Charge Rage: Electric Cars Are Making People Meaner In California 554
HughPickens.com writes: Matt Richtel reports that the push to make the state greener with electric cars is having an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner. The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. According to Richtel, electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window. "Cars are getting unplugged while they are actively charging, and that's a problem," says Peter Graf. "Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'"
The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, there have been notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."
The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, there have been notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."
Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Interesting)
Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:4, Interesting)
So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:4, Insightful)
That's my idea. If they want these prime spots right near the building that also give their cars free fuel, why not require a permit and have them pay a monthly fee? Then you can use the money to build out all the outlets you need.
As the article states, it's worse to have too few than to have none.
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Why are they giving away the electricity? Is it difficult to meter or something?
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they want to look "environmentally conscious", so they put two chargers in their parking lot and then add a slide about how "green" they are for the shareholders' meeting.
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People pay large amounts of money for electric cars so they can feel superior to the rest of us average drivers. They are saving the environment and you are destroying it. So They are better than everyone else.
Of course people like that are more or less petty by default. So combine Petty with snootiness and you have a recipe for fights over status.
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People pay large amounts of money for electric cars so they can feel superior to the rest of us average drivers. They are saving the environment and you are destroying it. So They are better than everyone else.
To be fair, that is true. They ARE doing something about the environment that you're not. Of course they shouldn't lord it over people, and I doubt whether many do in reality. It's probably more paranoia or guilt on your part.
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If you're charging for electricity, that means you're selling electricity and need a meter certified to be accurate and tamper-proof by either you or your customer. Also, since we're talking about parking spots rather than houses, you need identity verification infrastructure and some way to keep some third party from simply unplugging the cord and plugging in their own extension one.
Once money enters, trust leaves, and expense
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hipsters fight over "free stuff" (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are they giving away the electricity? Is it difficult to meter or something?
Free is the key thing here. Yes, the solution is just charge for time on the charger, and used that money to put in more chargers. But humans are uniquely curious when it comes to free stuff. Give away free stuff and everybody wants some, and they hate it when someone else gets free stuff and they don't. Charge just a little bit for it, and then it changes the whole attitude.
What is interesting is that most EV drivers probably don't need the charge to get home and carry out their daily errands. If they do then they probably made the wrong vehicle choice. They just want to charge up on someone else's dime.
Of course, there will be a few who would somehow feel entitled and would see such a change and respond.... "can you believe they are taking away our free charging!".
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Only utility companies (PUC's) can meter (Score:3)
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Informative)
Dunno... up here in Portland, I've lost count of the prime parking 'chargers only 'cuz we're teh environmentalz!!!!' spots that sit empty most of the time, even during peak shopping/working hours.
Wouldn't mind having the EV owners pay for the privilege, though, because if they don't, the rest of us do (the stores aren't installing the things out of the goodness of their hearts, you know, and they have to recoup the costs somewhere).
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Charging points are often placed in prime spaces because the installers want to use the shortest possible cable runs. If they put the charger at the back of the car park they would have to run a thick cable from the main building all the way back there. It's unfortunate.
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Interesting)
It is actually done that way due to the LEED certification process for green buildings; parking spots for carpools, low emitting vehicles, and EVs need to be prime spots. Electrically they are a pain because they are 40A at 208V, which makes provisions for more than three a bit of a challenge; 480V units would be much easier to accommodate.
The shortage is just a timing issue; chargers will catch up. The problem really is that many employers provide them for free.
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, if you shorten the distance to 250ft by moving the charging spots closer to the building, you can get by on 4ga, at only a hair under 3.5x the cost of 10ga, or put the spaces right by the building and get by on 6ga, coming in at (interestingly) about the same cost per foot. But also many fewer feet.
To give some perspective, let's look at a parking lot that runs 350ft out from the building, assuming the building is 100x100ft with power distributed from the middle of the back of the building. That gives you approximately 500ft to the farthest point in the lot where you might need a light. If lights are placed evenly in 4 rows, edge to edge, they will be placed 25ft apart across the lot; we'll assume similar spacing going down the lot, giving us 4 rows of (350/25) 14 lights. Since we're "green" enough to offer charging stations, we're also green enough to use LED lights weighing in at 150W that match 500W metal halide lamps in brightness, giving us a total of 2100W per row of lights. At 480v, that's 4.375A, requiring 12ga wire for a 500ft run. Pessimistically, we need 4000ft (the two middle rows will actually be about 50ft shorter, requiring 100ft less wire each, but let's ignore that and give your position a chance to hold up), which would cost $1160 to pick up from Lowe's by the foot. That's enough wire to power all 56 lights in the parking lot.
