Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers | Hacker News Reader

Too many electric cars, not enough workplace chargers

mercurynews.com

51 pointseigenvector55 comments

I drive an electric car and try to charge at work only twice a week. Although if I notice no one is charging at some point, I'll top it off, range anxiety is no joke.

Our workplace has a 2-port charger just for executives. (Naturally, it's often unused.) Meanwhile the rest of us non-executives get to slug it out for the other 2-port charger. I have discovered that Volts are excellent fodder for "charge-rage." Their 3.3kW chargers work so slowly, it's difficult to keep from thinking "they can just use gas, right?" And their batteries are so small, Volt drivers want to charge every single day. What's worse is, their charge port is alarmed. Even if the Chargepoint display says charging is complete, if you unplug a Volt it sets off the theft alarm.

Kind of fascinating to watch this evolve. Definitely need some better charging tech if electric cars are going to last.

My charge-rage is when I see a Tesla in one of the two charging spots at the Stanford shopping center. They have enough range to not need the power, the owners typically park there because they are the best spots in the garage.

Why do you care? I don't get upset at a Prius when I see one at the gas station and there are no available pumps. If people are using just for the good parking spot there is a simple fix--don't put them right up front.

If I had a Tesla and was able to both get a charge and a good spot you better believe I would take it, even if I wasn't dangerously low on power.

The ones at stanford shopping center aren't free, so the guy is paying money to use them. He probably needs it because they charge $2/hr which is about 2.5x the cost of charging at home.

How does this make any sense? Are you just looking for stuff to be pissed off about?

A car having a large battery tells you very little about how much charge is actually left in there. You don't know where they need to drive to next, where they have been, or anything.

If you are annoyed, hassle shopping centers to install new chargers, don't get annoyed at the people using them.

Besides, if they were rarely used, then the shopping center would eventually get rid of them, whereas if they are constantly used then the shopping center will eventually install more of them, as people charging their cars have to wait, which is excellent for shopping centers.

I specifically never charge my Tesla out of the house unless it needs to be charged. I agree that it isn't fair to the cars that actually need the power to get home. I've only ever not done that once when a garage near a theater in SF was full, except for an EV spot. Got them to open up the gate and let me park right across the street :)

In all seriousness, what does an electric car owner do if power goes out for a week or more, like after a hurricane?

The same thing people who can't get gas after a hurricane do.

(If you're worried about it running down to the point where it damages the battery, that takes more than a few weeks).

How much longer? NY Times' Tesla test drive saw loss of over 55 miles in range just sitting overnight, which was backed up by the data in Elon Musk's rebuttal [1] (yet ignored by him...)

Anyway, my experience with blizzards is that it's not unusual for the power to commercial districts and gas stations to be restored within a day, yet for some residential areas to remain without power a week later. Plus, more gas stations are installing generators. [2]

[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/r...

[2] http://www.ny1.com/content/news/201898/fema-funds-to-help-ny...

I remember reading somewhere they patched the software to fix that overnight loss to just a few watts.

It is used to keep the battery warm and electronics running.

if power goes out for a week or more, in the event of something as severe as a hurricane, I think driving will be one of your last concerns.

Also note, without power, you're not pumping any gas either, so the problem is the same. Also likely a hurricane is going to destroy roads, traffic lights will be out, etc. etc.

Sounds like you need a cheaper, slower charger primarily for Volts.

Better to have glorified extension cords serving all the cars than a fancy device that only serves one or two, right?

This is interesting, because the social concept of charging is being formed. Will charging be like a gas station, where you are only allowed to be at the charger while using it, or will it be like parking, where you usually have an implied right to use a space until you move your car away.

I think that at least for employer provided free charging it should be the latter. Whenever people start fighting over charging spots, or start leaving work to shuffle cars around, the employer loses. An employer should just set up simple free charging to as many spaces as necessary, so people can just park, plug in and not worry about their car.

You can just run an electric cable in a conduit by a row of parking spaces, and put in simple weather protected 110V plugs along it. Over 8 hours this should provide more than enough energy for a simple commute. For people that must have high speed charging, you can put in a couple of paid chargers.

