A lot myths here about charging requirements.

In the UK most domestic supplies will cope easily with a 7Kw charger. The 'chargers' on the wall are in fact connectors and comms devices only the actual charge being installed in the car itself.

My i3 averages in the summer 5.1 miles per Kw and in the winter 3.2 miles per Kw. Using a 7Kw charge, that means I can fill up the vehicle at the rate of 35 miles per hour charge in the summer and 22 miles per hour charge during the winter. The 33Kw battery charges easily in the 4 hour off peak supply overnight giving me 100 to 170 miles range (dependent on time of year) for the princely sum of £1.40.

The wallbox cost is quite high, the solution is make your own which is surprisingly easy and all of the information is out there. My first one cost less than £80, my latest one with more features around £125 or less than 25% the cost of road tax on my L322!

In terms of high mileages on daily basis, I can easily achieve it, I regularly do 400+ per days and it's really not an issue. Stop for coffee for 20 - 30 minutes and uplift another 80 - 100 miles range on a DC 50Kw charger, often free of charge! When I get home, plug in overnight and good to go again.

As far as Spain goes, I'm not sure theyre following the same datelines as the UK? With the better weather I would suspect a good solar / battery storage installation would be ideal. BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

Renault Zoe is about 25k and you can have a range of up to 245miles.

A 7kW / 32amp charge will take 8 hours according to this: https://www.renault.co.uk/electric-vehicles/zoe/battery.html

(Obviously shoots up to 30+ hours if you're restricted to 10amp)

But yeah, it may just be that an EV doesn't suit your usage patterns, the combination of needing to do two consecutive 200mile trips without being able to charge at 7kW and/or not being able to find a fast-charge point in-between is a bit unusual, plus being limited to low current charging at home on top.

I think Hybrids only really make sense if you do mostly short commutes where you can charge at both ends or once a day, with the fuel being there for covering the long journeys - to my mind they're a marketing exercise and not something that will be on the market for long.

AJGalaxy2012 wrote:

As far as Spain goes, I'm not sure theyre following the same datelines as the UK? With the better weather I would suspect a good solar / battery storage installation would be ideal.

You'd need a lot of solar and a very expensive set of batteries to be able to give a car a full charge - solar's not super ideal for the kind of loads you need to fast charge an EV, really.

To fill the car you're going to need at least as much battery capacity as the car has, plus a little extra to account for losses (even if you're DC to DC charging it).

You're also going to need a lot of panels to have that battery charged and ready again for the next days charge - in most peoples use case this probably wouldn't be an issue, but ur20v's got quite a specific use-case which makes it difficult

We also get taxed for the solar panels here (unless they're entirely disconnected from the grid), so this brings the cost up a bit, plus the purchase cost, plus the battery cost...

Thats the reason why I said solar plus battery! If you have 10 to 12 hrs of sunlight even a medium sized array will give 4 kw, over 10 hrs thats 40Kw stored (using ex EV car batteries is a good source of cells). With a little ingenuity a very rapid 100Kw charger could be made and the stored energy dumped into the EV rapidly. BMW i3 Electric Car
2012 Full Fat RR 4.4 TDV8 (now gone)
2006 VW Touareg 3.0 TDi V6

I agree charging from battlers and or solar isn’t efficient and limited to slow charging rates.

The solar is being sized to cover our daily usage summer and winter... we can fit a 10KW array without planning etc bigger and we get hit with planning and taxes etc. We are not going off grid just reducing our bills to as near zero as possible and be able to handle blackouts etc so the grid can still be used to top off the EV while the home bank of batteries take care of the off solar household load, then the solar tops off the batteries first then starts paying back the deficit of EV charge.

With 320 days and 3000hrs of sun per year and180hrs a month in winter and 350 hrs in summer, The 10KW array should easily have enough capacity to top off the home batteries, an EV and any deficit to the national grid through out the year. This is why an EV is of interest at some point... just not yet at current range/price.

The Li home battery bank is going to be as big as we can afford to allow for as many non-Sunny winter days as possible in case of a major national grid failure... lucky we get very few blackouts and very few consecutive non-sunny days.

[quote="Siftah"]

AJGalaxy2012 wrote:

We also get taxed for the solar panels here (unless they're entirely disconnected from the grid), t...