Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Why you SHOULD get a smart meter

In the UK, we are in the middle of a smart meter rollout. Basically energy firms keep pestering their customers to get a smart meter. The government is encouraging this. Many people I know are very negative and grumpy about this, probably because they are, in general, cynical about government initiatives, and have a hostility towards electricity companies. Plus there is a ton of silly conspiracy theory bullshit to select from.

Getting a smart meter is involved because you need some space around your existing meter to install it. This means for people like me whose meter was crammed into a box, you have to do a staggering amount of work to make a (free) smart meter install possible. I did it anyway. This blog will explain why.

Firstly…what is a smart meter? Its basically an electricity meter that connects via the phone network to a wide-area-network and can report your electricity usage in half hour segments remotely. This means nobody has to come to your house and ‘read’ the meter. Its also digital (at last) instead of an old fashioned 1950s style monstrosity with a spinning disk and analog readouts… Smart meters are fitted for free by your electricity company. My install was way more involved than that for tedious reasons, not least because I have a solar panel array and also an electric car charger. Thus my setup now looks this complex:

Top left is a fusebox (consumer unit in modern-speak), top right another fusebox (for the solar panels). Middle left is the solar panel generation meter for calculating my feed-in-tariff from the government, the white box to the right is the smart meter, and to the right of that is the black box with the main power fuse for the house. MOST people’s houses have far less complex electrics than this!

Why does the government want us all to have smart reasons? Well there are two reasons. One is talked about, another is fiendishly complex, and you have to do a lot of reading about energy markets and the national grid and talk to solar farm installers to work it out. Lets start with the first reason.

Smart meters make you save energy

This is the official reason we all need one. It sounds like it must be nonsense, but its actually super-true. I’m someone who is OBSESSED with efficiency and knows a lot about energy efficiency, and the smart meter effect even works on me. You get a remote gadget like a tiny tablet that shows you your current energy usage, and how much you have spent so far today. You can also get an app for your phone, which is tons better and displays pretty graphs and goes into a lot more detail, but ignoring that for now the in-home-display unit is actually quite cool.

Why do smart meters come with an In-Home Display? | Blog | Bulb

The display even has a tiny, not-oft-seen icon that lights up to show you when you are exporting power back to the electricity grid, should you be fortunate enough to have solar panels and generating more than you are using. This is an immediate sign that you should charge some laptops or phones or put the dishwasher on :D

Cynically, you might think that just ‘knowing’ how much power you use will achieve nothing, but it really does. We can see the massive spike when we put on an electric heater, and an even bigger spike if I plug in my electric car. If you look at the more fine-grained data on the smartphone app, you can see every time you boiled a kettle. Just seeing the massive difference between using one appliance versus another makes you think. And energy prices having shot up means those numbers are about to get way bigger.

So this reason is all about social engineering. Show people WHEN they are spending most of the electricity and they will make smarter decisions. Dishwashers running half empty are a waste of energy. Leaving an electric heater on when you are not in that room is a big waste of money. As people realize this, they will adapt their lives in subtle ways that reduce their energy consumption.

This is the main reason given, but its only part of the puzzle

Demand shifting and protecting the grid

Almost all western countries electricity grids are the same. There are a few super-huge power stations, normally in coastal areas, or remote areas, then a big fat network of pylons carrying the power to local substations, which then run cables to each house. I missed a few steps there, but generally that is the layout. Also most grids are OLD. population density is higher since the grids were built out, but the layout has remained the same. Until recently its kind of worked ok. Before I explain why its not working so well now, here are some technical details.

The UK electricity grid runs at a certain frequency. Its *roughly* 50 HZ. In fact, there are real-time-websites that let you see the current frequency of the grid. Right now it is 49.965HZ. This is really important. Its important because a lot of electrical equipment, especially really expensive electrical equipment, will absolutely freak out and fail/catch fire/explode if its much above or below that frequency. The frequency depends on the balance of supply and demand.

What that means is, that some organization (in the UK its national grid plc) has to keep turning power plants on and off again, to ensure that supply matches demand closely enough that the energy grid frequency remains within a narrow band. If they are going to fail to achieve that, they have to take drastic action, like closing entire sections of the grid off, in other words a power cut. This is a VERY big deal, so its to be avoided at all costs. How do they manage this?

