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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."
Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
That will be the end of humanity
It would seem electric cars are simply giving mean people another way to express just how mean they can be.
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.
I've always thought that once they became sufficiently popular you might need some sort of lock on the charger while charging otherwise merry pranksters (read @$$holes) might come along and just unplug your car, effectively leaving you stranded for a period of time if your charge is low.
Way to win people over for buying electric cars. Now I feel like installing fake charging ports just to fuck with assholes like you.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
>> Employees are calling and messaging each other, saying, 'I see you're fully charged, can you please move your car?'
Um...isn't this the way the world is supposed to work? Or is getting someone's attention and letting them know that it's time to move along now considered a microaggression?
A "free" resource becomes a scarce resource. Solution: charge $ per time unit for a parking space with a charger. Increase price till shortage disappears.
[Insert pithy quote here]
...how hard would it be to transmit power to the cars through the roads? A few years back wireless power was the big thing at consumer electronics shows, with demonstrations of televisions without power cables. Since then I've been wondering if this could be implemented for cars. If you got rid of the batteries it would vastly reduce the cost and weight of the cars, plus eliminate the issues related to recharging (range anxiety, charge times etc). You could have a small battery in the cars for driving on roads that are "off the grid" with the option for larger batteries for people who do a lot of off the grid driving. Is this technically viable or is there some reason it couldn't be implemented?
Even smarter, install two fake charging ports next to each other. One has an "Out of Order" sign on it. The other one says "FREE CHARGING!".
Wire them up so the "FREE" charger discharges the battery of anyone who plugs into it while feeding the power to the "Out of Order" charger your own electric car is plugged into.
I remember a while ago, as some people predicted that 30-minute charging times would be a problem. A lot of people formed a chorus to shout them down, referring to how long cars usually sit while people are at work, etc. But what those people didn't take into account is that a charging station is not at all like a normal parking spot. The charging equipment is expensive, as is installation of it...and like most things electrical, there are incredibly difficult challenges when you try to scale things. At first blush it may seem like a simple matter to simply run more wiring to build out more spots...but at some point you hit the stage where the line running to the building simply isn't big enough. So what...you get another transformer? It goes down the rabbit hole very quickly.
Despite appearances, a charging station isn't a parking spot with a plug for your car. It's a spot at a gas pump that takes half an hour to use. And that's the real challenge with electric cars...not range, not cost. Those are solved or about to be solved.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I would love to see the fights: kale smoothies splattered on hemp clothing, dreadlocks being pulled.
Trolling is a art,
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
I still get laughs over this self-righteous Prius owner ragging on a truck driver.
Trolling is a art,
Oh, waah, cry me a river. I live in Ohio, and the only place I have ever found to plug in my car is in my own garage, at my home. There ARE no public charging ports, anywhere. They don't exist here. So when I hear about Californians crying because they can't conveniently find enough public charging ports, excuse me if I don't get all weepy about their struggle.
We have over 40 chargers herespread over many different buildings, usually no problem to get one. There are 4 spaces for each dual-plug station. There is a posted 4 hour limit, so and the employees are really good at moving charge cables around when charging is finished. You can be fairly sure that if you park in a charging spot even if you can't plug in you will be full by EOD. If you really need to make sure you are charging you can check your Leaf app and see if you've been plugged in by lunch, if not you go out and move it (and any others that need to be moved).
Yeah, because clearly vandalism is a fantastic way to get your message across and not cause further problems.
I hope you get caught on camera causing someone financial harm, so that you and your pretentious bullshit can spend some time in jail and learn what real hardship is like.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Tragedy of the Hipster Commons
Ah, what is the world coming to! After spending $100000 on a Tesla, people can't find recharging spots. Obviously, "for the environment", we must mandate more more recharging spots, so that the poor, environmentally conscious "middle class" of Silicon Valley can recharge their cars.
(Actually, a far bigger problem with Teslas and other electric cars is that people get quiet "insane" acceleration and start driving like mad men.)
Californians are just terrible people in general, and no amount of "green" technology or reduction in fossil fuel consumption can change their nature.
It's generation X. Now back in the good old days.......
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Extension cords. Your welcome.
So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.
Accurate analysis from the very first post. This is a classic economics problem, overuse of a good that is given away for free; and has a classic economic solution: put a price on it.
This is silicon valley. Make an ap for them them to sign up for their spot online.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
People who find this interesting are maybe too young to remember what it was like during the oil embargo last century when gas stations would run out of product. There were long lines at the gas pumps, fights and shootings. Local governments had to enact "odd/even" day refueling to prevent riots at the gas stations.
And this story? Here's an example of how insufficient charging stations has made people "meaner":
This is apparently what millennials think is "mean". I mean, for chrissake the guy said "please". In my day, if you wanted to be mean to another driver, you broke his headlights, cracked his windshield and pissed in his gas tank. Now THAT was mean.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why are they giving away the electricity? Is it difficult to meter or something?
Free is the key thing here. Yes, the solution is just charge for time on the charger, and used that money to put in more chargers. But humans are uniquely curious when it comes to free stuff. Give away free stuff and everybody wants some, and they hate it when someone else gets free stuff and they don't. Charge just a little bit for it, and then it changes the whole attitude.
What is interesting is that most EV drivers probably don't need the charge to get home and carry out their daily errands. If they do then they probably made the wrong vehicle choice. They just want to charge up on someone else's dime.
Of course, there will be a few who would somehow feel entitled and would see such a change and respond.... "can you believe they are taking away our free charging!".
We need legislation. We cannot allow the early bird to get the worm. Its an antiquated concept and it is not fair. It is clearly discriminatory.
Most parking lots have lights. Adding adding a charging station to existing and/or new lots shouldn't be huge undertakings.
Adding a charging station to a an existing lot IS a huge undertaking. All of the lights in a parking lot probably take less power than a single charging station. The lights are 110V, and the charging station is going to be 240V. So new wire must be pulled, it must be thicker wire to support higher current. A high powered overhead light might draw 4 amps at 110V. A single charging station is going to draw 50 Amps at 240V. That is over 25 times as much power. Permits would have to be pulled and the parking lots breaker boxes and possibly the feed from the main electrical line would have to be upgraded. In fact, service to the neighborhood that the lot is located in may have to be upgraded.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
Recently I was talking to an electrician that was upgrading the charging ports at a parking structure. He was telling me that only government recognized utilities can meter the electricity (PUC's). Parking garages are getting around the issue by charging a higher flat rate for parking in a spot with a charging station. They also have NFC cards to turn on the charging stations for people that are paying extra for the spot. The thing is, in a commercial building, the employer is usually paying for the spot. This creates a bit of an issue because it incentives people to charge their cars only at work when the grid is in high demand instead of at home when the demand is lower at night. The told me there is a company called Freedom (you'll have to look it up). That is making grid aware charging stations that will turn off the stations during high demand grid. That is when the fun really begins! The charging stations will turn off the power automatically and people can't override it by grabbing the wire in the next space over.