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Charge Rage: Electric Cars Are Making People Meaner In California
HughPickens.com writes: Matt Richtel reports that the push to make the state greener with electric cars is having an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner. The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. According to Richtel, electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another's cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window. "Cars are getting unplugged while they are actively charging, and that's a problem," says Peter Graf. "Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'"
The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, there have been notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."
The problem is that installation of electric vehicle charging ports at some companies has not kept pace with soaring demand, creating thorny etiquette issues in the workplace. German software company SAP installed 16 electric vehicle charging ports in 2010 at its Palo Alto campus for the handful of employees who owned electric vehicles. Now there are far more electric cars than chargers. Sixty-one of the roughly 1,800 employees on the campus now drive a plug-in vehicle, overwhelming the 16 available chargers. And as demand for chargers exceeds supply, there have been notorious incidents of "charge rage." Companies are finding that they need one charging port for every two of their employees' electric vehicles. "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead," said ChargePoint CEO Pat Romano. "Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are going to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."
Indeed, but we're now into hipster dweebville where everyone hides behind their screens and cannot cope with people in real life. You'd think a modern system would send and alert via SMS or email to the car owner to have them be made aware their car is done allowing them to move the fucking thing. Hopefully the next step is to clamp the pricks.
Compounded certainly by the relatively well-documented issue about people who feel they're doing "their part" (driving green cars, using shopping totes, whole foods customers, etc.) being entitled assholes.
-Styopa
Dunno... up here in Portland, I've lost count of the prime parking 'chargers only 'cuz we're teh environmentalz!!!!' spots that sit empty most of the time, even during peak shopping/working hours.
Wouldn't mind having the EV owners pay for the privilege, though, because if they don't, the rest of us do (the stores aren't installing the things out of the goodness of their hearts, you know, and they have to recoup the costs somewhere).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Maybe things work differently in California but TFA seems to a bit strange to me. When I'm charging the charging cable is locked in at both ends. It can't be unplugged without a great amount of force, that will probably damage something.
It's not an "in California" thing - it's an "on some cars" thing. On the eGolf for example, the charger locks, and does not unlock unless the owner comes back and unlocks the vehicle. On the Leaf, it can be set to not lock even during charging (made safe by having control pins disconnect before power pins, and stopping charging as the plug is pulled).
Throw in traffic jams and start and stop driving while running AC and stereo, etc., and that 300 mile range drops fast.
You've got it backwards.
Stop and go driving and traffic jams are where electric cars shine the most. AC takes, at the very most 3kW; much less once the cabin is cooled down. Even at full blast, 3kW saps about 12 miles of range per hour.
EPA range numbers for electric cars are based on highway speeds. Electric cars easily get 150% of the EPA range at traffic jam speeds of 30-50 MPH.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
They ARE doing something about the environment that you're not.
Are they? Really?
Add up the total end to end costs...
The vehicle costs more (requiring more capital, more earned income, which uses more of Earth's resources), the batteries are NOT clean to make, and the power has to come from somewhere, which largely is NOT solar/wind/hydro, not on a percentage basis.
Then in 5-8 years the batteries will need to be replaced, causing another environmental impact not present in a gas car (which shouldn't need an engine replacement in its lifetime.)
So on a total end-to-end environmental basis, I'm not convinced EVs are that much cleaner than gas cars. They might be, a bit, but not as much as is claimed.
They run relatively thin wires all over the parking lot, 12ga to run at most 5A at 480v, assuming the longest run is 500ft. When you're pushing 208v to a device pulling 40A, at that distance you need much thicker wire, 1ga. You can walk into Lowe's and buy stranded 10ga for $0.29/ft, while stranded 1ga sells for $2.19/ft, more than 7.5x as expensive. Of course, you wouldn't buy your wire by the foot from a home improvement store for this type of project, but the price variance will be similar buying from a bulk distributor.
On the other hand, if you shorten the distance to 250ft by moving the charging spots closer to the building, you can get by on 4ga, at only a hair under 3.5x the cost of 10ga, or put the spaces right by the building and get by on 6ga, coming in at (interestingly) about the same cost per foot. But also many fewer feet.
To give some perspective, let's look at a parking lot that runs 350ft out from the building, assuming the building is 100x100ft with power distributed from the middle of the back of the building. That gives you approximately 500ft to the farthest point in the lot where you might need a light. If lights are placed evenly in 4 rows, edge to edge, they will be placed 25ft apart across the lot; we'll assume similar spacing going down the lot, giving us 4 rows of (350/25) 14 lights. Since we're "green" enough to offer charging stations, we're also green enough to use LED lights weighing in at 150W that match 500W metal halide lamps in brightness, giving us a total of 2100W per row of lights. At 480v, that's 4.375A, requiring 12ga wire for a 500ft run. Pessimistically, we need 4000ft (the two middle rows will actually be about 50ft shorter, requiring 100ft less wire each, but let's ignore that and give your position a chance to hold up), which would cost $1160 to pick up from Lowe's by the foot. That's enough wire to power all 56 lights in the parking lot.
Now, let's install one charging station in the far corner of the lot. Just one. 40A at 208V and a distance of 500ft, we need to run 500ft of 1ga wire, for a total bill of $2190 if purchased per-foot at Lowe's. And you can't daisy-chain them like the lights in each row of lot lighting; you have to run an entire cable pair for each charging station.
If you're going to put, for example, 10 stations in each row of parking, you need conduit that can hold 20 runs of 1ga wire; since that conduit will also likely be shared by the lighting wiring, it needs to be oversized so, according to NEC, 3-1/2" conduit is required in order to safely run all of this wire. I wont' bother factoring in the cost of the conduit, as I'm sure I've already made my point. If we have 4 rows of parking, and 10 charging stations per row, we're talking about 40 charging stations. If we want to put them at the far end of the lot, we're talking about nearly 40k feet of 1ga wire at a cost of nearly $88k (again, at retail, by the foot, not how you'd actually buy it; we can ignore the dollar values, but the cost multiples will be similar), or over 75x the cost of wiring all of the lighting in the parking lot.
Now, let's install our 40 charging stations in the 40 spots closest to the store. If we assume 6ft wide spots, we can put 10 right on the building, 5 on each side of the entryway, and still have 40ft for the entry. Worst case for those 10 is a 150ft run. If the spots are 10ft deep and we have a 20ft traffic lane, the next farthest charger will be at 180ft; with 4 chargers per row and keeping the 6ft spot width, we'll need 7 full rows of chargers and 1 row with chargers in the 2 middle spots. Since the edge spots on the 7th row will be farther from the power distribution point than the middle spots in the 8th row, those are our farthest distance, worst case scenario, at a distance of 216ft. At that distance, we can use 4ga wire.
In fairness, since the 500ft example treated all installed charging stations as the worst case (2x500ft of 1ga), I'll do the same here. That's 2x216ft of 4ga by 40 chargers, or 17,280ft of 4ga at $
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.