Now, let's install one charging station in the far corner of the lot. Just one. 40A at 208V and a distance of 500ft, we need to run 500ft of 1ga wire, for a total bill of $2190 if purchased per-foot at Lowe's. And you can't daisy-chain them like the lights in each row of lot lighting; you have to run an entire cable pair for each charging station.
If you're going to put, for example, 10 stations in each row of parking, you need conduit that can hold 20 runs of 1ga wire; since that conduit will also likely be shared by the lighting wiring, it needs to be oversized so, according to NEC, 3-1/2" conduit is required in order to safely run all of this wire. I wont' bother factoring in the cost of the conduit, as I'm sure I've already made my point. If we have 4 rows of parking, and 10 charging stations per row, we're talking about 40 charging stations. If we want to put them at the far end of the lot, we're talking about nearly 40k feet of 1ga wire at a cost of nearly $88k (again, at retail, by the foot, not how you'd actually buy it; we can ignore the dollar values, but the cost multiples will be similar), or over 75x the cost of wiring all of the lighting in the parking lot.
Now, let's install our 40 charging stations in the 40 spots closest to the store. If we assume 6ft wide spots, we can put 10 right on the building, 5 on each side of the entryway, and still have 40ft for the entry. Worst case for those 10 is a 150ft run. If the spots are 10ft deep and we have a 20ft traffic lane, the next farthest charger will be at 180ft; with 4 chargers per row and keeping the 6ft spot width, we'll need 7 full rows of chargers and 1 row with chargers in the 2 middle spots. Since the edge spots on the 7th row will be farther from the power distribution point than the middle spots in the 8th row, those are our farthest distance, worst case scenario, at a distance of 216ft. At that distance, we can use 4ga wire.
In fairness, since the 500ft example treated all installed charging stations as the worst case (2x500ft of 1ga), I'll do the same here. That's 2x216ft of 4ga by 40 chargers, or 17,280ft of 4ga at $
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't park within 1000 feet of the supermarket doors in their own parking lot now.
- 20 Handicapped spaces
- 6 "expectant mother" spaces
- 4 spaces to pickup internet orders
- 4 EV charging spaces
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I would think that the infrastructure behinds these extra wires and outlets need to be able to handle the increase; going from 16 to 60 concurrently charging cars would put a fair bit of load on the system.
Tesla uses 240v, 50A - if we assume there's a 10A option for slower charging, that's 100kW additional load, enough that the parking-garage might not have been spec'ed for it. At this point, it stops being just a bit more wire...
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You only need to be able to supply enough current to eventually charge all the cars. So you only need to meet enough load to get them all charged by the end of the day.
a classic economics problem (Score:5, Insightful)
So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.
Accurate analysis from the very first post. This is a classic economics problem, overuse of a good that is given away for free; and has a classic economic solution: put a price on it.
This is silicon valley. Make an ap for them them to sign up for their spot online.
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Running wire is cheap, sure. Designing and building an infrastructure for 20, 50 or 100 cars is not.
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Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
Or another alternative headline:
"Demand for Electric Vehicles Outpaces Recharge Ports." This is kinda how this stuff works. Supply follows demand.
Only in Anti-Tesla Slashdot world would we get such a whacky spin like "EV's make people mean". Something tells me that there will me more charging ports put in. The shocking truth.
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"Demand for Electric Vehicles Outpaces Free Recharge Ports."
Fixed.
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Maybe. Or maybe the businesses will say "Hey, Fuck You. Schedule a stop at a charging station as part of your daily commute." You know, just like the rest of us do with our combustion engine vehicles.
That would be a weird and backwards thing to do. One of the main advantages of EVs is that you don't need to take 10 minutes out of your day to park and wait for hydrocarbons to flow into a tank. You just leave it plugged in while you're stopped for another reason anyway.
At home, that's trivial, you just plug into your charger - there's a 1 charger to 1 car ratio.
At work, supply hasn't yet caught up with demand. That, combined with the fact that companies try to encourage employees being green by making
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ITYM "10 minutes out of your week." vs. 10 minutes out of each day finding a spot with charging near where "you're stopped for another reason anyway," getting the cable out, plugging, unplugging and stowing the cable. If that's an advantage, it's one for gasoline powered vehicles.
