Potentially Obvious Electric Car Design Flaw.

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I have recently seen a neighbours new electric car and I am not going to mention the make, as I have seen this flaw more then once and it is asking for problems.
The plug lead to charge the car sits upwards at an angle of around 45 degrees, so if one has a lot of bad weather, the rain will run down the plug and will cause the area around the plug to corrode, and even worse then that, has the potential to short out the electrics or possibly cause electrocution?

Why aren't the sockets pointing the other way round? (Maybe the thinking is that water could run downaards towards ones hand and if there was a short it could reach ones hand? But it could just as easily short and electrocute if a stream of water runs down the plug towards the car).

Those whomown electric cars. Make sure the power is off before removing the lead in wet weather and one should be safe.

But ideally, if one can charge ones car in a dry enviroment it is best.


Now here is a different issue altogether. I have heard that some charging points will use induction charging. Yes. The technology works and has been in use for many, many years as it is how traditional electrical transformers work, where the electro magnetic field from a coil powered by one current is inducted into an independent coil which will provide a new current, and this new current could either be stepped down or stepped up according to the needs of whatever one is running.
Where the risks are are because strong high powered electro magnetic fields can cause cancer. Think of living not only right next to, or underneath a pylon, and you not only get the idea, but the potential risks are many times higher as pylons are wires which are not in the form of a coil, so have weaker magnetic fields then a coil does, so those who have electric cars should never sit or stand around such places while ones car is charging, and it is why one would not position such a charger where people are going to be in the vicinity for any length of time like a taxi rank foe drivers of electric taxis etc.

Think the risks aren't that great? Think of the health warnings of using a mobile phone and amplify them a great many times and this is what one could potentially be facing.

Thankfully induction charging is something which has now largely gone quiet, so if one has an electric car, best plug it in, and if one wants to feel safe if it is raining, ensure the power is not turned on until after the plug is connected or dissconnected, and ideally, try and provide a sheltered enviroment so this issue won't be a problem.

Yet another issue: Not everyone has a garage or a private driveway.

We have street parking. I think running an extension cord from the front of our house, across a public sidewalk, to a car parked along the street would create a tripping hazard.

I guess the good news is we do not live in an apartment building or condominium. At least we wouldn't have to run the extension cord down the hallway and a stairwell before running it across a public sidewalk. (Though, rather than running it down the hallway I suppose you could just run it out your window.)

Maybe hybrids are a better idea, but to be honest, a small lightweight petrol or diesel car will be slightly more efficient with fuel consumption in real time figures because though in theory hybrid manufacturers may show their cars to give better fuel consumption figures, in reality every time one converts from one power source to another one looses efficiency.
The same issues were trialled and tested in the UK with railway locomotives but they dis have a different problem that most cars do not. Railway locomotives have to pull great weights at speed which would smash a conventional mechanical gearbox to bits. They did get mechanical gearboxes to work in lightweight railcars and low speed diesel shunters (Switchers) but though they tried various designs, the most interesting one being the "Fell" locomotive, they had to look at alternative ways to get the diesel engine to power the wheels. They needed a transmission with a bit of "Give" to it.
The solutions came in the forms of either using higher revving diesel engines combined with hydraulic gearboxes or using low revving diesel engines coupled to large generators which then use the electricity to power the traction motors which power the wheels.
On tests both were found to work well. The diesel hydraulics were able to haul loads at higher speeds compared to their size and weights then diesel electrics were, but the lower revving diesel electrics could stay in revenue earning service a litrle longer so were slightly more cost effective overall.

Now with a car we have hydraulic transmissions already in the form of the traditional automatic gearboxes, and most stick shift mechanical gearboxes gave much better fuel consumption figures. (Recently a few new automatic gearboxes have managed to give even better fuel consumption figures then manual stick shifts can, though I believe the new ones do not use hydraulically operated transmissions but electrical? Maybe someone can clarify this point).

But what I am saying is that in general, for a car, to use hybrid technology and make it more efficient, one has to make the engine work a little harder then it has to with a mechanical gearbox unless the cars batteries are already fully charged and taking over, so in town and city traffic one will get better fuel consumption figures, but hit those hills in the rolling countryside and while the cars will often even perform better in their ability to climb those hills, the fuel consumption will be worse as the engine has to catch up with the power used in recharging the batteries back to the point of where they were. So it depends on where one lives and the use the vehicle has.
A friend has a Toyota Prius and he loves it to bits, BUT never has he ever come close to the 70mpg fuel figures the manufacturer claimed the vehicle to reach. He said his averages at 35mpg for a typical weeks driving. He also uses another newer Prius so he has had a good few years of driving them under his belt.

We have more electric cars here than anywhere else in Canada.. and it rains the most here.. and exactly Zero of them have electrocuted anyone.

There are tons of Teslas on the road, as well as Nissan Leafs, some Hyundai Konas, Kia Souls, Hyundai Ionics, and I'm sure a bunch more I'm forgetting or not even realizing are full electric.

Pretty sure this is not an actual design flaw that's resulted in any dangerous situations.. or they would have arisen Here of all places - where it rains a LOT and there are ever more electric vehicles on the road. even IF there's a chance of water getting in around a plug, surely there are drains for it to exit by..

Those that I have seen use similar plugs to those used on caravan sites which have rubber seals to prevent water ingress.

