Did you bring an electric car home from Easter vacation?
Short version
- Electric vehicle driver Bart Amundsen (60) talks about the huge charging queues for electric cars during an Easter trip from Roros to Oslo on Easter Sunday.
- He believes the queues have led to dangerous traffic situations, with cars queuing up on major roads.
- Christina Pu, general secretary of the Electric Vehicle Association, said charging coverage has never been better, but queues can occur on special departure days.
- He advises electric car drivers to charge when they can, not when they need to, and avoid charging to 100 percent.
Bart Amundsen (60) did it.
– What to say, Viji says when he calls.
Amundsen feared the worst before going home from Roros to Oslo on Easter Sunday. And then it got worse.
In a post X He describes the charging queues on highways 3 and E6 as being too long.
– It was absolutely crazy in the whole valley. The big charging points on the road, Alvadal and Elverum, are completely hopeless and not immediately conceivable.
Local newspaper Labor Court He wrote that there was chaos on Highway 3 in Alvadal on Sunday afternoon.
Amundsen reacted harshly to the fact that the Alvdal queues created dangerous traffic conditions, with queues stretching up to main roads lined with cars.
– Cars are a bit on the side, but it's not a particularly wide road. You drive with your heart in your throat, says Amundsen.
– There could be a hundred Teslas on the road, and a lot of traffic to pass along the way. These were simply dangerous situations that lasted all day.
– started crying
Amundsen says he helped a woman who waited 45 minutes for her turn and couldn't get her charger to work.
– She simply started crying. Finally it was her turn, and then she couldn't connect, she says.
It finally worked for Amundsen and the electric car, who drove down National Highway 3 and found a charging station in Rena. He says he stood in line for half an hour.
– We hope that things will be better this Easter, says Cristina Pu, General Secretary of the Electric Vehicle Association to VG.
According to Pu, national charging coverage has never been better than it is now. Norway now has 8,000 fast chargers, 2,000 of which have been built in the last twelve months.
– So there is a positive background. But when there's a queue on the road, queues at fast chargers pile up quickly on special departure days. Here we hear a very boring situation for those who enjoy it.
He has two clear words of advice for electric car drivers:
- Charge when you can, not when you have to
- Don't stop until you have 100 percent power. Charging takes longer at the end of the charging curve.
– Inactive
Amundsen says the entire charging system is out of order.
– It is incredibly strange that the authorities are not more responsible in charging for infrastructure. They leave it to the market, where everyone tries to bind customers to their own payment system and connect them to their own complex solutions that don't work for each other, says Amundsen.
– This is a very poor solution. The activity should be an easy thing to solve.
According to General Secretary Bu, this is the heart of what the Electric Vehicle Association has worked so hard for.
– In such a scenario, it actually increases the challenge of people struggling to make payments. The challenge in Norway is that many companies do not want to participate in a common solution.
He explains that there are so-called roaming services, which, for example, can be used to charge different companies and utilities using the charging chip of the Electric Vehicle Association.
Bu also points out that last year all new charging stations were required to include card payment, and in a couple of years there will be a requirement for retrofitting.
– So there is light at the end of the tunnel.
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