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Maybe things work differently in California but TFA seems to a bit strange to me. When I'm charging the charging cable is locked in at both ends. It can't be unplugged without a great amount of force, that will probably damage something.
There are actually two types of locking mechanism. For slow and fast chargers, up to about 22kW, you supply your own cable and the car locks it in at one end and the charger locks it in at the other. You can set the car to unlock when finished charging, or never. For rapid c
Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe things work differently in California but TFA seems to a bit strange to me. When I'm charging the charging cable is locked in at both ends. It can't be unplugged without a great amount of force, that will probably damage something.
It's not an "in California" thing - it's an "on some cars" thing. On the eGolf for example, the charger locks, and does not unlock unless the owner comes back and unlocks the vehicle. On the Leaf, it can be set to not lock even during charging (made safe by having control pins disconnect before power pins, and stopping charging as the plug is pulled).
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Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
It's not so much about the free electricity. I think most would be fine with paying for the juice. It's about being able to get home.
When I worked in an office with chargers, though, it really wasn't a problem. We just set up a mailing list that everyone with a short-range EV subscribed to, and used it to communicate about vehicle swapping on the chargers. Unplugging someone else's car would have been considered very uncool, and no one ever did that. Those who lived close or had longer-ranged cars (i.e. T
It isn't climate change... (Score:4, Insightful)
Electric cars do not make people mean (Score:5, Insightful)
It would seem electric cars are simply giving mean people another way to express just how mean they can be.
Seriously? (Score:2)
If you knew of the problem before you bought the car, and you still bought the car, then you're an idiot.
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You bought a car which needs to be plugged in, you knew there was a shortage of available public charge spots and now you're mad that you can't find one? If you knew of the problem before you bought the car, and you still bought the car, then you're an idiot.
It sounds like you have come to slashdot, read some stupid article and now you are mad about it ....
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If you knew of the problem before you bought the car, and you still bought the car, then you're an idiot.
It's a simple supply and demand problem. It would be like running out of handicapped spaces, and you're pissed about the idiots who bought handicapped equipped vans.
When the fix is so simple, and can be monetized, and app driven as well, the amount of Slashsillieness applied is a bit funny.
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It's a simple supply and demand problem. It would be like running out of handicapped spaces, and you're pissed about the idiots who bought handicapped equipped vans.
Umm, no. Unlike buying an EV, being handicapped isn't really a choice.
When the fix is so simple, and can be monetized, and app driven as well, the amount of Slashsillieness applied is a bit funny.
Agreed. Wanna charge up? get out your credit card. Otherwise learn to plan your route accordingly.
Merry pranksters (Score:4, Interesting)
According to Richtel, electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots.
I've always thought that once they became sufficiently popular you might need some sort of lock on the charger while charging otherwise merry pranksters (read @$$holes) might come along and just unplug your car, effectively leaving you stranded for a period of time if your charge is low.
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I believe that some (most?) models do come with locking mechanisms, if only for safety/liability reasons.
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I've always thought that once they became sufficiently popular you might need some sort of lock on the charger while charging otherwise merry pranksters (read @$$holes) might come along and just unplug your car, effectively leaving you stranded for a period of time if your charge is low.
What I want in my future hypothetical EV is a port which will lock itself until I have enough charge to get home and/or do whatever else I've programmed the car to think I'll be doing for the rest of the day, then unlock itself so that if someone else really needs a charge they can get one. It should also alert me when someone grabs the charger so that if I change my mind later in the day and want to do more stuff, I can go down and plug it in again.
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What I want in my future hypothetical EV is a port which will lock itself until I have enough charge to get home and/or do whatever else I've programmed the car to think I'll be doing for the rest of the day, then unlock itself so that if someone else really needs a charge they can get one.
My 2013 LEAF has part of that. It will lock the charging port until the battery is full, where "full" can be either 80% or 100%.
Talking to someone is mean now? (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'
Um...isn't this the way the world is supposed to work? Or is getting someone's attention and letting them know that it's time to move along now considered a microaggression?
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Indeed, but we're now into hipster dweebville where everyone hides behind their screens and cannot cope with people in real life. You'd think a modern system would send and alert via SMS or email to the car owner to have them be made aware their car is done allowing them to move the fucking thing. Hopefully the next step is to clamp the pricks.