Its generally not been too bad, because demand for energy is pretty predictable. The national grid checks weather reports, to see what temperatures will be (to determine the need for heaters or fans/air conditioning), predicts that supply, and then schedules power station output to match it. This sounds easy, and it is…for certain types of power. Britain gets about 15% of its power from nuclear, which always runs flat-out, which means the flexibility has to come from other sources. In our case, thats gas-fired power stations, which can be turned on and off fairly quickly.

This has been happening for decades and everything has been fine. What makes it work even in cases of extreme demand is that we also have cables connecting us to France, and other countries that let us export power (rare) or import it (more common). However its starting to get tricky, really tricky, its starting to get unmanageable.

Renewable energy has entered the chat

Renewable energy is awesome. I’m a true believer, I’m even building a solar farm. But it brings challenges. Renewable energy is cheap, and environmentally awesome, but its variable. Some days its cloudy. Some days its windy. This introduces instability into the grid, meaning its MUCH more likely that we sometimes have way too much energy, and other times we have way too little. This can be accounted for and managed…but its introducing huge complexity.

FWIW, the national grid has put in place LOTS of ways to manage this. They all have exciting names and acronyms like ‘Fast Frequency Response’ and ‘Load Shedding’ and ‘Peak Shaving’. Its a whole super-involved ecosystem of trying to manage, in real-time, to keep that demand equal to supply while handling multiple different energy types, and demand spikes, and free-market energy trading systems.

You might think that electricity has just gone up 50% in the UK and that this is a big deal. Haha. You know nothing Jon Snow. Lets look at the real charts behind the headlines, that nobody outside the industry even looks at:

BTW, if you are on a long term fixed price energy tariff, you are paying the equivalent of about 50-60 on that chart. So…. looking forward to a potential trebling of energy prices? maybe even a quadrupling? But although this chart should alarm politicians, its not the one that alarms people trying to balance our grid with renewables. here are some more fun charts:

Electricity is traded in half hour chunks. No idea why, so 48 on the X axis is one day. You can see that the electricity price on the wholesale free market in the Uk yesterday ranged from £-50 to £229.90 per megawatt hour, in a single day. This is NOT at all unusual. This chart is an outcome of some desperate attempts to match demand to supply. Talking of supply:

This is what they are trying to balance. Nuclear is 100% inflexible, and must run all of the time (for economic reasons). Wind and Solar do their thing, and then we try and balance the rest by exporting/importing using the interconnectors. The thing is… we still cant do it, so we need to change the demand as well as the supply, or the whole house of cards will collapse…

Demand Management

If supply is an absolute random number generator, you need to change demand, otherwise we are in trouble. The grid already has systems in place to do this in both directions. You can be paid a regular flat fee by the grid, to agree that if they REALLY need to, they can turn off your electricity. This is for big factories and aluminum smelting plants, which draw huge power. If what you do is super-time-critical, this is unattractive, but for some industries its perfect. Thats load-shedding.

Another method is to create a market for energy storage. This is a real thing. The solar farm I am building will also have a 500kwh battery. Thats like 7 or 8 electric cars. The options available to you when you have battery storage are myriad, and very complex. This is where peak shaving and firm-frequency response come in. Peak-shaving is basically a way of smoothing out a sine wave by storing energy when you have too much, and releasing that energy back when you have too little. Some solar farms or other renewable systems can do this. Its especially helpful for solar farms because typical solar output looks like this over a day:

Thats my solar output yesterday. The thing is…if you scale this up we have a huge huge problem. The problem is this: The electricity grid cannot cope.

Remember my earlier description. The grid is old, and designed for a small number of big phat power stations. Incredibly high power and capacity cables run from sites like Sizewell nuclear power station to big cities like London and Birmingham. This works fine. But the cables that go out to all the smaller towns and the rural locations with wind farms and solar farms? These cables suck. They have no capacity to add further generation. They are ‘constrained’ in energy-industry-speak. Upgrading these cables costs a FORTUNE, and I know that, because I’m making a bank transfer today of £50k as a down-payment on an upgrade to some cables for my solar farm. Even if you are happy to pay, in many cases the grid upgrades are just catastrophically hard to do, and slow to do, and we don’t have time for that. We NEED to add renewable energy faster than we can upgrade the grid.

Save the grid!

