Charging idiots or charging etiquette - you pick it!

[MrB]

I had a very convivial conversation recently with a gentleman charging his well-loved Nissan Leaf at Ionity, drawing predictably low speeds. When he saw how quickly my car was wolfing down a charge, he asked me how he could get his car to do it. He was genuinely unaware of the limitations of the onboard equipment of his car. I gently pointed at the 50kw Gridserve chargers at the other side of the car park and suggested that he’d be as well to use those as he’d achieve no higher speed and would be slightly financially better off to boot. Perfectly amiable chat and no hectoring on my part as he’d approached me and asked but it was enlightening to me how much education still needs to be done around the whole charging infrastructure wrt what one‘s own vehicle is capable of receiving.

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[kort]

Given the typical EA derating in the Northeast, the tapering after 80% is often trivial.
And hard to blame EV drivers if they value free kWh over their time spent at a charger (or at nearby amenities).
Instead I blame EA for the free charging plans. And for not instituting idle fees once those vehicles hit 100% with their owners nowhere in sight.

again, not trying to be argumentative but the tapering can be quite significant, down below 30 kwh. as for the free charging, it is a marketing tool for the manufacturers who pay EA per unit for the access. and lastly there are idle fees that are imposed.

 

[kort]

I had a very convivial conversation recently with a gentleman charging his well-loved Nissan Leaf at Ionity, drawing predictably low speeds. When he saw how quickly my car was wolfing down a charge, he asked me how he could get his car to do it. He was genuinely unaware of the limitations of the onboard equipment of his car. I gently pointed at the 50kw Gridserve chargers at the other side of the car park and suggested that he’d be as well to use those as he’d achieve no higher speed and would be slightly financially better off to boot. Perfectly amiable chat and no hectoring on my part as he’d approached me and asked but it was enlightening to me how much education still needs to be done around the whole charging infrastructure wrt what one‘s own vehicle is capable of receiving.

good for your being a mentor to that fellow.
my experience has been that in the early days of Evs people were more open to chat about their cars and their charging than the crowd at chargers these days. if people aren't dealing with connection issues they just sit in cars are don't seem to be friendly at all.

 

[MrB]

good for your being a mentor to that fellow.
my experience has been that in the early days of Evs people were more open to chat about their cars and their charging than the crowd at chargers these days. if people aren't dealing with connection issues they just sit in cars are don't seem to be friendly at all.

Totally agree. I’m a little over 2 years into my time with this car and people were notably more curious/friendly at the start. Lot more sitting in cars furiously munching a meal deal from the service station nowadays.

 

[Jonathan S.]

If the idle charges reach the value of the car, can EA just confiscate it, sell it, use the money to add new charging spots at said location?

Hmm, let's see here ... research the median value of a CCS1 EV ... enter into the next cell the median EA idle rate ... divide the first cell by second cell ... whoops, that's an Excel error!

 

[Jonathan S.]

again, not trying to be argumentative but the tapering can be quite significant, down below 30 kwh. as for the free charging, it is a marketing tool for the manufacturers who pay EA per unit for the access. and lastly there are idle fees that are imposed.

I'm always up for a good argument!

Idle fees, imposed by whom?
The EA FB page often features pictures of EA screens for idle fees after hours of idling that amount to ... $0.00!
Ditto for my recent Blink session, which concluded with an email warning me that:

We understand you’re busy, but we wanted to warn you that this location charges occupancy fees, so hurry to move your ride! Please be courteous to other EV drivers as this location has high demand. Therefore, we charge non-charging vehicles occupancy fees $0.00 Per 3600 seconds

Free charging, yes, it's a vehicle feature that, like many vehicle features, is heavily marketed.
And therefore ... ?

Charge curve speed tapering, yes, I’ve studied the tests, and even experienced the tapering myself.

But the tapering is not all that significant given that I can rarely get out of the double-digits in the first place at CCS1 chargers in the northeast.

For example, had I been foolish enough to bring my Taycan on a ~360-mile roundtrip yesterday, or the same trip tomorrow, almost entirely interstate, with the final secondary highways leading to a major ski resort, here are my options:

• Four stations with a single 100kW charger. One location is a hotel, and another location is a major tourist attraction, so high chance of getting skunked. And best case is only ~3x a tapered ~30kW charging speed.
• Ditto re getting skunked at two stations with a single 80kW charge, one station with a single 62.5kW charger, and two stations each with a single 50kW charger. And even smaller differentials compared to a ~30kW tapered speed.
• Three stations each two split-power 62.5kW chargers, which I’ve previously found that get into the 80s, but one of those stations has had a broken charger for months with the other charger delivering in the high 20s.
• EA that would take me 20 minutes out of my way, and has been so unreliable that back on Labor Day all four chargers were broken. The most recent status shows only one charger entirely broken, but the most checkin is from a driver of our e-tron GT cousin who reports, “Max 42kw on a 350 station. Sigh”

Still love my CT, and glad I bought it. But also glad I kept an ICE so that I don’t have to deal with CCS1 dysfunction out here … even more so now that many new CCS1 stations on coming on-line in Vermont each with two 50kW chargers. Yes, that’s right, new stations in clusters of just two chargers, and just 50kW. (Which I discovered can be inoperable even just a couple months after installation, and even after very little use during that time period, and with the operations the responsibility of the station owner, not the network owner.) I found a list with the state grant money, so my hunch is that this was the minimum required to obtain the 50%-matching funds.

 

[bn8959]

Sounds like the US is generally screwed across the board

here in the UK I’ve not had an EV (Taycan) for long, but DCFC has been all successful for me (except for a painful session at a new Applegreen, when it was lashing down with rain and it took me 20 minutes to get a charge working and I got soaked!).

however I do totally agree some standards are needed to ensure fairer charging experience - pretty much exactly what Tesla do - idling fees and nudging to max charge to 80% when station is busy etc
I’d also love it if there was a method to queue fairly - eg registering on an app and being told which stall is yours to use when it’s your turn (and the stall only allowing you to connect to block queue jumpers) etc. realistically this only works when you have a unified system that you can consistently control (a-la Tesla). It’s basically impossible with so many different vendors and systems sadly - or would end up being a confusing mess with yet more apps (which we do want to avoid too!).

 

[action-ant]

So what's the consensus on staying on a public charger past 80% charge when there are others waiting to get on? This guy is at 84% and says he needs 5 mins more. And more than 5 mins has gone by.

 

[Hirschaj]

So what's the consensus on staying on a public charger past 80% charge when there are others waiting to get on? This guy is at 84% and says he needs 5 mins more. And more than 5 mins has gone by.

To make their next charging stop, this person might need 90+ % charge. Or they might not. You don’t know and they have every right to consume the amount of charge they need. Sometimes that sucks but that’s the status of the charging infrastructure here.

 

[gtm]

So what's the consensus on staying on a public charger past 80% charge when there are others waiting to get on? This guy is at 84% and says he needs 5 mins more. And more than 5 mins has gone by.

I just got back from a 2,200 mile round trip. Between the mountains and speed around 75 mph I averaged 2.9 miles per kWh. A full charge range of around 230 miles (my battery is down to roughly 80kWh usable). Never charged above 85% but sure considered it. Leaving a cushion of 10% on the bottom end results in a truly pathetic usable range of 175 miles. Given the inadequate real world range of our cars I can easily imagine situations where the extra charge/miles would be needed. If it's a Lucid they are abusing charger etiquette. For a Taycan it's not so abusive to want a few extra miles.

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