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>> Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'
Um...isn't this the way the world is supposed to work? Or is getting someone's attention and letting them know that it's time to move along now considered a microaggression?
You noticed that too. Until the demand issue is fixed, it seems like people are just working things out for themselves. After the number of charging ports rise, the problem will go away.
The entire story can Occam to some people hate EV's, and any negative spin - even ridiculous ones like this - will be applied and brayed out like the end of the world.
And everything is a microagression these days. Watch how pissed someone will be that I used "Occam" as a verb.
Re:Talking to someone is mean now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I didn't understand this either. That seems like the polite, neighborly thing to do with a shared resource. Whoever wrote the summary (if not the article) is a whining hipster douchebag - god forbid you should stop hogging a resource that other people need when you're not using it.
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There is a free app called ChargeBump that is being promoted on forums and by some charger providers. It lets you send a message to other EV drivers with only their car's number plate. The message is just a polite "I'd like to charge when possible", and they can respond with "please unplug when I'm finished" or a number of other messages.
Asking someone to move so you can charge is not a microagression, that's not what the term means. Most places in the UK have 3 hour parking in charging spaces anyway.
Econ 101 (Score:3)
A "free" resource becomes a scarce resource. Solution: charge $ per time unit for a parking space with a charger. Increase price till shortage disappears.
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A "free" resource becomes a scarce resource. Solution: charge $ per time unit for a parking space with a charger. Increase price till shortage disappears.
You need to charge to charge. No doubt of that. But you need to add more charge ports to maximize the money you can get from the charging charge.
Somebody tell me... (Score:2)
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...how hard would it be to transmit power to the cars through the roads?
Not very efficient at best, and I wouldn't be too surprised if ti would be an RFI problem.
When I was a kid, I used to wonder if big cars could be made like those little slot cars we used to play with.
I think the whole issue could be resolved by adding more charging ports.
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It's possible, but if you're talking traditional methods of wireless charging similar to a QI pad which uses electro-magnetic fields, it's extremely inefficient and would probably waste more electricity than it consumed.
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Yeah, now go ahead and build overhead caternary wires on every road everywhere. Because that won't be absurdly expensive and horrifically ugly at all.
Competition with Gas Cars (Score:2)
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What I see on the other coast is that many times ordinary gas cars are taking the electric car charging spots making it impossible for the electric cars to charge. The electric car spots (at least over here) are like the "parents with infant" spots and have no enforcement.
The obvious solution to this is to not make the electrical charging station a parking spot. People tend to want to park in parking spots. Make an electrical charging station look like a gas station pump island. Ticket people who walk away from their vehicle while charging.
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Make the electric car charging stations the absolute furthest spot in the lot. Why should electric car charging spots get priority behind the handicap spots as the closest parking spaces?
Because electric cables and trenching cost money.
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Most parking lots have lights. Adding adding a charging station to existing and/or new lots shouldn't be huge undertakings.
Adding a charging station to a an existing lot IS a huge undertaking. All of the lights in a parking lot probably take less power than a single charging station. The lights are 110V, and the charging station is going to be 240V. So new wire must be pulled, it must be thicker wire to support higher current. A high powered overhead light might draw 4 amps at 110V. A single charging station is going to draw 50 Amps at 240V. That is over 25 times as much power. Permits would have to be pulled and the parking l
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One word: logistics.
The property owner probably doesn't want to trench their entire lot to get electrics out to the edge. Sure, there might already be lighting out there, but can that circuit handle the current / voltage necessary?
Supply and demand (Score:2)
Sounds like a ripe opportunity to make some money. This is not a problem.
What usability problems really look like (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember a while ago, as some people predicted that 30-minute charging times would be a problem. A lot of people formed a chorus to shout them down, referring to how long cars usually sit while people are at work, etc. But what those people didn't take into account is that a charging station is not at all like a normal parking spot. The charging equipment is expensive, as is installation of it...and like most things electrical, there are incredibly difficult challenges when you try to scale things. At first blush it may seem like a simple matter to simply run more wiring to build out more spots...but at some point you hit the stage where the line running to the building simply isn't big enough. So what...you get another transformer? It goes down the rabbit hole very quickly.