In a situation where you cannot upgrade the grid, you are left staring at that solar chart thinking “hmmm…if only this was more predictable…”. Like this:

This is peak shaving. Take off the peaks and fill in the troughs. Its still not a flat supply, but its capped at a much lower level than the natural peak. If that natural peak would overload the grid, then we can still connect our big solar farm, but we use peak shaving to put less of a ceiling on our grid output. Plus the grid loves us…because they get a way less ‘spiky’ energy supply to contend with.

To make it clear: when the chart is red, we are sending some of our power to the battery. When its green, we are draining the battery.

Thats peak shaving. Firm-frequency response is different. Thats when the grid pays you, as a battery owner, to reserve usage of your batteries, with no-warning, if they suddenly need to dump power in it, or to whip that power back if they suddenly need it back. This happens on a VERY short timescale (think seconds or less). This is how they can keep that frequency where it should be.

How does this make me want a smart meter?

What I’m describing there is how renewable energy companies can make money, and how the energy industry is coping with renewables. But this also can affect us. To put it bluntly: we are not, and can not build enough batteries to keep up with the demand for frequency response issues for quite a while. For the foreseeable future, we will need to expand the size of the economy that we can do demand-management on. That means that individual home owners need to get in on the action.

Right now, my electricity company charge me £0.24 per kwh of power. If I want it now, its £0.24. If I want it at 3AM, it £0.24, so I frankly don’t care when I use power I KNOW I have to use.

Luckily I have 3 weapons at my disposal that will allow me, as a smug smart meter owner, to ‘haggle’ with the energy company. I own a dishwasher, a washing machine and… *drumroll* an electric car. I NEED the dishes washed today, the clothes washed today and the car charged over the next 12 hours, but I dont REALLY care the exact time any of this happened. So make me an offer…

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I don’t plug my car in every day, it doesn’t need it, but if I knew that I might get an offer of power for £0.01 /kwh at 4am tomorrow, I’ll fill my car up to the max. That suits me fine, and it suits the desperately-balancing grid even finer. Its a huge win-win, and smooths out some of those crazy price spikes. This sort of thing is ONLY possible with smart meters.

I’m about to swap to a different tariff, for EV owners, that gives me nighttime power at 75% off. This suits me perfectly, I’ll schedule the car charging and other stuff to run during those off peak hours. Excellent. Good for me, and good for the grid. And yes…EV owners are a minority for now, but a rapidly growing one. A big EV has an 85-100kwh battery, which represents a HUGE chunk of your electricity consumption. If everyone ends up with an EV, and we can all have the charging times auto-negotiated with the grid, thats a big win.

Notice that this is NOT ‘vehicle-to-grid’, where your car acts as a grid-connected battery. Thats a different, and interesting issues, but we don’t even need that. What we need is just to have ‘smart’ usage of electricity. We need to do localized peak-shaving in our communities so that the draw from each community is smoothed out and manageable.

The need for this is even greater when you consider rooftop solar. In an ideal world, if I’m on holiday but its sunny, my solar panels can charge my neighbors EV or run their dishwasher, without that energy ever needing to leave this village and put a strain on the main trunk-roads of the grid. It CANNOT put a strain on the grid, because the grid is already creaking like crazy.

Climate change is driving us to have more electric cars AND more renewable energy, meaning we demand more from the grid, just as it becomes more unstable. Smart meters HAVE to be rolled out to everyone ASAP, and I decided to get ahead of the chaos and the crush by getting mine early. If you live in the UK you WILL end up with a smart meter, and it will likely save you money. There is no real reason to avoid getting to the front of the queue before the queue explodes in size. It took me 3 months to get mine. Electricity prices have risen dramatically since I applied…

Thoughts after 5 Years using a pure electric car

I’ve written in the past about buying an electric car, and running it, and what I think, and today to the day is five years since I took delivery of it, so a good time to write down how its been to be driving pure electric all those years.

I drive a 2015 Tesla model S 85D. They don’t make that precise model any more, its kinda of mid way between the low end and high end dual-motor model S. That means its very high performance, but its not ridiculous high performance like you see in youtube videos. For those who care, its 0-60 is 3.8 seconds, and its 518 horsepower. Thats a lot of horses.

When I bought it, this was not only the most expensive car I had ever bought, it was TWICE the cost of the most expensive car I had ever bvought. It was the second time I’d bought a new car, going from a small hybrid lexus to a big pure-electric tesla. I absolutely loved it the minute I got it.