Valet parking service that takes care if it? Depending on the price of the charging station vs a regular parking space, it'd make sense.

It is already the case (in Palo Alto anyway) that you have to vacate the spot once your car is full. That can't work long term.

If you can't get home without charging, then an EV isn't a good idea for you. I understand that everyone should be able to get an EV, but with the way the infrastructure is, you gotta draw the line somewhere. Having spots that are not dedicated, first come first serve, and without expectation of use will make everyone far happier in the long run. Yes, things come up and you may find yourself out of range because of an unexpected detour, but once you start having people that MUST charge or they can't get home, then you only get what this article mentions.

Charging money for the stations is also another way to alleviate some of this problem, but the stations that accept credit cards are VERY expensive. For example, a ChargePoint system is $4000 for the first unit and then $2500 for the second unit. And then there are ongoing cell reception plans and money sharing per kwH used. It's not cheap. The reason you see a lot of chargepoints in NorCal is because in 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered free chargers to people that wanted them.

If you can't get home without charging your EV, you should move or get a new job. Suburban living is not eco friendly, I would hope that there are a small number of people who want an electric vehicle but would have such a long daily commute that they would have to charge it every day.

There are a few tesla owners that drive 200 miles a day. Only a handful are above 15k miles per year.

This is going to continue to be a problem as the US infrastructure for electrical vehicles is slowly upgraded. I think the only solution for now is to never depend on a charger outside of your home. People who have to drive more than a single charge in a day just may not be able to use EVs for now.

I think you are incorrect. Depending on a plug within your house is not a solution. That is avoiding the problem. Solution* is U.S. government rolling out standardized electrical socket plug for vehicles and investing in infrastructure to make it cheap enough to be installed virtually everywhere. After that getting commission together and drafting set of standards for wireless charging (this is decades away, but it needs to be common if we are to see electrical cars supplant fossil fuel vehicles universally.)

* Or one of them solutions.

Personally, I think the solution is for electric cars to have enough range that you don't need to plug them when away from home on routine trips, and for charging to be fast enough and available enough from dedicated stations that you can still do road trips.

Even if every parking space out there has a charger, I don't want to plug in every time I park my car. I want my car to go hundreds of miles in between charges so I don't have to care. That's not yet practical unless you spend serious money, but anything else seems like a workaround.

This is clearly the Tesla plan and definitely the way most people charge them.

Not coincidentally, that's exactly what I was referring to with "unless you spend serious money".

I'm not sure how much these stations cost but I could also see the potential for a company to employ a low level person to work as sort of a charger valet. You drop your EV off with them and give them the keys. They manage the rotating of cars as they get full.

This. Not everything need to be solved high-tech.

Is it just me, or is the solution not to add more chargers, but to add more cables connected to a single charger, and have it round robin charge all the attached vehicles throughout the day?

I think that would fall under "add more chargers."

Setting up a full charger with dedicated electrical supply is quite expensive.

Relays attached to extension cords cost effectively nothing.

The idea of sharing a charger over a larger number of cars sounds much closer to the latter idea than the former.

Great idea, that would be a good way to have more plug-in points. Since a big part of the problem is getting a large enough electrical service to the chargers.

You could also have the amperage be higher for the first hour or so of charging and then have it drop down over time or as demand increases.

I'm not aware of any existing chargers that would support this. There isn't much innovation or price competition in this space. It sounds like a great opportunity for someone to come in and do it right.

It's not always that simple - the electric lines have to support the load of additional vehicles. Even a relatively low charge rate of 12A (like a Volt) quickly exceeds the capacity of standard electrical wiring after about 3 vehicles. It's worse if you want higher speed charging, which requires 30A+ per connector. Adding the infrastructure to support more cables can actually be more expensive than running additional chargers, depending on how the lines were run.

I think the idea was that instead of simultaneously charging several cars, it charges them one by one (round robin). You just have multiple connectors to stop employees having to leave the office to change the connectors over when one car finishes charging. But I guess it would require smart-ifying the charger base so it could decide when to send power to each of the cars.