Despite appearances, a charging station isn't a parking spot with a plug for your car. It's a spot at a gas pump that takes half an hour to use. And that's the real challenge with electric cars...not range, not cost. Those are solved or about to be solved.
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At first blush it may seem like a simple matter to simply run more wiring to build out more spots...but at some point you hit the stage where the line running to the building simply isn't big enough. So what...you get another transformer?.......... And that's the real challenge with electric cars...not range, not cost. Those are solved or about to be solved.
How is the charging capacity problem more difficult than the range/cost problem? Sounds like it's already solved, the solution just needs to be implemented.
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Allow me to explain how charging works.
There are three types of charger. Slow chargers are like normal wall outlets, 230V in Europe and 120V/100V in the US/Japan. Typical EVs take 8-16 hours to charge from them. There are fast chargers, which provide up to about 7kW. In Europe they are just 32A single phrase, in the US and Japan they are multi-phase. They take 3-4 hours to charge a typical EV but usually don't require any special infrastructure, they can be added to any home or business or street. They are
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And that's the real challenge with electric cars...not range, not cost
You should talk more to EV owners to better inform your opinion . . .
EV owner here, and I never charge at work. I charge at home, so I normally spend less time "refueling" in public than you do. Most EV owners are in a similar situation. Charging in public is for those extra trips outside of normal activity.
By the way, EV chargers are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper and simpler than installing a gas station. The biggest thing holding back EV charger installation is simply demand. The strange bickering TFA talks
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The article is about charging spaces at work, not a Station. Those spots are a convenience for employees who don't want to schedule a stop at a charging station going to/from work. And as is pretty common, that type of thing goes from being a perk to an Entitlement pretty quickly.
You have to know ahead of time whether you'll be able to do this, because part of the function of a car is to actually get you to work in a timely fashion. So yeah, it's an entitlement. If it's too expensive to expand, then contract someone to install more and let them sell charges to the users. Just put a decent sunset on it and make sure they have to take their old chargers with them when they go, you'll want better ones by the time it's over anyway.
lol (Score:5, Funny)
eco-entitlement (Score:4, Informative)
Compounded certainly by the relatively well-documented issue about people who feel they're doing "their part" (driving green cars, using shopping totes, whole foods customers, etc.) being entitled assholes.
So lock the port. (Score:2)
My wife's Nissan Leaf has a switch to either lock the port or 'auto' lock it. Which means it will unlock it when it is charged.
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Spoiled Californians (Score:2, Insightful)
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These are probably the same people whose iPhone battery is constantly in the red too...
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Also in Ohio.
There are some here, they're starting to pop up here and there. Yes, they are more rare than you will find on the west coast, but they do exist.
(Of course, it depends on where you are in Ohio. If you're out in the Southeast portion of the state, you're probably correct in that there is maybe 1 per 100 sq. miles.)
SAS in Cary NC has over 40 chargers (Score:2, Interesting)
We have over 40 chargers herespread over many different buildings, usually no problem to get one. There are 4 spaces for each dual-plug station. There is a posted 4 hour limit, so and the employees are really good at moving charge cables around when charging is finished. You can be fairly sure that if you park in a charging spot even if you can't plug in you will be full by EOD. If you really need to make sure you are charging you can check your Leaf app and see if you've been plugged in by lunch, if not yo
the term for this (Score:3)
Tragedy of the Hipster Commons
Hand Dryers (Score:2)
...have the same problem. They don't multitask.
One user at a time, and there's a minimum amount of time for it to be useful.
Hilarious (Score:2)
Chalk this pretentious hipster Thunderdome shit up as the Comedy of the Commons.
The bigger problem (Score:2)
People begin to use the charging stations as their personal parking spaces. Instead of charging their vehicle and moving to a regular parking space, they park there all day long. Around here I know a few people who live very close by to a charge station, and do exactly this when they go to work. Nobody else can use the spots because they're always occupied.
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So put up "2 hour" parking signs (or whatever a reasonable time is). Or parking meters. And have a parking inspector start writing tickets.
problems of the wealthy (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, what is the world coming to! After spending $100000 on a Tesla, people can't find recharging spots. Obviously, "for the environment", we must mandate more more recharging spots, so that the poor, environmentally conscious "middle class" of Silicon Valley can recharge their cars.
(Actually, a far bigger problem with Teslas and other electric cars is that people get quiet "insane" acceleration and start driving like mad men.)
Comment from an electric car owner (Score:2)
First I own an electric car (Ford Focus Electric). I'm not wealthy but when gas was high I leased one before the cost of the lease and insurance would be less than my monthly fuel cost in my 2005 SUV. My company also just installed chargers so I had free electricity from my office.
We had some issues at work when we only had two spaces for 3 fully electric vehicles and 1 plug in hybrid. We talk on our internal communication tool to try and move so everyone can charge. The real issue is while my vehicle
Simple Solution: Charge while connected (Score:2)
However, some owners don't seem to understand how short the optimal charge time is or how slow they are charging after they hit 80% (if they want to hit 100% at that point, they
I Just Solved This Problem (Score:3)
Extension cords. Your welcome.
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Shit, that's a "you're", over.
History (Score:3)
People who find this interesting are maybe too young to remember what it was like during the oil embargo last century when gas stations would run out of product. There were long lines at the gas pumps, fights and shootings. Local governments had to enact "odd/even" day refueling to prevent riots at the gas stations.
And this story? Here's an example of how insufficient charging stations has made people "meaner":
This is apparently what millennials think is "mean". I mean, for chrissake the guy said "please". In my day, if you wanted to be mean to another driver, you broke his headlights, cracked his windshield and pissed in his gas tank. Now THAT was mean.
Employers don't pay for your fuel. (Score:2)
BYOG (Score:2)
Bring Your Own Generator. Pack a Honda generator and a 5 gallon portable tank of gas. Then you can charge it up anywhere in the parking lot.
A temporary problem (Score:2)
Typical... (Score:2)
All these Silicon Valley *geniuses*, flush with millions of dollars of venture capital... And nobody saw this coming?
I remember speaking to engineer after engineer about putting solar cells all over the roof and trunk and hood of every electric car -- and they all ignored my ideas, saying that the panels couldn't generate enough -- but that's not the point -- the point is that a car spends MOST of its life parked, and while it's parked it could be generating some power.
That's like the time I'm at the NY Aut
Solved! (Score:2)
Bad headline (Score:2)
In my mind, that is the real truth behind the canard "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely".
The reality is that almost all people were already corrupt, and the power merely revealed the corruption, rather than caused it.
Similarly, when your ex cheated on you, they were ALWAYS the type to cheat - and you should have been able to see it w
Electric cars (Score:2)
Why should your company be giving you this for free?
At what point does gaining "green credentials" falter under the expensive?
Do you really think that KW's of charging power available on demand throughout the day by allowing any significant percentage of your parking lot spaces to be able to charge is cheap or even possible? Honestly, you're into MW before you even get out of SMB territory.
Your electric cars are SO GOOD that you can't make it to work and then home before you need a charge?
There's just too
Re:ICEd (Score:5, Funny)
Way to win people over for buying electric cars. Now I feel like installing fake charging ports just to fuck with assholes like you.
Re:ICEd (Score:5, Funny)
Even smarter, install two fake charging ports next to each other. One has an "Out of Order" sign on it. The other one says "FREE CHARGING!".
Wire them up so the "FREE" charger discharges the battery of anyone who plugs into it while feeding the power to the "Out of Order" charger your own electric car is plugged into.
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Re:ICEd (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, because clearly vandalism is a fantastic way to get your message across and not cause further problems.
I hope you get caught on camera causing someone financial harm, so that you and your pretentious bullshit can spend some time in jail and learn what real hardship is like.
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Do you really want to live in a country where people get jailed for scratching a paint job on a car?
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Californians are just terrible people in general, and no amount of "green" technology or reduction in fossil fuel consumption can change their nature.
It's generation X. Now back in the good old days.......
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Funny)
Californians are just terrible people in general, and no amount of "green" technology or reduction in fossil fuel consumption can change their nature.
It's generation X. Now back in the good old days.......
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This is proof! When is this scourge of patriarchy going to end???
I'm sure you're right. I bet that not one of those six charging points mentioned was reserved for gay black trannies
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Because it increases the expense of the car while being the most inefficient method of charging the battery. A solar panel that size would generate a near negligible amount of power. It would probably take weeks or longer to charge the battery.
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If your electric car doesn't have the range to get you to work and home, you shouldn't use it.
Exactly. In fact, you really want it to be able to go back and forth to work 3 or 4 times just to be on the safe side. You should also plug it in every evening, just to be safe.
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