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."

Comments

Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[danbert8]

Or another alternate headline: "Rich people fight over free lunches"

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[knightghost]

So let them pay for the charging spot. Running wire is pretty cheap.

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[tripleevenfall]

That's my idea. If they want these prime spots right near the building that also give their cars free fuel, why not require a permit and have them pay a monthly fee? Then you can use the money to build out all the outlets you need.

As the article states, it's worse to have too few than to have none.

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[Penguinisto]

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).

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[tripleevenfall]

Because they want to look "environmentally conscious", so they put two chargers in their parking lot and then add a slide about how "green" they are for the shareholders' meeting.

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[beelsebob]

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).

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[Mr D from 63]

You can just charge for time at the charger. Time metering is cheap and easy.

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[aaarrrgggh]

It is actually done that way due to the LEED certification process for green buildings; parking spots for carpools, low emitting vehicles, and EVs need to be prime spots. Electrically they are a pain because they are 40A at 208V, which makes provisions for more than three a bit of a challenge; 480V units would be much easier to accommodate.

The shortage is just a timing issue; chargers will catch up. The problem really is that many employers provide them for free.

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[operagost]

You can't park within 1000 feet of the supermarket doors in their own parking lot now.
- 20 Handicapped spaces
- 6 "expectant mother" spaces
- 4 spaces to pickup internet orders
- 4 EV charging spaces

Re:Hipsters fight over limited supplies of juice

[BronsCon]

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 $

It isn't climate change...

[JeffOwl]

That will be the end of humanity

Electric cars do not make people mean

[gtall]

It would seem electric cars are simply giving mean people another way to express just how mean they can be.

Merry pranksters

[sjbe]

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.

Re:ICEd

[ArchieBunker]

Way to win people over for buying electric cars. Now I feel like installing fake charging ports just to fuck with assholes like you.

Talking to someone is mean now?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> 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?

Re:Talking to someone is mean now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Talking to someone is mean now?

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, I didn't understand this either. That seems like the polite, neighborly thing to do with a shared resource. Whoever wrote the summary (if not the article) is a whining hipster douchebag - god forbid you should stop hogging a resource that other people need when you're not using it.

Re:ICEd

[nojayuk]

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.

lol

[grub]

I would love to see the fights: kale smoothies splattered on hemp clothing, dreadlocks being pulled.

eco-entitlement

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:ICEd

[grub]

I still get laughs over this self-righteous Prius owner ragging on a truck driver.

problems of the wealthy

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

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.)

Re:Maybe...

[willworkforbeer]

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.......

...we had few fights at the horse-oats feeding station, but if we did, Gunfight, Bitches!

a classic economics problem

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Hipsters fight over "free stuff"

[Mr D from 63]

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!".

Re:Hipsters fight over "free stuff"

[toadlife]

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.