Plug-in Vehicles and Driveways

Recently I read an article in the Economist which discussed the differences between how car service stations were considered in America and Europe. According to the article, Americans tend to have a positive attitude towards them, choosing to locate them in prime central urban areas. In contrast, Europeans have a more negative opinion of service stations relegating them to out of town areas such as ring roads and shopping centres. This observation has been backed up by the downward trend in service station numbers in Europe with tens of thousands going out of business in the last decade. Supermarkets have taken up the slack to a certain degree and the combination of doing your shopping and filling up your car seems popular. It isn’t too much of a leap to envisage that Europeans would tend to value the ability to avoid service stations in the future altogether by purchasing a Plug-in vehicle more so than Americans as a result of this embedded attitude.

 

Clearly for some individuals the ability to refuel from home would be more beneficial than others. If you live 5 minutes drive away from a service station the time it takes for you to refuel your car is much less compared to if you live in a rural area and your nearest station is 20 miles away. This discussion is overlooking one key aspect however, even if a household would highly value the ability to refuel theirs cars from home this is dependent on the right infrastructure being in place. Households that have dedicated off-street parking and, better yet, a garage, have a much easier time turning their homes into refuelling stations whilst households that only have on street parking or no formal provision will find it much harder. The UK Government is trying to address this barrier by installing on street public charging stations in major urban areas across the country but this initiative is still in its early days. Households may be less inclined to use on street charging stations as it could be perceived as a safety risk. Leaving a section of your car open presents an open target for any would be vandals to damage your car, especially if it is left charging overnight.

With the above discussion in mind it can be put forward that households that do not have dedicated off street parking may be less inclined to consider a Plug-in vehicle. Indeed, moving towards a decentralised refuelling infrastructure can be disadvantageous in the sense that it may require thousands of individual recharge stations to be installed to replace a single conventional service station. This creates an addition burden for society that need to foot the bill until private sector firms begin to enter this market. Whilst the simple argument put forward for Plug-in vehicles is that we already have the infrastructure in place with the electricity grid, once you start to ask more probing questions it seems that the situation is not as straightforward as it first looked.

A potential game changer is the advancement of inductive charging technology. Also referred to as wireless charging, this technology allows electricity to be transferred from one device to another using an electromagnetic field. Currently available on the market for small electrical devices such as mobile phones, this technology pathway has the potential to mitigate this potential barrier to adoption of plug-in vehicles. Whilst the current and, perhaps, next generation of Plug-in vehicles will not be compatible with this form of recharging it is expected that 3^rd generation Plug-ins, perhaps coming onto the market by 2020, could have this technology available out of the box. There are, however, some current limitations that still need to be addressed before this technology is ready for this market. Firstly, charging can only take place over a short range currently affective at about 40mm. Secondly, the electricity transferred is still considerably lower compared to wired options. Thirdly, the electricity transfer is less efficient with a greater proportion of the energy being lost in the form of heat. All of these limitations will have to be mitigated if the technology is to move into the mainstream.