
Daddy, did you need to buy an electric car? - ZeljkoS
https://svedic.org/tech/daddy-did-you-really-need-electric-car
======
rgovostes
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
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
> 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.

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olyjohn
How does this compare to the US? It sounds like there's no way to pay cash, or
just use a credit card and go at any of these stations. Using an app, and
requiring and account to do this is idiotic and will just end up leaving you
stranded like this guy. If a gas station required me to have an account and
app to gas up my car, I would tell them to screw off and never go there again.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Disclaimer: We own several Teslas, US-specific.

With Tesla Superchargers, it's automatic. You pull up, you plug in, you
charge, and your credit card on file with Tesla is automatically charged as
soon as you stop the charging session (whether in the app for your vehicle,
pressing the button on the Supercharger handle, or in the vehicle on the
control/display panel). You're never more than ~100 miles away from a
Supercharger station [1].

With ChargePoint stations (rarely used), I swipe an RFID card or the app on my
iPhone/Apple Watch, which authorizes the charge with a J1772 adapter. Super
simple, have never had a problem. Many businesses provide Tesla destination
chargers or J1772 chargers (or both in some cases) that require no auth to
pay, the power is free.

I have not encountered anyone who minded tapping an RFID card, phone, or watch
at a Chargepoint station; it is no different than using Apple Pay to pay for
fuel. These are solved problems from a payment infrastructure perspective,
it's just going to take time to shake out as EV adoption increases.

The author's mistake was not buying a Tesla EV, as they prioritize efforts to
ensure a positive charging experience (including spending hundreds of millions
of dollars building out and maintaining EV charging infrastructure). Other
automakers make no efforts whatsoever (except at brand dealerships; who wants
to charge at a car dealership?) to provide charging infrastructure, with this
being the result. Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 owners face the same hassles in the
US.

[1] [https://supercharge.info/map](https://supercharge.info/map)

~~~
mikestew
_The author 's mistake was not buying a Tesla EV_

The commenter's mistake was not reading the...part where the author cannot buy
a Tesla in their home country.

 _Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 owners face the same hassles in the US._

What hassles are you referring to? You just outlined how one taps a card and
charges at ChargePoint stations, which doesn't seem like a hassle? The only
hassle I've encountered in nine years of Leaf ownership is a non-operative
charger.

~~~
toomuchtodo
TLDR Blog post should be “I made a mistake buying an EV in Croatia”

If you can’t buy a Tesla, and settle for another EV, you can’t complain about
the garbage third party charging experience. They’re (Non Tesla EVs) perfectly
fine golf carts (<100 miles round trip) if you never make long trips with them
though.

Non Tesla level 2 chargers can be out of order (as you mentioned), causing
range anxiety or exceptionally slow travel plans for Leafs, i3s, and other EVs
without a manufacturer provided charging network. I’ve never had a
Supercharger or destination charger be out of order upon my arrival and need
to charge (it happens I’ve heard, it just much more rare than neglected third
party charging stations). I opportunistically charge at ChargePoint stations,
but don’t need to due to having 300+ miles of range; them being out of order
doesn’t impact me in our S, X, or Y. I can always Supercharge, other EVs have
limited options ( _as this blog post demonstrates_ ).

Anyway, I think the case is really “don’t buy an EV if you need to travel and
the charging infrastructure doesn’t exist”, and being of low quality is just
as bad as not existing.

------
rograndom
I had a very similar experience during my first somewhat long trip in my Leaf.
It has a range of "150" miles, but it's closer to 120. My destination was 60
miles away, should be good for a round trip, maybe a short charge at the
destination or on the way back.

Nope. It's 30F out and that left me with 5% battery when I reached my
destination. There was a charger nearby at a CVS. Arrived there an it was out
of order. The town had a charger in their parking garage, get in and that's
out of order as well and I had to pay $5 for the 5 minutes I was in garage.

Drove to the next town over for the next closest charger. 2 blocks away and
I'm at 0%, the car is yelling at me but managed to make it to the charger. It
works! It's a level 2, but should charge to full in an hour. Head to the
shopping area and keep track of the charging process on my phone, which was
nice. An hour later and I'm only up to 30% and I have to go back and start the
charging process again. Wander around for another hour to get to 75% and can't
stay longer because the garage is closing.

Thankfully that 75%, with the heater off and not going above 45mph let me get
home with 5% battery left. Many lessons learned that day.

