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:
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
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:
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…