Re: Recharging = needed break anyway?
"Charging (or refueling) points are expensive to install" :
In the case of rapid chargers, yes - they cost a fortune (I believe you're talking about £80k+ for ultra rapid). But for single-phase 7kW AC chargers the cost is a fraction of that. One can easily get a basic charger installed for under £1000 (and I think the charger units themselves are way overpriced for what they are) - certainly in my case even consistent access to a regular 13amp socket to use a so-called granny charger would have taken the edge off in most of my own cases. I'm sure the government could easily offer grants and incentives to business across the country to try and achieve basic charging facilities installed in the majority of public and private car parks.
One of the many problems with the public charging infrastructure is the extortionate prices they charge. e.g. At home I'm fortunate enough to have a driveway and a 'smart' home charger so I can charge for about 7p/kWh vs anything from around 43p on Tesla's network up to about 89p with the worst offenders (here's looking at you, InstaVolt and PotPoint!). Don't even get me started about 'fragmentation', shitty apps, incompatibility etc.
Rapid chargers are serious machines - liquid cooled cables delivering hundreds of volts DC at insane currents - they cost a bomb and then you have to deal with the latest craze of ne'er-do-well metal thieves chopping off the cables. I have to assume that a large part of the exorbitant price of charging is due to the exorbitant cost of installing and maintaining the chargers - i.e. rapid charging might always be a rip-off and not necessarily because of profiteering but because of the massive overhead costs of running them.
I think the long-term solution is two-fold:
Firstly:
EVs need to have sufficient range for their purpose. Tiny EVs marketed for inner city use can get away with a tiny battery whilst family/business EVs should (entirely in my opinion) have enough range to be able to handle 99% of regular journeys without needing a rapid charger.
My own yard stick is: My EV needs to be able to cover a minimum distance of 200 motorway miles driving at <u>the legal speed limit</u> in winter conditions. (N.B. it is quite common for EV drivers to brag about how they achieved a better range by driving at 50mph on the motorway. For me this is a deal-breaker.)
I had a Citroen e-C4 for three years with a 45kW battery and an advertised range of over 200miles. In reality when driving on the motorway I could not risk driving more than 120miles before needing to charge and this turned a ~400 mile journey to Cornwall with my kids (and a 400 mile return) into a "never again!" moment. The lack of charging infrastructure in Cornwall at the time compounded the misery. This was certainly a time when a even a humble granny charger would have made an improvement to the experience.
Now I've got a Polestar 2 which is an order of magnitude better than the Citroen on all counts, but the really crucial difference is that it is a long-range model with an 82kW battery - close to double that of the Citroen. This is a game changer for me - I can easily do a 200 mile round-trip from fully charged driving normally, using heated seats and A/C etc, and still get home with another 80+ miles of range remaining. In 4 months of ownership (well, 'lease-er-ship') I haven't needed to use a public charger once and don't envisage needing one any time soon.
Secondly: "Graze Charging" - Almost every time I have needed to use a rapid charger, my car has been parked for multiple hours with no access to power and could have easily been topped up enough to avoid the need to make a detour and delay my driving time at a rapid charge point.
As per my initial point about the cost of chargers, I'm convinced that if some ~7kW chargers were available at the majority of car parks (and ideally half the price per kWh or better compared to rapid chargers) then the demand for rapid chargers would fall drastically and we'd all be a bit less obsessed with trying to push a huge amount of power into a battery in the shortest possible time.
Back on the topic of BYD - My gut feeling is that this new breakthrough, if it's viable, it likely to be even more costly than the current rapid charging options. I did look at BYD's cars when choosing my latest EV but the reviews were not particularly good and given they were similarly priced to the bigger names in the market there was nothing to inspire me to look at one this time round.