The first thing to mention is that its not exactly the same car as when I got it. I had a few people use my referral link to buy cars so I got given 2 kids-size teslas (one I gave away to charity, one is in my office) plus some ‘arachnid’ wheels, which I guess look a bit cooler. I mostly got em (for free) because it was a plot point in an episode of silicon valley.

As well as getting new wheels, very very recently I gave in and upgraded the screen and the media-computer in the car. TBH this is overpriced (£2k), but in my personal experience was worth it. The graphics chip in the original 2015 model S was just too crap given the insane size of the screen, and it also meant that the screen could be buggy, voice-response was spotty, it was prone to the odd bug (unconnected to the actual car, you can even reboot the media unit while driving…)

Early Teslas like mine have a tendency to flake out due to an old chip that needs replacing. Theoretically you can pester tesla to replace it under warranty, but that leaves you with the same GPU and screen, and I was happy to pay for an upgrade.

During the time I’ve owned the car, thats pretty much all its cost me. Its been serviced twice (in FIVE years), and both times nothing was wrong at all. They check brakes and so on, but with a pure electric car the brakes are used very rarely due to the regen braking. The car has been for an MOT test once, and passed perfectly. It *did* need the front door handles replacing in the first year, but that was under warranty.

TBH the biggest cost of owning the car has been accident-prone driving and having it cleaned. I got a bunch of scrapes and a small dent in the first year, which needed a specialist body shop because the body is aluminum. Then last year I spectacularly screwed up by reversing when the front of the car had settled (air suspension down) onto a kerb by a parking space, which practically pulled the whole front of the car off. Ooops. That was pricey. My fault… BTW insurance is still stupidly low, about £470 a year, even after I recently made a £2k accident claim for the bumper thing. (I’m 51 BTW which likely reduces my insurance cost, also rural UK has less auto-thefts).

shiny body, fancy wheels…

The only other issue I have had is that the glue that the number plate is stuck on with started to fail slightly after four years, so it slightly bent outwards (not really visibly), and this interfered with the calibration of a parking sensor. I ended up just screwing the number plate on myself instead of relying on glue (you cant really tell). The cleaning cost is due to it being aluminum and not really safe for automatic carwashes. I get someone to come to my house, to save me time. Its expensive but super worth it.

In terms of experience, the car still feels like new. If I’d never seen one, and it was delivered to my house tomorrow, I’d assume this was an amazing cutting edge high tech supercar released in 2020. Its still pretty much unbeatable. The new model S has more range, and you can pay more to get the 0-60 time even quicker, but honestly who cares. This one is dangerously fast as it is. The range in practice is about 240-250 miles, given British weather and roads, and TBH thats fine for me. I’ve never really found myself cursing its range. Supercharging is fast!

When we first got the car, the supercharger network was very limited. Since then they have added a bunch, especially on the M3 and M4 motorways, which I use now and then. Sadly the really new superchargers use a different standard, and although I *could* pay to have mine adapted to the new ones, I likely will not bother. In addition to the supercharger network getting better, they have also released a stupidly long list of software upgrades to the car. It has numerous silly and cool features I won’t bore you with it. All software updates are always free.

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Luckily, as an early buyer, my supercharging is also free for life. This sounds amazing until you do the math. Filling up my car paying retail (5p/kwh) electricity costs me £12.75. That gives me about £0.05p a mile to run. Superchargers cost more, but you use them really rarely. I reckon that perk earns me about £100 a year tops. I also get free premium connectivity (free Spotify with voice control!) which is actually more valuable I think.

In terms of reliability, performance, and general driving experience, the car is as awesome as when I bought it. There are no discernible squeaks or creaks or bumps. It feels new. An app I have on my phone (tesla core) says my battery degradation after 5 years is 2.69%. Yup, 2.69% of battery capacity lost over five years… BTW I’ve done 38,000 miles so far.

I guess the best question to ask someone in these circumstances, is would you make the same choice again, and will you keep it? To the first, The answer is actually….not sure. I Bought mine because the Tesla model 3 was not out in the UK at the time. I live down single-lane dirt track roads and the model S is WIDE and LONG for rural UK. But thats the ONLY reason that would make me choose the 3 over the S. I also really like the big dual-screen setup for the model S.