MG, is it a documented flaw or just something you suspect might potentially be a flaw?

Goldy is right about their safety record (unless you've got more info to provide) and MCT is right about how the problem has been solved in other similar applications.

I believe your concerns might not be warranted because issue was taken into account when designing the plugs.

As for charging stations:

There are charging stations all over town. Some at shopping malls and grocery stores. Brand new condo buildings are starting to have them all included - eventually it will become building code that they Must Be installed. Everywhere.

My friend had one installed at his work. I don't think he has one at his condo - doesn't need it since it's less than 10 miles away. His dad was having one installed at their downtown townhouse so they have somewhere to charge the car when the family comes to visit in that car. Quite pricey to run the electrical because the cable itself costs more than $100/foot - something like that.

Places with street parking might see charging stations installed, or maybe people will just use quick charging stations elsewhere - especially as battery and charging technologies improve & charging time gets faster. It'll still take longer than filling up a tank with gas, but might be quick enough to just pull over and do it somewhere like you would get gas. Time will tell.

I suspect. It is through having a brother who was an elwctrician who taught me why things are done in certain ways while watching him working.

Here they are setting up those charging spaces where they can but because they look like dissabled parking spaces, I often see elderly people parking in them with their blue badges displayed. I see this regularly because they don't realize what they are so they assume they are dissabled parking spaces. Oops! It is a good job that there are not many electric cars around here as yet. I would say it is about one in 200 to 300 cars I see. (I am good at spotting them as I notice things like that because I pick up on patterns, so if a make does petrol and another car of the same make and model being electric, they do have small differences that I notice, but I will say that my area is one of those areas where cars head this way after about 15 years to get their final decade of life out of them where most of the older cars that head this way used to be owned from people who used to live in the cities where they can afford to buy new and change them often. We are more "Green" down here so we keep the old cars on the road for longer. Wierdly, one or two cars I have sold have gone on to be classed as classic cars, and the buyers bought them just before that date so they could wait for their prices to rize).

^Interesting.

There are so many Tesla's around here that it's not very uncommon to see 3 or 4 of them in a row on the roads/highways. A lot more than 1 out of every 2-300 vehicles, that's for sure. Electric cars probably make up at least 3-5x that, maybe more, and growing every day.

There are a lot of people here with a lot of money - and a lot of people with "paper money," real estate gains due to the VanRE market insanity. There's also a lot of West Coast environmentalist types - Greenpeace was founded here, after all.

Plus it's the most moderate climate in the entire country, so electric cars make the most sense as they can easily handle our "winters." (We have palm trees on the beach like California - we don't get "real," winters here.)

As for age of cars on the road: Cars easily last 3-4x longer here than most of the rest of the country & continent -> almost no snow means no salt means they don't rust away to nothing. Combine that with environmentalists And the fact that the vast majority of working people cannot afford new cars regularly and really need them to last as long as possible, cars don't get replaced anywhere near as often as they do in other cities.

The normal "charger" for an EV is actually all about safely connecting the car to the electrical supply. For shock hazard: GFI protection is provided and power is cut by relay when the release handle on the plug is depressed. For weather proofing there are seals and the water has to travel in opposite directions to get to the contacts. Even if the socket is not pointing up the design still has to be able to work in driving rain. Other safety features are power is only provided when the plug is connected to an EV and the interlock is very unlikely to be accidently defeated. The current available to the EV is reported through the cable to prevent overload. This can be a problem if extension cables or questionable outlets are used with the portable charge cable. And last but not least, the charging cable is tested to safely break away from the box containing the safety equipment, if the EV starts rolling away, for example. The lingo for the "charger" is an EVSE but also call a charging station. The high power, fast charging stations are actual chargers since they provide DC power at the battery voltage and control the current based on maximum the EV reports the battery can accept. These are the Tesla Superchargers that you see all the Teslas happily lined up at. There are 2 other competing DC fast charge standards but the SAE-CCS (US) standard is gaining in worldwide dominance over the ChaDeMo (Japan) standard. I don't know what safety features the DC fast chargers use, but since they are vastly more expensive, I imagine they are plenty safe.

Is there a plan for charging stations in rural areas?

Yeah.. any home with electricity can install one - sooo, people will install their own.

Other than that, Tesla's supercharger network surely has them dotted along major highways through rural areas as well.. and then other brands' chargers are likely to be installed in similar locations - they're not going to skip over rural areas entirely, or it'd be impossible to drive across the continent. I have no idea what the locations of chargers are as I'm still at least a year or two away from owning an electric vehicle, at the earliest, so it's not a piece of information I need to know at the moment.

One problem is those charging points one has to have some sort of online only acces to recharge? Why can't I put ten pence in a meter or something? I will not get an electric car if the only way that I can charge it is by trading online.

More than that, induction causes radio frequency interference.

Yes, some charging stations require a smart phone with NFC to activate. Many can be used with a credit card, either directly or by calling the company. Others can only be used with account and either an RFID card or smart phone. The industry needs to standardize and cooperate more to make the multiple charging networks easier to use. A smart phone is very useful for finding charging stations even if the EV has built in capability to find stations. A smart phone is all useful for a slew uses as in any car.

I have owned and been driving EVs since 2013.

Ah. That explains something. Why radios humm when they are run off a transformer but do not humm if run off a battery.