The short version
- Electric motorist Baard Amundsen (60) tells of large charging queues for electric cars during the Easter journey home, when he drove from Røros to Oslo on Easter Sunday.
- He believes the queues led to dangerous traffic situations, with cars queuing along the main roads.
- The Electric Vehicle Association’s general secretary Christina Bu says that charging coverage has never been better, but that queues can occur on special departure days.
- She advises electric car drivers to charge when they can, not when they have to, and to avoid charging all the way up to 100 percent.
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Baard Amundsen (60) did that.
– What to say, he says when VG calls.
Amundsen feared the worst before the journey home from Røros to Oslo on Easter Sunday. Then it got worse.
In a post on https://twitter.com/baardamundsen/status/1774745118722965728?s=20 He describes the charging queues along highways 3 and E6 as massive.
– It was absolutely crazy up the whole valley. The big charging points on the road, Alvdal and Elverum were completely hopeless, it was not to be thought of at once.
The local newspaper Arbeidets Rett wrote on Sunday afternoon that chaos broke out along highway 3 in Alvdal.
Amundsen reacted strongly to the fact that the queues in Alvdal created dangerous traffic situations, in that the queues stretched out to the main roads where cars were lined up.
– The cars are slightly on the side, but it is not a particularly wide road. You drive past with your heart in your throat, says Amundsen.
– There are maybe a hundred Teslas in the road, and you have to get past with heavy traffic on the way. These are simply dangerous situations, which lasted the whole day.
– Started to cry
Amundsen says that he helped a woman who couldn’t get the charger to work after waiting for her turn for 45 minutes.
– She simply started to cry. Finally it was her turn, then she was unable to connect, he says.
It finally worked out for Amundsen and the electric car, who drove off national highway 3 and found a charging station at Rena. He says he stood in line for half an hour.
– We had hopes that things would be better this Easter, says secretary general of the Electric Vehicle Association Christina Bu to VG.
According to Bu, there has never been better national charging coverage than now. Norway now has 8,000 fast chargers, and 2,000 of these have been built in the past twelve months.
– So there is a positive backdrop. But when there is a queue on the road, the queues at the fast chargers can quickly pile up on special departure days. What we hear about here is a very boring situation for those who experience it.
She has two clear pieces of advice for electric car drivers:
- Charge when you can, not when you have to
- Do not stand until you have 100 percent power. It takes the longest to charge at the end of the charging curve.
– Dysfunctional
Amundsen says he experiences the entire charging system as dysfunctional.
– It is incredibly strange that the authorities do not take greater responsibility for charging infrastructure. They leave it to the market, where everyone tries to bind customers to their own payment system, and link them to their own complicated solutions that don’t work with each other, says Amundsen.
– It is simply a very bad solution. The functionality should be the easiest thing to solve.
General secretary Bu says this is at the heart of what the Electric Vehicle Association has worked a lot on.
– In such a situation, it actually increases the challenge that people struggle with payment. The challenge in Norway is that many companies do not want to participate in a common solution.
She explains that there are so-called roaming services, where you can use, for example, the Electric Vehicle Association’s charging chip, to charge many different companies and apps.
Bu also points out that last year it was required that all new charging stations have card payment, and that in a couple of years there will also be a requirement for retrofitting.
– So there is light at the end of the tunnel.