We do not yet have the Tesla model Y in the UK, but when we do, I may be very tempted to trade in my car for that. My model S has lost roughly half its value in 5 years, which means its still quite a chunky trade-in value if I wanted to swap to a new model Y. I’d do this in order to get the new autopilot hardware (something too involved to upgrade for mine), and dramatically longer range and charge time, and also the much smaller car. I would miss the dual screens though, and probably be a bit sad to lose free supercharging and connectivity. ho hum. Mine is also a ‘panda-nose’ early model, might even be considered vintage one day…

I do have to say that there is NO CAR on the market other than a tesla that would vaguely tempt me away from what I have. If I won a Porsche taycan in a lottery I’d sell it the next day, same with the Audi e-tron or anything else. The supercharger network + autopilot is a complete game changer, and only Tesla has those. I’d never even consider a non-electric car of any make or any value. Smelly, unreliable, expensive to maintain, awkward to fill-up, less safe and more expensive to run, plus they belch out fumes and contribute to climate change. No thanks.

Electric car tradeoffs.

Some recent reading of comments on the topic of electric cars has prompted me to summarize my views on where electric cars should be heading next. There is a big disconnect between the reality and the general opinion of people who do not already own an EV. I thought I’d like to shine some light on the discussion, so here goes.

There is nothing magical about the batteries in an electric car. Until about 8 years ago, they used to tend to be large ‘pouch’ batteries, but these days they are more likely to be just an assembly of small round batteries like you stick in a TV remote. The most common is the ‘18650’ batteries used by tesla:

Image result for tesla 18650 battery

It might sound nuts that this is what powers a car but its true. The difference between that and your laptop/TV remote battery is the ‘battery management system’ meaning some hardware and software that warms/cools/monitors and controls a LOT of these batteries once assembled in a big pack:

Related image

When it comes to the battery in an electric car, there are a lot of misconceptions, lies, FUD and confusion about how they work, how good they are, and whats important. This is partly because the battery tech has moved SO FAST, and partly because there are deliberate campaigns by anti-EV lobbyists (oil companies) to spread lies and fear. Lets clear some up!

Firstly, NO they are not dangerous. Stats show that a fossil fuel car is way more likely to catch fire or explode. EV batteries are heavily shielded. One famous case of a tesla battery fire was eventually found to be a result of someones handgun going off whilst pointed at the car floor(battery)…errr…don’t do that! (in ANY car!).

Secondly, no, the batteries do not just die after a few years. Battery degradation is REALLY low. My own car is 4.25 years old, has gone 34,000 miles and the battery degradation is 2.69%. Not only that, but a lot of evidence suggests that they degrade a lot (relatively) the first year, then that rate trickles off. I have no doubt my car battery will last another 50 years minimum (unlike my frail human form)

Thirdly…no, it doesn’t take four hours to charge an electric car at a car charging point. The speed here REALLY depends on the charger itself. My home charger is pretty slow, and will take maybe 10-11 hours from empty to full, but a tesla supercharger will charge insanely faster. The exact empty-full time will depend on temperature, but here is a rough guide:

What people forget is that your car charges at home WHILE YOU SLEEP. So 11 hours sounds a lot, but thats then 200-300 miles of range. I don’t travel 200 miles a day on a commute, so I don’t care. Note that not all cars, or chargers are the same. Some older charging networks have really slow speeds, and many cars cannot cope with 150kw. Your Mileage May Vary, but if you think there isn’t a car with 300 mile range that you can ‘fill up’ in 30 mins…well you are wrong :D

Oh and last thing before I talk about trade-offs… the price. I pay about 12p/unit for my electricity (apart from the power I get from my solar panels :D). because I live in COLD England, I average about 350wh/mile in my car, meaning that a mile is using about 4.2p of energy. Not bad

Note that Tesla supercharger prices vary, but are free for many S/X owners. The average rate is about 20-25p/unit. The new ionity chargers are charging 70p/unit so…buyer beware. Its STILL cheaper than petrol though :D

So now lets talk about battery trade-offs, namely the problems of Price, Range, Durability and charging speed.

When designing an EV and its battery these four things are always pulling against each other. Making a stupidly-long-range EV like this 2020 Tesla roadster is easy:

Image result for tesla roadster 2020

You just layer 2 model S 100kwh packs on top of each other (making the car heavier, and a bit cramped), and enjoy a crazy range of 620 miles. The only downside: OMG its expensive (think £250,000 minimum).

At the other end of the spectrum check out this super cheap electric car, the twizy (Starts at £6,690).

Image result for twizy

It has an amazing range of…err…56 miles. Not so good. The trade-off there is absolutely to make the cheapest EV possible, but range (as well as performance and interior capacity is totally sacrificed.

