Charge station is NOT a parking spot - When EV is too popular

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finny47

Member
Joined
Sep 25, 2016
Messages
10
At my work, there are 6 free charging stations. It was cool until..... there were more than 10 of us fighting for the same charge stations. They are ChargePoint stations which has a great website and alerts that can be configured to let you know when your car is fully charged. Problem is the charging is free to all and parking spots are right up front. People park all day even when the typical charge takes only 3 hours. Worse, I've seen EVs parked that aren't even plugged in.

I have a 2016 base model and in the winter, I use 70% of my 100% charge for a measly 32 mile trip back home running the heat and highway speeds. My lease is ending next year and due to the charging contention issues, I do not see myself getting another EV. Until people started to treat it more like a gas pump and park elsewhere when fully charged, I'm out.

Anyone else in the same boat?
 
finny47 said:
At my work, there are 6 free charging stations. It was cool until..... there were more than 10 of us fighting for the same charge stations. They are ChargePoint stations which has a great website and alerts that can be configured to let you know when your car is fully charged. Problem is the charging is free to all and parking spots are right up front. People park all day even when the typical charge takes only 3 hours. Worse, I've seen EVs parked that aren't even plugged in.

I have a 2016 base model and in the winter, I use 70% of my 100% charge for a measly 32 mile trip back home running the heat and highway speeds. My lease is ending next year and due to the charging contention issues, I do not see myself getting another EV. Until people started to treat it more like a gas pump and park elsewhere when fully charged, I'm out.

Anyone else in the same boat?

Talk to management, not just you but a group of EV drivers at your work. Get an EV policy written.

Free gets overused. Even a nominal cost will cut back on usage.

Charging stations were I used to work were low cost for 4 hours, then jumped to $5/hour. Very few cars parked all day.

Convince management to tow people just parked and not using the stations, and have this in the EV policy. If you see someone, leave a copy of the company EV policy on their windshield. The first time. Report them the second time.
 
At my workplace, the EV drivers reached out to each other and we used email and IM to communicate our plans and needs for the day, and let each other know how many hours of charging we might need that day. Everyone accepted the notion that cars needed to be moved when their charge requirements were met.
 
My workplace recently outgrew our chargers. So far, things are still ok. I tend to park there only half the day, moving my car at lunchtime. I'm still waiting for the day that this becomes a problem.

The trouble with pay charging is that it costs a lot to monitor and bill for the electricity. In our case, it was costing more than the electricity itself, so they went to a subscription model ($12/mo for unlimited charging). Which is possibly worse than free. The mentality becomes "I paid my $12, and now I want to get the most of it!".

If the company passed on the cost of billing to the users, then it would cost more than gas, and noone would charge. Ideally, it should be priced less than gas but more than home. This discourages the "round-trippers" who have large batteries and only charge at work. In our case, that's one Bolt and two Model 3s. But it encourages the PHEVs to charge enough to avoid burning gasoline. It also allows those like the OP to charge up enough to get back home, even in the dead of winter.

Idle fees are also critical if you want to prevent people from taking up the spot all day.
 
We handled it much the was Nubo describes: We created a mailing list for plug-in owners to communicate over and a etiquette document that lists "do"s and "don't"s.

We've kept adding EVSEs as the number of plug-ins has increased, so we've outgrown the number of EVSEs a few times over the last 4 years. A year ago we were tightly constrained with about 16 EVSEs serving 60 cars (before we added the ones as a result of https://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?t=24456) and every day people would be moving their fully charged cars starting at 11AM to let someone else in.

It helps that we have 2 spots per EVSE, so right there a second car can be queued up waiting to be plugged in when the first is done. It took a lot of work to convince the facilities people of this; the first big expansion of 8 new EVSEs (to bring us to 10 total) were 1 spot per EVSE. The moment we had more plug-ins that spots it because a terrible challenge to get people to move. Once they re-installed those 8 to cover 16 spots, people got used to the fact that sharing an EVSE was a normal thing.

Personally, I think for workplace charging the best result is 3 spots per EVSE. Most of our 120+ plug-ins all finish charging in about 3 hours. I would label each spot with a reserved 3-hour time range where that car gets priority access to the EVSE : 8:30-11:30, 11:30-2:30, 2:30-5:30. (those hours work well for a tech company). This is to avoid the occasional Tesla or 3.3kW LEAF from hogging an EVSE for 6 hours because they came in with a low battery.
 
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