- Joined
- Jun 24, 2008
- Messages
- 45,229
- Location
- London
- Car
- 2022 Hyundai IONIQ 5 RWD / 2016 Suzuki Vitara AWD
my take on this is why should councils be expected to pay to install charging points? they didnt pay to build petrol/diesel filling stations. locally there is an ev van being used by a contractor on a council contract that cant do a full day without needing a top up charge. when i suggested to thd company they perhaps didnt have thd correct vehicle for the job, i didnt get an answer!
Vans are a mixed bag.
Down here in London, all Amazon delivery vans, and most of the supermarket delivery vans, are 'zero emissions'. But traffic in London is very slow, and the city is densely-populated, so a range of 60-70 miles on single charge is more than enough for the slow start-stop drive that a delivery van will do around Central London. However, away from city centres, i.e. out in the suburbs or when driving between towns, the story is obviously very different.
So an EV van isn't suitable for regional work, both because of the reduced range due to the higher weight of the van and payload, and because of the need for load carrying volume which limits the physical battery size.
But in city centres, an EV van will actually work much better than a Diesel van. I can see on my EV that it loves slow traffic, and in fact the remaining range hardly drops when not moving, or when moving slowly (the electrical consumers - heating or AC etc - don't really have a significant effect on the battery charge level). This is a contrast to a Diesel van, where slow moving traffic is a killer for mph, burning fuel unnecessarily, and having to rely on awkward Start/Stop technology that shortens engine life.
With 300+ miles range now the norm for most new EV private cars, they are just over half the range of a typical Diesel car, but still, they have become borderline on-par with ICE for most use profiles in terms of range (the majority of people do not have a daily commune in excess of 300 miles). But for vans, the technology isn't quite there yet, other than for in-city driving, which is the only place where EV vans can have an edge over Diesel vans.