At the less extreme end, here is the Nissan leaf, starting at £26,345. It has a range of 168 miles but is limited to slow 50kw chargers. Its also a bit slow for an EV (max speed 90, 0-62mph 7.9secs).

Image result for nissan leaf acenta

Essentially all these cars are trying to balance out the priorities of fast charging, long range, price and battery lifetime. Pouring tons of energy into a small battery very fast will affect its lifetime. Having a much bigger battery boosts range *and* allows fast charging, but hugely increases cost. What to do!

My personal opinion? Well I drive a 2015 model S 85D, with an 85kwh battery pack. It can take me comfortably 240 miles, or further if I’m careful and don’t drive like a maniac, or if its super warm and sunny (batteries, like petrol cars prefer warm weather). I would guess 95% of my charging is done at home while I sleep, with me only using a supercharger for long trips ( a quick top up with coffee when I visit london, for example). It seems that most EV drivers you talk to are doing the overwhelming majority of their charging at home or while at work, just like me.

So…

The current best-in-class rate of public charging is about 150kwh. Thats VERY fast., any faster would *actually be annoying*, because the current speed lets me grab a coffee and a bun, and a call of nature before returning to the car. I only need to do this on super-long trips anyway and I WANT a break. Even with autopilot, driving is kinda dull. I want to stop and have a hot beverage.

The speed of filling an EV vs petrol/diesel cars is a HUGE red-herring because unlike most petrol/diesel drivers…we EV drivers hardly EVER need to do this. Its a rare thing for long trips only. If it takes us 15-20 mins, we grab a coffee. You don’t have to sit there holding a pump like those old fashioned petrol cars :D

Image result for supercharger tesla

So for me… NO, speed of charge is now fine. I wouldnt trade anything else to get my EV to charge faster, which leaves range, lifetime, and price.

As I said above, the current battery degradation of my 2015 battery is minimal, and Tesla are now saying they are heading towards a million-mile lifetime battery. In short… this problem is SOLVED. We don’t need batteries that depreciate less, we already have that, AND the charging time thing sorted.

So… that leaves a simple two-axis trade-off between price and range. This is something easily solved by the free market.

Every car in tesla’s lineup comes with a standard and long range variant. You can get a cheap(ish) car with good range, or a pricey car with excellent range. Which you pick is basically a factor of whether you drive a lot of long distances or not, and how much money you have. Its important to note that you should NOT compare your petrol-car range to your EV range. Every time you leave the house you have a ‘full tank’ in an EV. This is a game changer, this is huge!

TBH most of the time (including right now) I don’t even bother plugging my car in at home. Its just parked. I always plug in if I know I’m doing a road-trip the next day, or if its getting low on charge, but its certainly not daily. The range on my car is *more* than sufficient for my needs, even though I live in a rural location and its a 15 mile journey just to go to a shop.

Image result for old gas station

I think eventually people will get over this old-fashioned and silly ‘Until an electric car has 400+ miles range I won’t buy’ trope. Thats thinking like a petrol car. You NEED 400 mile range because refueling is a trip out of your way to some specified location. Thats annoying, and inconvenient, and…old fashioned. EVs make every single house a fuel station.*

So to conclude…I’m thinking the correct trade-off is PRICE. People designing EVs need to focus on price above everything else. EVs are STILL too expensive for many people, and a BIG chunk of the cost is the battery. The industry is already making great progress in this area. The huge scale up between 2012-2020 in terms of EV battery production have sent battery costs down lower and lower, and this should continue to be a point of focus.

So for anyone analyzing the EV market…look at who is making CHEAPER batteries, not the biggest or the ones with the fastest charge rates.

And for anyone looking into getting an EV, ignore battery lifetime and charge rate (these are solved!) and don’t get hung up too much on range either). I follow this market super-closely and would say by a HUGE margin, if you can possibly afford it, the Tesla model 3 is the BEST combination of all these factors.

Image result for tesla model 3

If you cant afford that, I’d suggest maybe the Nissan Leaf, but that is a big shift down in terms of spec.

If you can’t afford either hang in there…but do NOT buy an expensive hybrid car. Hybrid is the worst of both worlds. Keep your current car struggling along another year or two and watch decent EVs come down in price even more.

*i know this is currently only for houses with offstreet parking, but roadside lampost charging will come soon enough.