McCharge: McDonalds Is Now Charging EVs | Hacker News Reader

McCharge: McDonalds Is Now Charging EVs

thenextavenue.com

59 pointsreddotX34 comments

How much charge can you get in the time spent at a fast food outlet?

This is the beginning of gas stations and oil companies feeling the fear. This week saw the first US gas station stop selling gasoline and switch to charging only.[1]

Walmart is putting in charging stations. That makes a lot of sense. The amount of time spent at a Walmart is enough for a good charge.[2]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/first-gas-station-to-ditch-o...

[2] https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2019/06/06/electrify-...

With the new Tesla fast chargers you can get about 150miles in 10~12min. Which is about the time spent to buy food and leave at a fastfood restaurant.

Some people get range anxiety if it's cold out, or they made an abnormal trip, or if traffic will be bad. I have a supercharger visible from my office and anecdotally a lot of people come in for 10-20 mins at a time

For 8 months I've been traveling in the US[1] and Europe[2] by bicycle. Most of the time I was camping and McDonalds was the most convenient place to charge my phone. I found that I could easily spend 2 hours per day there without getting bored. I didn't have a stove, so it was my warm meal on most days.

I suspect a lot of underemployed Americans could adopt a similar routine to get their cars charged.

1: https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/burgers

2: https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/roads2rome

In Hong Kong, people sleep at the McDonald's:

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/community/article/215836...

Yes, I can confirm that about Hong Kong and I don't condone it. They are not a homeless shelter.

I know they don't like it if people adopt a sleeping posture, e.g. by laying on your arms. I was never so tired that I had to that.

I always ordered something. In fact, sitting there quietly with a tray in front of me is to their advantage: I was well groomed. It reinforces the impression that they are popular.

There was an interesting article[1] a while back about the social/community roles that McDonalds plays for a large variety of groups. They are usually pretty good about "loitering" if you (a) buy something and (b) are non-disruptive.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/08/mcdonalds-c...

And you are not sleeping, or appear to be.

The car chargers at McDonald's aren't free (unlike phone chargers). If you have a home with an electrical outlet reachable by the car, I would assume that would be cheaper.

I also wonder how the McDonald's electricity price per mile compares to gas price per mile of typical cars.

My 2015 Vw E-up takes about 15 minutes to add 75% state of charge using the mcdonalds charger, so it's actually a bit too fast to eat there. I guess a leaf or e-golf with bigger batteries might do it.

My model x would have to stay there quite a bit longer but it's idiotic to charge a tesla on these 50 kW chargers as the superchargers are much cheaper (if not free) and are usually situated next to better quality food outlets.

I haven't eaten at mcdonalds in 20 year or so anyway, they only serve garbage food, but I've used their chargers for the e-up :)

If Warren Buffett is regular, it can't be all unhealthy.

George Burns smoked a huge cigar every day, and he died a rather old man. By your logic, this proves cigars aren't all unhealthy.

You're getting it backwards. They wan't people to come for the chargers, and then happen to buy an expensive soda.

While I'm sure they are making a large profit on sodas, the piece is quite cheap. In the US it's $1 for any size. It's actually the cheapest price I can recall for Coca-Cola products.

Tesla and Wawa (a convenience store) have a partnership to expand superchargers at these locations. Some Wawas that have no gas pumps are only getting Superchargers. Tesla still (in most locations) sites Superchargers near malls, grocery stores, and other locations where you can comfortably dwell for 30-40 minutes.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-superchargers-to-double-in-w...

In Norway McDonalds have chargers in many locations already (and significantly more EVs than Sweden)

In Germany there's also lots of McDonalds with chargers, some of them have already been there for 2 years or more.

I'm not familiar with EV charging prices, but this does seem a bit expensive. 2.5 SEK per minute is 0.23€ / 0.26USD. Is that for high speed DC charging?

Anyway, to me the focus on high speed charging seems to be completely the wrong way to go about charging infrastructure. Our cars sit idle 95% of the day. Aside from long trips, why should we try to charge them in as little time as possible?

Almost all the new charging stations they install around here offer high speed charging. They are extremely expensive to set up, because providing 50kW DC charging requires big expensive electronics. This leads to the problem that only very few charging stations are installed, and the charging stations have to charge by the minute to make sure that people only park there as short as possible.

What if instead the city provided 5kW AC outlets next to every parking spot? Those would be much cheaper to install, the electronics needed for billing would be extremely cheap (an NFC reader, a microcontroller, and a relay won't cost much), and charging speed is not an issue for people who live or work there. You would just leave your car plugged in while you're at the office, or overnight. If you could top up 30kWh while you work that would be plenty for most people.

> Aside from long trips, why should we try to charge them in as little time as possible? ... What if instead the city provided 5kW AC outlets next to every parking spot? Those would be much cheaper to install, the electronics needed for billing would be extremely cheap[.]

It's a lot easier to install a few high speed chargers than many thousands lower speed chargers.

Probably correct, however from a user perspective it’s much more convenient to charge when parked overnight or at work. Installing an ordinary AC charger is quite cheap, and the goal should be to have lots of these, to make EVs more practical then fossil fuel cars.

EV charging hardware is very expensive at the moment.

A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.

I imagine a future where the people who make streetlights just integrate a couple of sockets in the bottom of every streetlamp. Total human time to fit one to an existing streetlamp should be only 15 minutes or so, so they can be rolled out en-mass.

I think it's inevitable that this will happen.

It sounds like there should be a startup out there that sells small weatherproof boxes with an outlet and a relay and a microcontroller inside, that makes it trivial to sell electricity to everyone who uses an app. There's really no reason such a box needs to cost $1000.

> A 100 Amp relay good for 10kW is < $2, yet the cheapest similar EV charging system is easily $1000.

The grid operates at 10kV. Most electric cars accept voltages less than one tenth of that. The cost is creating a large transformers.

That said, large transformers like these are pretty standard in sub-stations, it's still not clear to me why our existing infrastructure can't support super charging everywhere.

Presumably, people will eventually have both high and low speed charging station options with faster charging being more expensive.

However, at a fast food restaurant you want to get significant range in 10-30 minutes which a 5kW charging station is not going to provide. I don’t know how fast these are going to be, but adding ~150miles in 15 minutes would these actually useful on long trips.

This is brilliant, and something I've been expecting for some time now.

Starbucks is next.

Wow this is bang on.

Cars come to Maccas to get food, why not charge there too?

And for MacDonalds, it brings new customers.

What a great idea.

I think the reasoning is the opposite. Someone is doing a long drive, maybe to get to the mountains in the north to go skiing. They need to stop and charge somewhere on the way. Why not get food too?

(Norwegian with Nissan Leaf) This is exactly what we do on a long drive. Stop to charge, try to convince the kids that there isn't any happy meals left. They are all out, we promise. No other burgers either.

Seems to be 50 kW chargers

You could probably top up pretty well in the time it takes to get your food picked up from the drive-through.

I don't know what it is lately, but McDonalds takes forever to make a burger now. At this point it isn't good, it isn't fast, and it isn't cheap.

In Europe over the last few years they changed restaurants so all burgers are made on demand. The only advantage I see is outside of peak times your meal is fresher, and they potentially have less wastage. But as you say it has definately increased wait times.

s{(Super-size)}{$1 and Super-charge} me.

what?

I think it's supposed to be Awk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com