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EV Charging at Alton Towers

Craig said:
I have similar thoughts in terms of EV charging to park guests without people just chucking their cars in a spot for the whole day. It's hard to incentivise someone to head out of the park when they've paid £150+ as a family of 4 to get on and park on the first place. As EV use grows I don't think that's all that sustainable. It risks causing more complaints from guests than the current complete lack of chargers. At least EV drivers know where they stand at the moment.

There's only a finite amount of infrastructure to support charging at Towers, so it needs a lot more involved thinking than "just add more chargers". If only they had sufficient capacity in the hotels they could've had some sort of offer where people could have a drink, maybe grab some post park grub, quick charge their car to be on their way.

Of course that again comes with limits, so perhaps linking up with some nearby facilities and publicising them as an alternative would be a good idea too? Incentivise people to top up before/after their day at the park instead with some sort of discount/offer?
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I think there will be a lot of places with this issue in ten years time when the number of electric vehicles is closer to being greater than petrol/diesel. Right now a smaller number of chargers slowly charging all day should be fine. But once most people have electric cars then many venues will need to consider these issues.
 
jon81uk said:
I think there will be a lot of places with this issue in ten years time when the number of electric vehicles is closer to being greater than petrol/diesel. Right now a smaller number of chargers slowly charging all day should be fine. But once most people have electric cars then many venues will need to consider these issues.
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In 10 years' time I'd like to think that battery technology will have advanced so much that an EV's range will match or beat a petrol engine, meaning drivers won't need to charge so much on long journeys and would be able to travel to Towers and back on one charge (or at least charge as often as they currently need to fill up with fuel for the same journey length)
 
Center Parcs have put close on 150 EV chargers into each of their villages in the UK. These are very slow trickle-charge ones & have to be pre-booked as an “activity” on your break. Idea is you unload your car, return it to your EV charge point in the carpark and leave it plugged in for your 3 or 4 night stay. They generally only charge overnight on cheaper electricity but your EV battery is full come departure day.

The theme park day-visitor model does not really work for EV charging without some way of juggling round the cars connected to the chargers during the day. Hotel overnight trickle-charging would definitely work though.
 
Exchangeable batteries, what a great idea like the days of the old Nokias. Just pop a fully charged one in when the old one runs out. Maybe in the future batteries can be so small and still give the same range this might be a realty (just pop it into the charging pod in the boot)
 
Nio in China are doing this. You can either charge your own battery or drive into one of their swap stations and have it swapped over in around 3 minutes (apparently). The benefit I suppose is that if you're in a hurry you can just get the battery swapped over. If you don't mind waiting then you can go to a regular charger and eat your dinner or read a book or whatever whilst waiting for it to charge (or do it at home). I suppose you need enough cars swapping batteries to make these 'swap stations' viable long term. It would also help if more manufacturers aligned with each other with battery compatibility and stuff so one swap station could be used for multiple brands. You can Google 'Nio battery swap' and it'll come up with all sorts of stuff.
 
I don’t see why there’s a perceived issue of having rows upon rows of 7kW units blocked out for the day as that’s the whole point of them being destination chargers - you charge at the destination and have a full battery ready to go when you leave.

Most shopping centres have loads of them now, look at Meadowhall and the Metro Centre who are swimming in them for example - I have used the podpoints at Chester zoo for the full day regularly - and elsewhere that has 7kW units the expectation and design is that they are destination chargers and going to be in use all day by one, possibly two users.

Of course if Merlin install rapid DC units they are just idiots because they have no use whatsoever at end destinations.
 
I imagine we won’t see any work now until closed season. The last thing towers will want to do going in to their busy scarefest and fireworks events is close off sections of the car parks to install these.

Still no clue where they will go, other than the press release saying theme parks and hotels.

Express would make sense, but that car park is often full most days with normal cars, and the coach park gets very full as all during trips.

I guess you could use the coach overflow car park, as that’s just used as a normal car park on busy days.

As for the hotels, it will be interesting where they decide to put these, with them having four different hotel car parks.
 
BarryZola said:
Should be like £40 to park there. You're getting parking close to the entrance and electric pumped into your car.
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I would guess the electricity is going to be VERY expensive for a few reasons, one is that it is in the middle of nowhere and where else are you going to charge at? also I would guess it may be a similar case to the arcades, where alton rent the space out (that is how a couple other charging companies also do it) and then the charging company makes the money from charging, and considering the location it probably isn't that cheap rent.

although I do wonder if they will charge premium or if they will mandate people actually charge there (not just park their electric car their)
 
It will be 62p/kwh the same price as Chessington so in the region of £40 for a full battery if you turn up almost empty. Conversely I was paid between 2-8p/kwh to charge my car today at home on my Octopus tariff; luckily a round trip is easy for my car but the rate is way north of where it needs to be for profitability.

Yes business rates are different and so on but EV charging prices don’t go in swings and roundabouts like petrol does - the prices for charging publicly only ever seem to go one way.
 
dave___ said:
It will be 62p/kwh the same price as Chessington so in the region of £40 for a full battery if you turn up almost empty. Conversely I was paid between 2-8p/kwh to charge my car today at home on my Octopus tariff; luckily a round trip is easy for my car but the rate is way north of where it needs to be for profitability.

Yes business rates are different and so on but EV charging prices don’t go in swings and roundabouts like petrol does - the prices for charging publicly only ever seem to go one way.
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But it's a one off 🤷🏼‍♂️

I drove down to Legoland recently which is about 90% charge for me each way:
Home Charge to 100% for way down at 8p/kWh = £4.80
Back up to 100% for way home at 62p/kWh = £34.50

Would have easily cost me more than £40 in fuel in my old car so still winning, got free priority parking and zero waiting time, worth it for the convenience imo.
 
evilcod said:
But it's a one off 🤷🏼‍♂️

I drove down to Legoland recently which is about 90% charge for me each way:
Home Charge to 100% for way down at 8p/kWh = £4.80
Back up to 100% for way home at 62p/kWh = £34.50

Would have easily cost me more than £40 in fuel in my old car so still winning, got free priority parking and zero waiting time, worth it for the convenience imo.
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My head is still stuck in the good old days when InstaVolt was expensive at 35p.

It’s interesting that wholesale electricity rates have crumbled since the energy crisis during the early stages of the Ukraine invasion and yet commercial entities other than Tesla don’t really adjust their pricing at all to reflect the changing prices. Makes one wonder just how far in advance they are hedging their prices for them to remain so consistently high.
 
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