------
theandrewbailey
Having to research this stuff, get specific apps, and plan out a route is a
horrible experience. Compare to ICE cars: universally compatible with stations
at almost any corner or highway exit, and all you need is cash or a credit
card. Until someone who isn't tech-minded can use EVs for trips like these,
don't expect them to get mass adoption.

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mzakharo1
Electric cars need a range extender. Due to lack of imagination on both
consumers and manufacturers, this means buying a second ICE car to act as a
range extender. Here is an example of planning camping trip on tesla route
planner:
[https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/trips#/?v=M3_2015_74&o=Guelph,%2...](https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/trips#/?v=M3_2015_74&o=Guelph,%20ON,%20Canada_Guelph%20Wellington%20County%20ON@43.5448048,-80.24816659999999&s=Killarney%20Provincial%20Park,%20960%20ON-637,%20Killarney,%20ON%20P0M%202A0,%20Canada_Killarney%20Provincial%20Park%20960%20ON-637@46.01304630000001,-81.4017487&d=Guelph,%20ON,%20Canada_Guelph%20Wellington%20County%20ON@43.5448048,-80.24816659999999)

With an ICE, you save over 3 hours of trip time, and modern conveniences of a
gas station. Priceless.

------
tenacious_tuna
As I was reading the article I found myself getting more and more frustrated
with the author and developers of EV charging infrastructure; the author, for
having not researched these things ahead of time, which seems reasonable when
buying such an unusually fueled vehicle, and developers for having such crazy
disparate standards and plugs and cabling and generally crap user
friendliness.

I typically draw this comparison between Tesla and Apple: Tesla wanted people
to enjoy using EVs, and they saw a few problems for that:

1\. charging sucks, and range anxiety makes people nervous

2\. most people's perception of electrically-propelled vehicles is of
Prius(es? i?): slow and unimpressive.

They solved (1) with the supercharging network, which is insanely easy to use
(drive up, plug in, credit card is automatically charged), and integrating the
network _as well as_ all Tesla "destination" chargers (level 2s installed at
businesses, hotels, etc) such that the car knows where all of them are. The
built-in navigation on my model 3 can tell me exactly when and where I'll have
to stop for charging along my trip, and for how long, with real-time
availability info.

I don't understand how other EV manufacturers haven't tried to co-ordinate a
similar open network between them: it would solve so many usability problems.
Go lob some $$$ at Chargepoint and use the 3g connection the cars are already
using to send telemetry back to check availability for chargers nearby.

Give users incentives to use whatever network works with the manufacturer; buy
a Kona? get 15% off your first 5 charges with ChargePoint. Honda Insight?
Congrats on your 500 free miles with $OtherProvider!

Tesla absolutely has shortcomings, but they well and truly solved this UX
issue. They should at least be given credit by being emulated.

The downside of course is it's easy for them to deploy those solutions in the
relatively-homogenously-regulated region of the US, but significantly more
difficult in regions like Europe.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
The one point I'll make is, Tesla solved all these problems. But that only
makes it equivalent to ICE vehicles in someways and still worse in others.

UX to find charging stations and having to plan trips? That's impressive if
the alternative wasn't ubiquitous gas stations literally everywhere with 5
minute fill up times.

The supercharger network is great but people want to be able to mainly charge
at work and at home not on I-79 or someone else's business. And no one wants
to foot that infrastructure bill right now.

~~~
rusticpenn
The number of charging stations is just a chicken and egg problem.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
The problem is deeper than that.

For EVs to truly take over people need to be able to charge at work and at
home. This immediately rules out any resident without parking options.

It doesn't matter for ICE vehicles - fill up times are short and gas stations
are ubiquitous. But neither of these are true for EVs. Even if they were
ubiquitous, they still take time.

------
dsq
High fuel taxes in Europe are a lucrative source of income for governments,
and are a perverse incentive to neglect EV infrastructure.

~~~
metiscus
Knowing Europe, they will eventually come up with some bundle of regulations
and a super VAT for electricity when put into a car to make up the deficit.

------
thehappypm
Wow. This makes me very grateful to live in America. Our infrastructure may
not be as high-tech, but it's at least fairly consistent coast-to-coast.

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brundolf
> But this time dreams failed because of people, not because of technology.

As a technologist, never forget this. It's a very common thing.

