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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

The main thing about these chargers is that nobody is monitoring them. At a gas station, an attendant is usually less than 20 feet away, and if anyone has a problem, they come talk to that person immediately. That attendant usually can't fix the problem on their own, but they can take steps to get it fixed quickly.

By contrast, electric charging stations are typically at the far end of a vast sea of parking. There's nothing, and nobody around, so vandals take advantage, and even when they don't, things just break and there's nobody around to tell about it.

And the whole payment scheme is ridiculous. Imagine a gas station that didn't accept cash, or that you needed an app to pay for. Again, the main problem is that there's nobody around to account for when things go wrong.

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The systems definitely have a method to communicate for payments, they should add a button to report issues with charger. Of course it's ripe for the button being pressed randomly, but I'm sure there's a smart person that can automate the messages received to catch that. But at least it would provide a possible mechanism to have frustrated users report these unattended units

There's really no reason 95% of issues couldn't be caught through self diagnostics. The easiest thing for the button press is to rely on repeated presses at longer intervals, like 3 presses with at least 15 minutes between the first and last within a 2 hour window.

It is more of installers/maintainers not interested in fixing the chargers. They would already have information about how much is being payed for each charger and from that would know some charger is broken.

I'm sure the installers/maintainers are not the blame here though. Of course they'd like to get paid for doing it. It's the owners of the equipment that don't want to pay for the maintenance. Let's place the blame at the appropriate feet here.

Or gamify it, via the charging app: if you report a broken charger, and it's verified, you get a $1 credit.

Is that really necessary?

If your charger used to generate $X/day and all of the sudden generates $0/day most likely its broken.

Given the business model for gas stations (~%0 on the gas, huge on the mini-mart) it seems kinda ridiculous they're not rushing to put fast chargers in every station.

You pretty much need three-phase service availability to install one, and a lot of C-stores don't have access to that.

It's a losing proposal in some ways though; by investing in charging today, tomorrow 50% of people will charge at home 95% of the time.

The next 10 years are going to be really interesting for gas stations and car dealerships.

Even if you take just 5% adoption we have so far, that's 3%+ of former once a week gas station customers that now charge at home

I'm usually seeing charging at the front of the parking lots around me. It also wouldn't surprise me if the attendants from charging stations were largely useless as I assume an electrician license would be required for most repairs in most states.

But I agree on the whole no cash or app payment thing.

A gas station attendant isn't likely to fix a breakaway hose or pressure nozzle any more than they're going to replace a 240 to 400v cable.

An attendant can reset a pump or circuit breaker though. And more importantly place the service call or call the police for a vandal.

You would think resetting a breaker could be automatically or remotely done based on some telemetry from a self diagnostic system (or lack of expected telemetry). I would think remotely monitored cameras and a voice interface (would be a nice feature) on the charger would be a more efficient way for watching vandalism and communicating with customers.

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