
So what's really holding up the enthusiasm? I've been to the solar show in Munich (2018), and the two Frankfurt car shows (2017 and 2019) where the battery cars were heavily featured. I've even test-driven the E-Tron from Audi.
My enthusiasm? It's just not at any level to go out and spend 50k Euro on a decent battery-car model. Even if you had some smaller VW to offer in the 20k Euro range....I'd still lack the enthusiasm for the idea, and from the German side of this....they appear just as skeptical.
It's more than just the charging station problem (note, toward the end of 2018, they were at roughly the 12,000 level in terms of public stations).
I would essentially go to three basic problems:
1. This waiting time of three to six hours (depending on the model/brand) while waiting on the charge to wrap up....won't cut it. Even if you said it was 75 minutes...most Germans would be skeptical over the acquisition idea.
I sat at a autobahn point around three years ago, where they had the public chargers available. Folks arrived, plugged in and walked across the parking area to McDonalds. In simple terms....they intended to be there a minimum of two to three hours. So you had to develop your trip plan around idea of a major stop in the middle, with several hours of rest time. This would mean leaving two hours earlier than desired.
2. The disposal process and cost when the original batteries are 'finished'. No one talks much about it, and you have no idea what the real disposal cost will be. Maybe your batteries (if this were a Tesla) would be around for ten years. For some of the lesser brands, I would anticipate disposal to arrive the 5th or 6th year.
Batteries tend to appear toxic in nature....so there's got to be some hefty cost factor.
3. Germans already pay the more hefty rate of Europeans for electrical power. If you had one to two million cars that were plugged in nightly and drawing more power off the grid.....would this trigger more cost upon you, and at what level? Would they tell you that the cheaper rate would only kick in at 1:00 AM?
There's already anticipated chaos coming to the German grid with nuke power and coal power going off-line in the next decade. Is this going to be a problem?
Then you come to the electrical bill itself.....would you blow your top if your electrical bill started to reach 300 to 400 Euro per month (to charge up two battery cars nightly)?
But lets come back around to the million charger number that the Chancellor proposes. How exactly would you deliver those million? Grants out to city and village mayors to install the chargers....even when there's not a single battery car in the village or within 25 kilometers?
Would these public charger points be reasonable or ultra-expensive? A 7-Euro fee each time you plugged in and the actual power consumed would only be 1-Euro itself?
Would some idiots plan these public charger points deep in the middle of national forests?
Then you come to the cost factor of building 1-million charger stations? A billion Euro? Two billion Euro? Unknown.
This all sounds nice, but it just makes people ask more questions. And behind all of this....those hydrogen guys are still working on their vehicle and hydrogen filling stations. Might the billions wasted on battery cars.....be proven to be worthless because people bought into the hydrogen idea? That's what you have to be curious about.
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