An electric van, fitted out at home

I've wanted a van for a long time. But a combustion van was too expensive to run and far too much CO₂ for me: a big diesel for weekends away was something I couldn't justify.

So for three years I made do with car sharing, on top of a Swiss rail pass and my bike. It was the greenest and the cheapest option. But with my daughter growing up, and wanting to get back into outdoor sports, skiing and paragliding, it was getting complicated.

An electric van changes the equation: energy is cheap, maintenance next to nothing, and over its life it emits far less than a combustion one, battery manufacturing included (see the ICCT life-cycle analysis). And batteries are now big enough, and charging fast enough, to travel far without thinking about it.

Of course, cycling and public transport remain the better option, and I keep using them. But they don't fit every lifestyle: with a child, paragliding gear and dawn starts to take-offs no bus reaches, sometimes you need a vehicle. It may as well be as frugal as possible.

The van reports to a small server I wrote: every trip, every charge, the battery's state. Over the first three weeks, 1,360 km from 30/09/2026 to 20/10/2026:

On a motorway trip you'd rather charge between 10 and 80 %: that makes legs of about 200 km, roughly two hours of driving, the right moment for a break. On country roads at 80 km/h, it goes past 350 km.

What matters is speed, not weight. In a combustion car, every time you brake the energy of motion turns into heat in the discs: it's gone. In an electric one, the motor brakes by charging the battery. Coming down the Jura or stopping at a light now costs only a small efficiency loss, instead of all the energy. So the van's mass, and what you load into it, barely change the consumption, and the brakes hardly wear. At high speed, though, air resistance dominates, and a van is shaped like a wardrobe: hence the gap between 19 and 25.

My building bills charging at an absurd price: 0.60 CHF/kWh at the car park's charger, even when it's our own roof's solar supplying it. We're trying to get that changed. Even at that price, electric is still cheaper than a diesel van.

The household tariff is the one on our flat's electricity bill in Nyon: 26.4 ct off-peak, 32.2 ct peak. 80 % of the charging at night and on weekends is what a car sleeping in the garage does without trying. My real cost in October, with the expensive charger and a few fast charges on trips: 11.90 CHF/100 km.

With solar panels on your own roof, it gets much better still: charging from your own surplus costs only what the grid would have paid you for it, often under 10 ct a kWh. 100 km for about 2 francs, with energy made a few metres away.

Besides energy:

The PV5 has an API: you can read the battery's state, start and stop a charge, set the charge limit or schedule the heating remotely. That's enough to automate a lot.

A small server runs all the time. It follows the van, and it also connects to the building's solar data: live production from the roof's 128 kWp, and the forecast surplus for the day and the week (see the building automation). It only starts charging when the roof makes more than the building uses, and stops when the surplus goes. The rest happens at night, off-peak.

Of course the system can always be bypassed: if I have to leave tomorrow morning with a full battery, one button does it.

What changed in the last few years is that batteries became big enough, and charging fast enough, to travel. The PV5 charges at up to about 125 kW on a fast charger: around 25 minutes to get half the battery back, the time for a coffee and a leg stretch.

For camping, a 230 V socket on a huge battery makes everything simpler. No leisure battery, no roof panel, no gas stove: plug in an induction hob, a heater, a laptop, whatever you like. An evening of cooking and computing uses a handful of kWh, a few percent of the battery.

The van's heat pump can also heat or cool the cabin all night, far more efficiently than an electric heater. In "utility" mode I measured about 280 W of air conditioning in mild weather. The rough figures I found for a cabin this size: 0.3 to 0.7 kWh an hour depending on the cold, so 3 to 7 kWh for a 10-hour night, 5 to 10 % of the battery.

As long as the V2L socket is on, the van stays awake: high-voltage battery connected, inverter, 12 V converter and control units running. The ADAC measured this self-consumption on six electric cars: 390 to 500 W depending on the model, 390 W on the Kia EV5 (ADAC V2L test, in German). It comes on top of whatever is plugged in, even a phone charger.

For cooking, that's negligible: an induction hob draws 2 kW for half an hour, and the van's 400 W are a small part of the bill. For a small appliance left plugged in, it's the other way round. A fridge that uses 30 W on average:

Over 90 % of the energy goes into keeping the socket on, not into cooling. A three-day weekend with the fridge plugged in all along costs 40 % of the battery.

Better to switch the socket on only for the big loads. For the fridge, a passive cool box is enough for a short weekend. For longer, a portable power station runs the fridge and recharges from the socket an hour a day: the van only pays its 400 W for that hour. The socket switches itself off at the discharge limit set in the van, which keeps enough to drive home.

Version 1, deliberately simple and cheap: an OSB bed platform in the boot, rear seats folded, to prove the geometry before making the same parts again in plywood. Underneath, room for the luggage. On top, two inflatable mattresses, a duvet, and insulating curtains on the windows. More photos will follow as the build goes on.

Two 15 mm OSB3 panels side by side, resting on the boot's plastic side frames, false floor removed. A batten rib under each panel and a beam under the centre joint make them stiff: halving the span is worth as much as doubling the thickness, for a tenth of the weight. Every part comes out of a single 2500 × 1250 mm sheet.

The one thing not to get wrong is the orientation: OSB is two and a half times stiffer along the sheet's length. So the 745 mm span must be taken along the 2500 mm. Getting the orientation right is worth more than going to 18 mm, and costs nothing.

Closed-cell EPDM tape wherever wood touches the van, and 50 mm holes every 20 cm under the mattress for ventilation. Materials and consumables: about 130 CHF, of which 33 CHF for the sheet. The final version, in 15 mm maritime pine plywood, weighs about the same, is much stiffer and has edges that look fine raw, for 86 CHF a sheet.

The front seats don't slide forward, so the bed is shorter than 1.90 m. Off-the-shelf platforms don't escape it: Combe Valley Campers' one for the PV5 is 1380 × 1815 mm. A hinged head extension is the idea for version 2.

Insulating blinds with suction cups for the rear window and the side windows: they keep the warmth in at night, the sun out by day, and hide the inside. I made them from a do-it-yourself kit, the Carbest 7-layer Thermomatte, about 70 CHF from Camping-Profi. Bought with my own money, no affiliate link.

The kit holds 3.5 × 1.55 m of insulating mat, 30 suction cups, 30 m of edging tape and a plastic sheet for the template. Trace each window onto the sheet, cut the mat, sew the edging tape all round, then fit the suction cups. The 14 mm eyelets aren't included: they go in with a hammer and a small setting tool, sold separately.