'Charger hogs' are ruining the electric vehicle experience
cnn.com
cnn.com
Actually, we did have to wait once for charging in the middle of Oklahoma (at the time a bit of a charging desert). It was at a casino, and a fellow Tesla owner had shot the place up with an assault rifle. It took almost 2 hours for the crime scene techs to collect bullet casings and clear the chargers (no one was hurt - the shooter was on LSD and defending the rest of us from space aliens). Law enforcement offered the shooter a ride - so he didn’t even need the charge.
Do you genuinely believe that everybody owns a house and/or have a dedicated parking spot with an accessible charger?
Everyone else can fast DC charge (~20 min 0-80%) at the grocery store or Walmart, or at traditional travel stops during road trips. Electricity is ubiquitous, chargers can be everywhere.
Public EV charging is going to need to be much better than it is currently; part of that means having lots of public EVSEs that properly share a common backhaul without popping their breakers, and it also means figuring out how to bill people for the power they need.
I've been able to get by solely with my EV for 6 years, and it's only occasionally been a minor inconvenience (mostly having to spend 20-30 minutes charging per 3ish hours driving on long distance trips); I've had to wait for charger capacity only when foolish enough to drive into or out of an eclipse totality path, and even then I was forced to wait a total of 20 minutes before getting a charging stall.
I'm lucky -- I also have access (10 months out of the year) to a parking place with a dedicated 240v/20a charger. For 2 months of the year I charge at a L3 station when I go grocery shopping; (in those 2 months I also have access to L1 charging and a dedicated parking spot but it's more convenient to charge at the grocery store.)
In North America, non-tesla L3 charging seems to be managed by organizations mostly dedicated to making people foolish enough to buy a non-tesla EVs miserable.
L3 charging, btw, is really exotic, or at least really heavy duty technology -- you can't trivially drop 8 stalls of 400v / 200a just anywhere; many of the tesla superchargers near where I live have local power generation facilities (big natural gas fuel cell setups) to do peak shaving.
Largely I agree with you -- electricity is everywhere, and it should be possible to make L2 evse plugs available to 20-30% of street parking spots and put L3 charging in lots more places than it is. It's not trivial but it also isn't insurmountable.
https://www.recurrentauto.com/research/impacts-of-fast-charg...
Where I'm at (outside of Philly) $1K is the bottom end. Depending on the distance from the panel, access to the garage and the house service it can be lots more. I had mine done (panel on the other end of the house) and it was $2200
I have a 240v / 20a plug next to my drive way. It cost $300 for the electrician work and $150 for the EVSE. It uses inexpensive romex, didn't require me to beef up my house's 100a service, and 95% of the time recharges the car overnight. On the rare situations where I get home from a long drive late in the evening, with the car under 10%, and drive it the very next morning, the car will have not gotten back to the "normal" charge level, but it's still perfectly usable for 99% of driving requirements... And if I'm in a rare situation where I need to charge it more than I'd get from an overnight drive I can L3 charge it.
Sure, if you're putting 200 miles a day on the car consistently, or if you've got several EVs, or if you've got a huge price difference in your "time of use" power metering contract, having a big pipe between the car and the grid is helpful.
But just as often, spending more than $500 for an EVSE hookup is just not going to be a good way to spend money. Do it if it makes you feel more comfortable, but it's rarely necessary.
You need an electrician to run a new 240v circuit and, in many cases, a new main service for the house to accommodate it.
I only ever charge on 120V personally and have no problem, though anyone who was going to buy an EV planning on charging that way should run the numbers with the EV they’re looking at. ABRP can do a pretty good job of it.
When I got the EV I just installed the charger, it wasn't even a thing I thought much about: I saw it as just part of having an EV. The ability to charge overnight at home was a reason to have an EV or at least a reason that having an EV wouldn't stink.
And I am shocked by the fact that I can talk to a dozen EV owners and not encounter a single other one who charges at home.