In some parts of the world there are electrical outlets for everybody so that everybody can plug their block heaters in...

Why not just charge employees for the electricity? That should help reduce contention, and pay for expansion automatically as it becomes necessary.

That won't give employees an incentive to move their now-fully-charged car as soon as it finishes charging.

Clearly, after the charger fully charges the car, it should give the owner 15 minutes to move their car then start discharging it.

Or just charge by the hour.

My office builder has a handful of chargers for employee use. They are always full. People with EVs come early, and leave their car connected for the entire day (even if it is not needed).

I suspect some kind of "recommended policy" might be coming at some point, as suggested in the article, since there will in no way be enough chargers for EV owners to leave their vehicles connected all day. Although I hope they also add more charging stations.

Do the chargers indicate when the car is not drawing current any more? Either with a light or something internet-enabled?

(Are we at webcam filter coffee time again?)

Leafs have blinky lights on the dash that quit blinking when the car is charged. I don't know about Tesla. Conceivably coworkers could know when is safe to unplug someone else's car and charge their own. Then again, we can't even get people to make a new pot of coffee when they drain the last of it, so who knows how considerate your fellow plug-in owners will be.

Model S has a fast pulsing green light around the charge port when it's charging.

The chargers and the car itself indicate whether it's charging or not. With the Chargepoint chargers mentioned in the article you can see if they are in-use or not online. But in-use just means plugged in, not drawing current.

As an individual you can see if your car is charging online, but you can't see if others in the same bank of chargers are charging. You also can't see if a car is blocking the parking space.

This is something where an webcam would help, but without a way to contact the owner of a car in a space it's hard to do something about it.

Do any of the electric cars have a feature that the car will text you when it is charged? I imagine that might be nice to have, so that when your car is full you can go out to the parking lot and move it into a regular space.

The Leaf will send you a text/email when it is done charging. I've never used it, but it is a settable option in the Carwings mobile app.

Most stations have indicators to say if they are charging, but it depends on the model/manufacturer.

I'd revise that title to "too many cars, not enough public transit."

Then your title would not be very descriptive of the story here.

The story here is "some advocates attempt to delay the obsolescence of personal vehicle travel"

Yeah, I'm not convinced that this is much different from "not enough parking spaces for everybody", or "not enough bike racks to meet demand", with the exception that sharing is actually somewhat feasible for these.

It's very different, because there are enough parking spaces for everybody, but they don't happen to have sockets in them.

With many corporate chargers you need to have a special card to charge on them even though they are standard ChargePoint chargers. So if you are near a Google, Microsoft, etc building at night which has hundreds of chargers not in use you can't use them.

Because these companies get a great tax break for installing them I think they shouldn't be able to prevent the public from using them.

Companies also get tax breaks for having showers.

ChargePoints also have an ongoing cost. You need to pay for the cellular access that is built into them every month. They also charge the company different amounts depending on if they make it free to the employees or some dollar amount.

Also, they are expensive. They can cost $4000+ for the first unit plus installation. This cost scares a lot of companies from even starting the project.

In 2011 or 2012, chargepoint offered chargers for free. And now, in 2014, there are no tax breaks.

Maybe charging stations could come with N full charging cords and 2N trickle charging cords and it would be socially acceptable to replace someone's full charging cord with a trickle charging cord once the car was full.

Better yet:

Each charging station has N cords.

The first n cords to be plugged in becomes a primary (read full) charge cord.

Once n primary cords are in use, any subsequent cords start as secondary (read trickle charge -- an aside, do EV's really need to be trickle charged). Again, in order of arrival, the secondary cords are put into a queue.

As the initial batch of n cars reach full charge (or maybe 90%), primary cords swap functionality with the next secondary cord in the queue.

It's interesting to me how this is portrayed as a problem that workplaces need to deal with, and not the real issue which is that EVs are still seriously impractical.

So is this technically a 0-World problem? (like 0-day, beyond first-world problem)

Can I copyright that term?

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