The results of the 12-month trial of electric vehicles have been released and the findings are revealing - and confirm what I have been saying based on my own experience with 1,000 G-Wiz customers in London.
The conclusion: “they [electric cars] are more than capable of meeting the needs of drivers that require efficient urban transportation”.
The study is called CABLED, which is short for Coventry and Birmingham Low Emissions Demonstrators. CABLED is one of a number of government strategies to increase the number of low carbon cars on UK roads. The data collected will also help to determine how infrastructure and Smart Grid technology should develop.
The study, the largest of eight trials taking part, monitored the use of 25 Mitsubishi imievs and 20 Smart fortwo cars over a total of 147,000 miles.
The study found that over three quarters of daily journeys took less than 20 minutes, with just two percent of them using more than 50% of the battery charge. So in the vast majority of cases, drivers had more than enough juice for a return trip.
That’s a pretty strong argument against ‘range anxiety’, a point that was supported by a trend that showed journeys getting longer over time. Simply put, as drivers began to have more confidence in the car’s actual range potential they began to use more of it.
The other interesting thing is that drivers didn’t recharge at a specific point of depletion, but rather, just plugged in if they got to a place with a handy socket. In fact, the average driver plugged in with between 81 and 87 percent of charge remaining. And with such a relatively low level of use – the cars were on the road about 40 minutes a day on average – there was clearly lots of charging opportunity.
The other revealing finding indicates that most drivers finished their daily journeys with over 40% charge still remaining. And the average user only needed to recharge every 2-3 days – they tended to charge at home overnight or at their place of work over 85% of the time.
The average charge time was between 2-3 hours (usually equivalent to half charge) with an energy transfer of 6kWh costing around 60-80p depending upon tariff (equivalent to one load in a washer dryer). Peaks for charging were observed from 7-9am and from 6-7pm, likely because people charged at work in the morning and home in the evening. Another peak occurred after 11pm when participants used timers to take advantage of off-peak energy tariffs.
Brian Price from Aston University, which was responsible for analysing the data, commented: “Through satellite tracking and on-board telemetry, we have been able to monitor real-world usage of the latest ultra-low carbon vehicles technologies on an unprecedented scale.
“Public charging points provided as part of the trial are proving popular, but less necessary than originally thought, as users gain confidence in the range capability of the vehicles. The trial has shown that the current generation of low carbon vehicles are as capable as conventional diesel and petrol engines for performance and ease of use, whilst having significantly lower emissions and operating costs.”
Charging stations are being built and we will see them proliferate rapidly in many countries. Meanwhile, let's get over this chicken and egg debate in the media about the need for charging stations everywhere before the EV market can take off. It's dead, it's buried, let's move on.
