Summary
- You can charge your EV at a public fast charging station.
- You can use a Kirana Charzer at your nearby grocery store or a coffee shop.
- Keep your batteries for charging at locations where Battery chargers are available.
- Use the onboard charger to charge your parked vehicle at a shopping center parking lot while you do your shopping
- You could also replace your battery with a fully charged one at a swapping station.
The most popular unique selling point of an electric vehicle is that it gives you the freedom to not worry about stopping for petrol and paying hefty amounts just to travel a few kilometres. Your home becomes your petrol station and you get to charge your EV overnight while you spend time taking rest.
But, What if you don t have the option to charge it overnight? this can be a problem faced by people living in Apartments, or rented households, where there isn’t a practical option to have a charging port where you park.
There are times even if you have a place to park your vehicle near a wall socket, you find out that the electrical box and/or service needs to be upgraded, or the distance from the box to the charging location is excessive. Both of these situations can prove pricey and time-consuming to rectify. these problems are usually with fast chargers.
Fortunately, in the meantime, if you have access to a parking spot and access to a wall outlet, You should be able to slow charge your 2 wheeler using a standard wall outlet.
But, if you have a rented apartment or a house and cannot install Wall chargers, read below to understand what options you currently have
But this shouldn’t be why you are turned away from buying an electric vehicle. Here are some alternatives you can try to get your vehicle charged to full without a home charger.
- You can charge your EV at a public fast-charging station.
Public Charging stations are a great way to get your vehicle charged while on the road, and, most of them have an option for fast charging, thus giving you the freedom to stop for 30 mins to get your vehicle fully charged while you have lunch or your daily breakfast.
There are currently 970 public EV charging stations available across india, and are expected to go up to 60,000 by 2024. thus giving you easy access to public charging in the coming future.
But, if you can’t wait that long, and are looking for other options, read below for more currently available options. - You can use a Kirana Charzer at your nearby grocery store or a coffee shop.
Kirana Charzer is an initiative by a company called Charzer to bring affordable charging stations to every grocery store or general store across India. and the charger just costs around Rs 10,000/-
They currently have over 80 chargers installed across 5 Indian cities. any grocery store can become a charging station.
All you need to do is book a session for charging using the Charzer app. After reaching the charging station, you use the app to start the charging.
2-wheelers and 3-wheelers will need to connect the portable adapters that they got with their vehicle to the charging station and start their charging. it is as simple as that. and this can be done at any grocery store in India that has the Kirana Charzer
it will cost you a maximum of Rs 25 per charging session.
And they also support any electric 2 or 3 wheelers in the market.
The only limitation they currently have is the lack of support for 4 wheelers. They plan to add 4 wheeler support in the coming months.
- Keep your batteries for charging at locations where Battery chargers are available.
Image by @kumpan_electric
If your vehicle has removable batteries, you can keep one battery for charging at your home by plugging it in your home wall socket, or if you are at work you can just find a nearby grocery store with a Kirana charzer and keep your Battery for charging while you finish your work.
Pick up the fully charged battery after work, plug it into your EV and head home without any worries.
If you have multiple batteries in your vehicle, you can just keep one battery for charging while you do your errands across the city and come back, get the fully charged battery and replace the finished one. - Use the onboard charger to charge your parked vehicle at a shopping center parking lot while you do your shopping
Image: EVPlugin Charge, Cross River Mall
You can also charge your 2 or 4 wheeled EV at a Mall parking lot near you. there are a lot of charging stations with reserved parking for EVs being set up in underground parking lots of Malls and supermarkets.
This is an amazing way to charge your EV while you spend time shopping.
Multiple vehicles currently get fully charged within 1 hour. this time can be perfectly spent charging your vehicle in the parking lot. while you finish shopping. plus it is very cheap. - You could also replace your battery with a fully charged one at a swapping station.
Few vehicles have a problem of needing a minimum of 6 hours to fully charge, this is a very long time to wait just to get a few more kilometres out of your vehicle,
One solution to this problem is by using a swapping station to get fully charged batteries instantly. without any waiting times,
Image: Charge up
by using a swapping station you have a massive advantage of saving a lot of time as well as the guarantee that you have a fully charged battery pack.
If you are a delivery rider or an auto-rickshaw driver. time is very important and the distance travelled needs to be more as well. so with swapping stations, All you need to do is to subscribe to a daily battery rental plan. This allows you to visit the swapping station as many as 2-3 times a day and swap the discharged batteries with fully charged batteries.
With swappable batteries, the drivers can potentially increase their average earnings from Rs 850 to Rs 1800, and instead of 80-90 km a day, you can cover as much as 160+ kilometres a day, depending on how many times you swap your battery.
There are too many options to charge your vehicle effortlessly without wasting a lot of time waiting for it to charge, you can get errands done while you charge using a parking lot charger, or you can get a fully charged battery and go on your way without any waiting time.
But the main thing to consider from all of the above options is affordability. compared to petrol or diesel prices. you can go the same distances almost at 1/10th of the cost! which is mind-blowing.
So we hope you don’t move away from buying an EV just because of perceived low charging options. as you can see. there are a lot of options to choose from.