Charging issues
Behind these images is a comic scene. You should have filmed the man behind the wheel looking for the right position for the charging station. You should have heard his curse. I probably would have been lying if it had been someone else. But it was me and this German charging station between Braunschweig and Berlin turned out to be a real torture.
Every EV driver knows the problem. How do I connect my car? At many charging points, it is no mean feat. At slanted parking spaces you sometimes have to do highly illegal turns to put your car close enough to the fast charger. With the BMW with its rear right-hand charging port, there is sometimes no other option. Worrying about the optimal location for a charging port is pretty fruitless, by the way. Wherever that thing is, you can never control where you can stand. If one of the two parking spaces at a street charging station is occupied, you as an EV driver will soon be left with a problem. In cities, Mennekes cables can’t be long enough for me. In Germany I often had to pull my charging cable over my car to be able to charge it from the mains. The new time comes with new rituals. When it rains, I treat the muddy hose with a cloth to prevent paint damage on the roof or hood. Sometimes I’m bumper to bumper with my co-pluggers. In the long run, it can be quite irritating if you travel electrically from city to city for ten days, as I did last month.
This German pole was a fascinating misfire. He could only be reached with transgressive behaviour. In the parking spaces I could not connect left or right and forwards or backwards. To the hilarity of the Dutch witnesses in the parking lot, times did not work. The CCS cable was simply too short, so I saw no other option than to put the BMW across the post – see the photo. Luckily he did, so I counted my blessings; it was still quite a long way to Berlin.
I don’t know if they came up with it themselves, but Fastned has fantastically solved that eternal problem in the Netherlands with car wash-like swivel arms for those bloody fat fast charging cables. With this you can now slide to the left and right of the chargers everywhere, wherever your socket is located. It can be that simple, the right solution. While you used to have to wriggle in the most impossible turns on those usually not too generously sized loading docks to find your way. May this egg of Columbus spread with the speed of a pandemic.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl