In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have met personally with ChargePoint representatives. They have data that shows that if you charge $0.30 or more per kWh, then only people who NEED a charge will occupy the space. Couple that with an occupancy fee that ramps up dramatically when the car stops drawing current, or after, say, 2-4 hours, and people will start moving their cars. Even at this rate, you're still only charging $0.10/mile for electricity, which is on par with what you'd pay for gasoline these days.
I think it would be vastly preferable if:
1) All cars and chargers had a clear and consistent signal to show that they are done charging. In my area, few chargers indicate charging status, and every car has it's own completely inconsistent meaning when it comes to lights, it seems.
2) Each charging port could access multiple parking spots.
3) It was considered polite to unplug a charged car and plug in your own (this is already mostly the case).
4) Charging locations were not placed at the best parking locations, but spread out.
A charging station need not be so expensive that it has to be used continuously to justify its capital cost. Better to have them spread out and plentifully available, but until we're there, there's many ways to make each charging port more valuable without causing serious inconvenience.
You're describing sociopaths here not just rational people. Rational people can use a higher-level reasoning framework than their short-term personal convenience.
This may sound like a dumb example but I went to a meetup once, expected 20-25 people. Arrived and there were 6 footlong sandwiches. Clearly with 20-25 people coming the organizers expected them to be cut into around 2-3 inch portions. At 3 inches that would be 24 mini sandwiches.
For whatever reason 2 of my friends just helped themselves to a sandwich each. They are 2 of the nicest people I know. I never asked what was going through their minds. I assume they just didn't think about or thought first come first served or something. There's no way I'd describe them as sociopaths.
I've seen similar behavior quite often. People don't think or maybe they view the world in someway where there apparent selfish behavior is rational. Next time someone else will be first or something. Today is my turn, someone else will get it tomorrow. Or maybe they're just not thinking, like the 50% of people who stand in front of a train door or an elevator door to board blocking the people trying to get off or the people that stand and have a discussion the moment they step of the escalator blocking everyone about to exit. I don't think those people are sociopaths but they are being unintentionally selfish
Displacing a meal is often a greater imposition that simply the meetup time. Maybe your friends simply figured that more food would come for the rest of the attendees?
I also would agree with you that social pressure would apply more if there were better established etiquette. Many EV drivers honestly think that charging spaces are "EV parking spaces" not "EV charging spaces". This doesn't make much sense, except that we have given such a huge goodie bag to EV drivers already (free charging, tax rebates, access to HOV lanes) that many of them just assume this is another benefit tossed to them by society. And, four years ago, when EV's were so rare that the local Leaf club drove in the Christmas parade as a novelty, it probably didn't matter much if you parked in the charging spot ...
But, to take an example from your daily life -- if your car is legally parked on the street in a non-timed space, do you feel obligated to go out and move it every so often so someone else can take a turn? If not, why not?
Finally, if EV parking spaces are 1% of the available spaces in a given lot, it only takes 1% "sociopaths" (or, alternately, normal people who don't understand the rules or who are "just popping into the store for a second" or who are late for their morning meeting) to park them in and make them useless ...
For those who don't understand, gasoline taxes provide a large portion of highway maintenance revenue (often most). Electric cars have as much wear-and-tear on roads as gas cars, but avoid that tax right now. At some point we will need to figure out how to shift taxes from per-gallon to per-mile, or add an equivalent surcharge on electric chargers.
Since home chargers are just electrical outlets, there's no real way to tax just the "highway electricity" there. So we either have to increase income/property taxes across the board, or have a mileage tax. Most of HN would't like option (1) because then everyone who bikes/takes public transit is subsidizing all highway transit.
So yeah, it has to happen eventually.
with regards to the article, charging should not be free in public spaces. that alone would cut down on some of the abuse. Electric cars need a very clear and obvious indicator for charge state as well - that is communicated back to the charger and visual to any who walk up. Likely a standard is going to be needed
Not at all. Axle load has a completely outsized impact on road wear. Civil engineers use a fourth power law to estimate road wear with respect to axle load: if you double the mileage you double road wear, but if you double the axle load (assuming constant axle count) the road wear is multiplied by 16.
Put in numbers, a Model S has an axle load of 1T (2T on 2 axles). A fully loaded 18-wheeler is limited to 36T (80000lbs) on 5 axles or a 7.2T average axle load. The road wear impact of the 18-wheeler compared to the Model S is 2.5 * 7.2^4 (2.5 times the number of axles and axle load ratio raised to the 4th power), or about 6700 times that of the Model S.
It's actually slightly higher than that as 18-wheelers have 4 7.7T axles and 1 5.5 axle rather than 5 7.2T axles, the estimate is closer to 7500. Your standard 2T sedan has to drive for 7500 miles to generate the road wear a loaded 18-wheeler generates every mile.
Assuming your 2T sedan lives for 150000 miles, it's had the same road wear impact as 20 miles of a loaded 18-wheeler.
When it comes to road wear and maintenance, mileage-based pricing and taxes are trucking subsidies.
Without the roads there would be no deliveries. No deliveries, no industry. No industry, no jobs. So of all the things to call it, a trucking subsidy seems a very loaded description.
But more to the point, actual trucking costs would increase the appeal of trains for long haul, while keeping trucks (possibly smaller) for shorter hops between train depots and distribution centers (aka stores).
I personally think it's definitely a valuable subsidy.
What else would you call the artificial lowering of trucking and truck-hauled goods prices through passing a significant subset of trucking costs directly onto taxpayers instead of reflecting said costs in hauling prices?
> Without the roads there would be no deliveries. No deliveries, no industry. No industry, no jobs.
I'm not sure what comment you're replying to here, but it certainly isn't mine.
Sometimes even more. Of course that depends on exact car that is being compared, but as a rule of thumb, an all-electric vehicle would be significantly heavier due to battery weight, and as was pointed out:
> Road damage rises [...] to the fourth power of the axle weight [0].
Salient example is a Tesla model S, which have a curb weight of 2.1 metric tons in standard configuration [1], while comparable gasoline-powered sedan weights in at approximately 1.5 metric tons [2]. That means that applying formula above, "average", electric car causes 3.6 times more road wear than "average" CO2-belching one, just due to being 40% heavier while having same number of axles.
To make matters worse, many countries tax vehicles based on their weight (so to translate a fair share of road repair costs to the vehicle owner). And that makes subsidies (in the form of tax exemptions) to the electric vehicles even more important - otherwise electric cars would not be able to compete at all.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating
[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/support/model-s-specifications
[2] http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/sedan/2015/sho...
The comparison doesn't hold, the Model S is a full-sized sedan, the 3-series is a compact. The Model S is somewhere between the 5-Series and the 7-Series, closer to the 7-Series than the 5.
Either way, both EV and ICE car road wear is completely dwarfed by trucks.
Point about trucks stands of course, as you've pointed in the other comment. 3-4 orders of magnitude more road wear - that's crazy! I wonder how does that translates to truck road taxes.
[0] http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/7series/sedan/2015/sho...
Large trucks cause 99% of road wear. Teslas will never be a siginificant factor.
* not of vehicle weight, but per-axis weight
Trucks are still big "winners" though - see masklinn's calculations here.
The gas tax indeed provides the largest single source of funding, but many roads are funded mostly by general revenue nowadays. I seem to recall that half of major highways and interstates fail to capture enough gas tax revenue to maintain themselves, with roads in general only getting about half of their funding in the form of the gas tax.
Well there's the inherent reason that it's a requirement for proper resources allocation in a capitalistic framework (although the requirement is less tax on their usage and more tax on their consumption/wear)
And I think it's just the same in most countries: taxes are just taxes, general revenue; not earmarked money for some particular purpose.
(What baffles me is that the gas tax in U.S. is so low; that contributes to the situation where vehicles are often very large and consume ridiculously high amounts of fuel).
It was too long, and I fear it might be boring. So, to summarize: due to historic accident, Americans like big cars. Moreover, no matter what cars they might prefer, ownership of a car is an economic necessity for most Americans-again, historic accident. Those Americans are also not very well off, at least by northern-Europe standards, so money for gas is a big line-item in the family budget. A regressive tax increase on fuel would be clearly felt && very unwelcome, even though many if not most could see the logic behind it.
That being said, I do think there are localized areas where we want to decrease usage. So the future probably involves a combination of tax-free electrical vehicles and substantially more toll roads/congestion-charged zones.
This isn't true. They only provide 20% of revenue in CA and between 20-30% across the country. Taxes on fuel have not been raised for decades. Currently, most road funding comes from non-road related taxes.
I made a longer post above with citations.
Fuel tax in most states is a flat rate that hence isn't automatically adjusted with inflation, and it's political suicide to increase it (just love that cheap gas, but tax those EV fuckers, they are not paying road tax!). It's pretty much a laughably low amount by now.
From that perspective, there's nothing better than raising taxes proportional to road mile or road hour.
Taxes are going to involve people that don't agree with something supporting those that do almost every time.
The best public schools are in jurisdictions with anomalously high property taxes. You move there when it's time for your first child to start school and you move out when your youngest graduates. The tax base is overwhelmingly middle-aged, married, educated, and willing to pay what a top-tier school system costs. In my hometown 95% of adults had at least a Bachelor's. 95% of a given freshmen class would go to college. I would guess there were approximately 0 adults between 18 and 30, and 0 households that didn't currently or formerly have kids in the schools.
People who want expensive education for their children can get it; people who don't want to support education (much) can live in an area with lower property taxes a mile or two away.
>people in low crime neighborhoods should not be forced to support policing in high crime neighborhoods
Crime is a major reason people move from the cities to the suburbs, at which point they are no longer paying for urban police departments.
Like I said, this is fundamentally unavoidable for issues like national defense and the social safety net, but services which could meaningfully be privatized (utilities, infrastructure, recreation, etc) can usually offset their costs by charging for use.
Why do people believe you cannot put a use tax on the electricity?
I'd be more in favor of increasing property taxes to cover more highway infrastructure than I would taxing the vehicles themselves. And for that matter, Prop 13 has to go.
Well, Americans should have sympathy for the workers who spent lifetimes learning crafts that just disappeared at the stroke of a politicians pen.
By some estimates, eliminating fare collection would actually consume less tax revenue, not more.
If that isn't sarcastic, you're in for serious disappointment if you think SEs are any less human than anybody else.
So even if it dropped to 0%, it would only result in a 20% shortfall that would have to be made up in the general fund.
Also of interest, if you look at the numbers most car drivers (gas and otherwise) operate at a deficit. They do more damage to the road then they pay in taxes and fees to maintain it. Pubic transit users, bike commuters, and those who do not car commute in general subsidize car drivers.[2] There was a similar study done on CA alone, can't find it at the moment. Also, remember, this doesn't even take into account the cost of health externalities due to car culture. It's purely cost of maintenance of the roads themselves.
At least with electric vehicles, we're subsidizing a mode of transportation that doesn't destroy air quality in urban areas and is generally less of a public nuisance.
1. http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...
2. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/05/debunking-the-myth-th...
Base package costs $15.99 * 9,000 units = $143,910. Wow....
Jamie Hull, who drives an electric Fiat, grew apoplectic recently when she discovered herself nearly out of a charge, unable to get home to Palo Alto. She found a charging station, but a Tesla was parked in it and not charging. She ordered a coffee, waited for the driver to return and, when he did, asked why he was taking a spot when he was not charging. She said the man had told her that he was going to run one more errand and walked off.
“I seriously considered keying his car,” she said.
A person could wave a key in the part of the world where the Tesla has no right to be, and the Tesla owner is responsible for making contact with the key.
Also, blocking someone's ride is not damaging property AND this lady is equally at fault for making her path home depend on on charger. What if a car was plugged into that spot? She would have nobody else to blame for her poor planning.
For some reason I can't see that eliciting much empathy.
Can you imagine what would happen in the city?
Kids will be shorting out your car and watching it burn just for fun (or blowing a very expensive fuse).
Since gas caps are (mildly) locked, why aren't charger locked into the cars?
Also with CarWings, Nissan remote control, I believe you can lock/unlock on the fly without having to go to the car. So pretty much no reason to use it.
Er, what city are you talking about here? Do you even live in the US?
The chargers available in our area lock into the charging stations to keep people from messing with them when they are not in use as well.