Sometimes it's because the owner doesn't own their home and can't add an outlet. Other times they do but believe they are blocked by city permitting, or they abandoned the idea after an electrician quoted them thousands of dollars. Less often it's because they've tried using the 120v 12a or whatever charger thing that came with the car and found it unhelpfully slow and don't know that charging at 240v/40a would be oodles faster.
I think it's insane. But in my experience it is the vast majority.
Presumably the people selling EVs downplay the importance of charging at home since the extra requirement would cost some sales? No idea.
I don't think the author was lying, that was the experience they had which seemed suboptimal and quite rightly pointed out a need to improve the charging experience.
I rented a Tesla for a short holiday and I have to admit I found the charging situation frustrating. Driving to a charging station only to find that its being used is a frustrating experience.
EV's are wonderful and the charging experience is cheaper or sometimes free compared to petrol, but it does need to improve.
1. EA does not have enough charger stalls, there is a lot of demand but utilites make it hard to build so they take a lot of time.
2. Some people are new to EVs and have charge anxiety / dont really understand how it works, they will get it in time.
3. Some people have free charging so they charge until 100% because its free, companies introduced these programs to sell cars and as these programs expire (usually 2 or 3 years max after purchase of the vehicle) it will get better.
We are still in the beginning process of adopting this tech and there will be some growing pains but we will get there.
Note: The one thing I can't understand is why Elon is handicapping the supercharger expansion. Tesla has by far the best charging experience and their chargers are packed. Now is the time where they can swoop in and take over the market. They can even spin out supercharging as an independent company and take it public.
They have added an 80% cap to a handful of busy chargers in California.
What they should do is add an electronic queue for the chargers, and automatically add the $0.40/minute idle rate to any charging above 80% when someone is queued for your charger.
They also need to do something about people with low voltage cars taking the high voltage spots. Something like a time factor in the price for the high voltage stations, to discourage low voltage cars using those unless necessary.
Some new cars have 800V architecture and will be able to benefit from high voltage chargers as they roll out.
There are also cars that can't charge at 350kW, but still take a 350kW charger.
Charging a 100kW car in the 350kW bay is fine, but these owners should be given some reason to prefer a 100kW or 150kW charger if it's available. I like the idea of using someone being queued for the charger to trigger an infrastructure charge if you are underutilizing the charger, just like we already do if you are simply parked there and not charging.
At the very least, require that drivers at least try to use the charger that best matches their car if it's available. Require that they plug in, or that they document a non-EV in the space before connecting to an over-spec charger.
Edit: yeah feel free to downvote me. I believe in not just the rich being able to fast charge without issue.
What about the competing interest of making charging fast and convenient, which surely would drive EV adoption? Is slowing the energy transition a worthwhile cost in the pursuit of equity?
...or just charge a premium for using the fast chargers. That way you're not you're not checking your phone every 5 minutes to see whether you're racking up additional charges and whether you need to move your car or not.
While these measures will help, the reality is that EA did not invest in enough chargers per location.
If you are correct that they are a utility and should be priced low, then Superchargers would be detrimental to Tesla's stock price and should be spun out as a separate utility company with lower margins. This would create a better EV experience, thus furthering Tesla's goal.
Won't next year's batch of new EV owners be doing the same thing? Or have companies stopped offering the incentive?
This is really annoying and should stop
It sounds like marginal charging past 80% is too cheap per percentage point. If you want to encourage throughput, you have to make it expensive to be a "hog" in TFA's parlance.
Myself and many others walk away from their vehicles while charging
Finding out that my car stopped charging for some reason doesn't make me rush back to a charging station because 9 out of 10 times that reason is that the station broke for me and anyone else that would show up. So there is no reason to move my car.
Percentage charge is not the best measure here. I appreciate that charge rates slow down after around 80% regardless of capacity, but sometimes I have no choice but to continue charging to 90%. That extra 10% is significant for me!