The route stretches from Italy to Hong Kong, covering approximately 9,300 miles with a target completion time of 43 days. Leading the journey is the Denza Z9 GT, a shooting-brake-style EV from BYD’s premium brand. What makes the campaign particularly interesting is that the Z9 GT pairs a substantial driving range with the ability to charge from 10% to 97% in just nine minutes.
For me the source of range anxiety is not that I will not get to the next charger or that I will have to wait 30 minutes to charge. I’m worried that the charger will be broken. Chargers are complicated. So far I was not able to charge because:
- the charger was completely dead
- the charger repeatedly failed to establish connection with the car for unknown reason
- the entire infrastructure of the charger operator was down
- the Android app didn’t work on GrapheneOS
- the charger was in use
- the charger was installed in a place without 4G coverage…
I would estimate that chargers work maybe 70-80% of the time. Having an app with live availability info helps but you really never know if you will be able to charge or not.
I have a friend whose apartment’s garage charger was installed and metered by a company that went bankrupt. Luckily, it fails gracefully by still providing electrical charge, without running a transaction on his credit card registered to a now-defunct service. Problem is that it still uses the apartment building’s main electricity, so all the building’s EV owners are nervous that one day the big corporate landlord is just gonna disconnect it when they eventually realize how much extra it costs on the landlord’s monthly electricity bill.
I went to Farmington NM last week. There were multiple broken charging stations. I was only able to charge by calling customer service and having them remotely start the charger. Out of 5 stations I visited, only 1 kind of worked
I don’t know where you live/drive, but in my experience
- there’s rarely only one charger around/within reach
- you can have NFC cards in addition to apps
- you may be able to wait until one of the occupied chargers gets free
- broken chargers typically aren’t shown as available in apps
I’m in Spain and while everything you said is true it doesn’t solve any of the issues I’ve listed, it just makes them less likely because:
- there are plenty of places were there is no another fast charger nearby. You can’t plan on reaching a charger with less than 50km if range because if it doesn’t work you may be fucked. that adds to range anxiety
- there are some networks that support NFC cards but majority doesn’t. Using NFC card is usually more expensive as it goes through a different operator
- yes, you can wait but it fuck up your schedule and sitting in a car for 30 minutes is not fun
- yes, if the charger is completely offline it will not show. More often they are malfunctioning but still showing as active
I didn’t mean to downplay the issues listed by you. Those are real challenges.
I rather wanted to put them into perspective.You’re right that operating an EV is in some ways similar to the early days of combustion engines, where getting a refill often meant looking for a pharmacy to buy ethanol.
The infrastructure needs to be improved and this will happen, because there’s money to be made.
Alas that’s the reason for not having a vast oversupply of charging stations, because they have a better ROI when being heavier utilized.
With more EVs on the road there will be more chargers and that will make it easier to find one nearby that’s free and operational.
Time is on our side - at least in that case; I hope so.Fully agree. I was just commenting on the premise of the article. A single car driving 9k miles doesn’t ease my range anxiety. Some statistic showing that public chargers reached 99% of availability and have low repair times would.
Charger availability data in EU is public. I was thinking about gathering it and creating some stats but I have too many projects opened already. Maybe in a couple of months…
And how many of those ultra high-speed chargers do they expect to find between Milan and Hong Kong? I can’t even find one in the 500 km between Montreal and Toronto, Canada’s most densely populated stretch of land.
Edit: I can’t even find a 350 KV charger, the highest my car can handle, between Montreal and Toronto. Instead I am stuck charging at a third of that or less, taking well over an hour to fully charge.
I’m sure they plan a head and have them installed where needed. Most publicly stunts pull that trick off.
Is it a large truck with a diesel generator powering a fast charger at the back?
BYD is starting to build charging networks outside China with battery stations included.
They don’t need high power infrastructure due to the batteries, which can charge slowly from the grid and charge attached cars fast.
Those buffer batteries are also needed for the pulse charging, which conditions the EV battery for high charge power in cold conditions.
I can’t say I’m a fan of s such vendor lock-ins, but technically and economically (value chain creation wise) they make things right.A previous announcement said they are bringing Flash charging to Canada and we will start to see some locations in a few months(I’m guessing more like 6 months but maybe they aren’t lying)
1000 horsepower? Can we start getting cars with reasonable horsepower?
EVs don’t lose efficiency with high horsepower figures… in fact, they gain stronger regen braking, which reduces brake pad wear (and means less brake pad dust polluting the environment) as well as extending range in city/residential driving and on downhill sections of road.
Excess horsepower cost more money and is less safe
The reason why EV motors are so high power is that unlike internal combustion engines, an electric motor being capable of high power doesn’t make it less efficient during lower power use. So unlike a 1000 hp gasoline engine, an EV with 1000 hp can cruise around a city at low speeds using very little energy.
Another advantage of high power motors is that they are also high power generators for recapturing the kinetic energy in regenerative braking that charges the batteries.
Why? Power isn’t bad
It is. Higher horsepower is predictive of higher driving speeds, higher collision rates, and more damage/risk per collision.
Even if it weren’t, it requires a heavier motor and stronger parts be used in the car, increasing costs and weight, which in turn decrease range.
ome of the most powerful EVs is also the most efficient EVs, the Lucid Air. Aero has way more impact than the relatively tiny amount of additional weight added by including slightly beefier motors and cooling and such.
Yes.The Pure (base) is $72,000 delivered, plagued with issues, and subsidized so heavily the company lost $1 billion in the last quarter alone. This is reflected in some of the highest replacement parts costs in the industry rivaling ultra luxury manufacturers like Bentley. It is why residual retention is so poor even by EV standards.
This car is the poster child for my point. They put a powerful motor in, added battery to mitigate the lost range, then had to engineer around the weight at a price. You just don’t see the full cost which easily exceeds $150,000 per vehicle shipped.
I have much bigger anxiety with exploding batteries, poor safety standards, and surveillance.
Gas cars burn much more frequently than EVs
Batteries are getting much safer (starting with LFP) and surveillance is common to all cars nowadays.
Well, I feel better about the batteries.
Car surveillance could be tamed by (EU) legislation, but somehow, nobody cares that much, they are busy discussing whether one can use vegan steak name. 🤷
What did Merkel say back then (in german)? “The question is, wheter the data belongs to the provider or the manufacturer.” So yeah, priorities. Not your data.
You should probably ditch your cell phone.
