walterbays
Well-known member
At risk of carrying this thread a bit further off topic, a couple of somewhat related observations...
Today at Ikea one of the 3 Blink units was broken - in the famous RFID-processing loop. One was charging another Leaf. And the third, handicapped space, was ICEd as always. An exacerbating issue with Blink's high failure rate is that their network status is usually wrong. I checked status on the Blink app at the time and it showed: 2 available, 1 in use. You wouldn't necessarily expect them to detect ICEd units, but I wonder why they still haven't figured out how to identify locked up units that haven't communicated with the Blink servers for hours.
In Balboa Park thanks to Car2go the unit status is off in the opposite direction. Right now the Blink app shows 6 units in use and 1 available at Pallisades. But the Car2go locator app shows at least 3 vehicles there, so there are probably actually 4 units you could use by moving a Car2go car. If the Car2go app would let you zoom the map in a few more steps you could probably tell exactly how many spaces were potentially available.
Right now with free charging it's not so bad that you can never tell the actual availability of charging stations. But when they start charging money to charge, and possibly also to make a reservation to charge, they'd better figure out a way to determine and communicate whether or not they are able to deliver the promised service.
Today at Ikea one of the 3 Blink units was broken - in the famous RFID-processing loop. One was charging another Leaf. And the third, handicapped space, was ICEd as always. An exacerbating issue with Blink's high failure rate is that their network status is usually wrong. I checked status on the Blink app at the time and it showed: 2 available, 1 in use. You wouldn't necessarily expect them to detect ICEd units, but I wonder why they still haven't figured out how to identify locked up units that haven't communicated with the Blink servers for hours.
In Balboa Park thanks to Car2go the unit status is off in the opposite direction. Right now the Blink app shows 6 units in use and 1 available at Pallisades. But the Car2go locator app shows at least 3 vehicles there, so there are probably actually 4 units you could use by moving a Car2go car. If the Car2go app would let you zoom the map in a few more steps you could probably tell exactly how many spaces were potentially available.
Right now with free charging it's not so bad that you can never tell the actual availability of charging stations. But when they start charging money to charge, and possibly also to make a reservation to charge, they'd better figure out a way to determine and communicate whether or not they are able to deliver the promised service.