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For a time while working at a Bay Area tech company I had a Chevy Volt. I parked in a city-owned garage with a charger, but the charge fee per mile of range wor

For a time while working at a Bay Area tech company I had a Chevy Volt. I parked in a city-owned garage with a charger, but the charge fee per mile of range worked out to be about the same as the cost of gasoline. So I tried to take advantage of chargers provided at work. Employees who used the chargers were encouraged to join an email list. The tone of this list was incredibly negative, with constant bickering about the lack of free chargers and cars left plugged in too long. Tesla owners could hog a charger for the whole day while poor Leaf owners would be anxious about making it home. Eventually I wrote a little script that would scrape the ChargePoint API to tell me when chargers became available, which I kept as a well-guarded superpower. Overall the experience of driving an electric vehicle without having a dedicated, personal charger was a considerable headache.

tenacious_tuna 6y ago
That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do, but that's also something that I think it a bit silly for the other EV owners to have not expected: you should at least be able to round-trip from your home to your work. What if there's a power outage? what if traffic is worse than you expect and you're stuck on the road for longer? what if people in your garage are being a jerk and aren't sharing the plugs? Granted, it's significantly more inefficient for everyone to have this reserve capacity and not use it all the time, and people should be conscientious enough to share the limited infrastructure. Is there a way this could have been brought up to manglement or something similar? Or a friendly suggestion to the group? ("Hey, if you don't absolutely need to charge, please leave your phone number in the window, so others who need the charger can call & safely unplug your car" etc etc)
- mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
  > That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do Is it though? Vehicle owners are classically used to leaving their cars parked until the next time that they are needed. For people to recognize that there are insufficient chargers to the point that it becomes socially valuable for people to stop what they are doing once their battery is topped off and head to their vehicle to unplug is a pretty significant behavior change.

tenacious_tuna 6y ago

That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do, but that's also something that I think it a bit silly for the other EV owners to have not expected: you should at least be able to round-trip from your home to your work. What if there's a power outage? what if traffic is worse than you expect and you're stuck on the road for longer? what if people in your garage are being a jerk and aren't sharing the plugs? Granted, it's significantly more inefficient for everyone to have this reserve capacity and not use it all the time, and people should be conscientious enough to share the limited infrastructure. Is there a way this could have been brought up to manglement or something similar? Or a friendly suggestion to the group? ("Hey, if you don't absolutely need to charge, please leave your phone number in the window, so others who need the charger can call & safely unplug your car" etc etc)

mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
> That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do Is it though? Vehicle owners are classically used to leaving their cars parked until the next time that they are needed. For people to recognize that there are insufficient chargers to the point that it becomes socially valuable for people to stop what they are doing once their battery is topped off and head to their vehicle to unplug is a pretty significant behavior change.