drees said:
TonyWilliams said:
The best hope is a swap out of the crap Blink equipment for something reliable.
Are there any rock solid public charging stations out there with support for billing? Even Chargepoint has reliability issues.
If I had the company, I'd probably swap in an OpenEVSE guts. Make them dumb and simple with a relatively low cost fix.
To generate income, and because the current Rema ones are garbage, I think I'd sell cords like they do in Europe. Then, add a Mennekes receptacle on the unit, which now has no cable to be vandalized or burn a pin on a car. Two problems fixed.
Now, I sell Mennekes to J1772 cables and give away the L2 charging service. Freeloaders won't ever show up because they need a cable that costs $199.99. Folks that buy the cable aren't cheapskates and have virtually free reign of the charging locations. The Mennekes adaptor is encrypted with the owners billing for future use.
If I sell 1000 of these cable sets, that's $199,990 in gross receipts, and $100,000 in profit. More than Blink pulled in, and all the units work.
When I sell 10,000 cable sets, almost $2 million in gross receipts!!! After a few years, I add pay by the minute/kWh, with a system paid for with the revenue from selling cables. No cards to swipe, because every time a person plugs in, the billing is already known.
I celebrate every time a Just-Drive-The-Prius(TM) person complains that it's "too expensive", and realize that is just one less freeloader blocking a spot for paying customers.
All the DC chargers, I would just replace, and again they would be dumb chargers.