How do you apply 'idle time fees' to a free charger?

I am focusing an edges cases because those are a reality. It was a major factory in my wife's last car purchase and it's not as edge as you present. We take trips of about 100-150 miles on a pretty regular basis. If we go to Napa, for example, we drive there, drive around a bit while there and sometimes stay the night. Sure, that only represents one trip in 50 (assuming commuting two times a day, twenty days a month and then ten trips for errands and such) and in the grand scheme of things, that one trip is much more impactful. It's one trip in 50, but it's greater than the sum of its parts. It's driving to a place that we are not as familiar with and introducing more variables.

The problem with the two car scenario is generally you want to take bigger, more comfortable cars on log road trips, so the road trip car would be the one that gets worse gas mileage. In my scenario, I have my F-Type and my wife has an SUV. We use the SUV for many road trips due to the comfort and space (dogs won't fit in the F-Type if you have a passenger). We'd have to keep the SUV as an ICE and then I'd have an EV. If I wanted to go on a breakfast club rally in the bay area, I would be at the end of range anxiety as spirited driving hits the old battery hard. It doesn't work for me. Also consider what happens when the person with the ICE goes out of town and the other person wants to go somewhere else. That happened to me three times in the time I had my EV. Two times I had to drive about 110 miles up the road to a place where there weren't many chargers and I ended up having to plug in my 110 adapter, which is painfully slow. The other time I went camping and there was no way to bring the EV at all.

A possible work around would be to rent/Turo something like a suburban for long trips. That may work, but it introduces and inconvenience, another set of variables and many are not keen on pets.

Another point is what do people who live in apartments or cities with on street parking do? Let's say you live in San Francisco and you are fortunate enough to have a parking garage attached to your building, but it doesn't have any chargers. This is the case of my brother in law. He lives in a nice complex right by the bay and each unit in the six story building gets a parking space. Chargers are not a part of it. Others have to park on the street. City driving is where EVs absolutely shine, but if you can't get reliable charging, the benefits are quickly erased.

I don't think EVs the way they are setup now is the answer. Maybe a quick swap battery exchange would work or something like fuel cell vehicles.

I just re-read this and it sounds pretty negative. This is just my thought process and my experiences. If I didn't like sports cars, I would seriously consider an EV for me.

 

Right!? Think of us down here in Tucson who if our 1 of 1 -J/LR dealer who hasn't sold a new Jag in two years decides the same thing. I will be pretty pissed if I have to drive to Chandler or Glendale AZ for my paid for warranty service. My warranty won't expire (time) till May 2026. There is 0 chance I will hit the 60,000 mile marker expiration before then. I did read somewhere that JLR dealers who dropped new J sales had to by contract service J's for 5 years from the last new J they sold. Scottsdale I would think it the ideal J dealership location, what the heck is that dealer thinking?

My Dealer sent me this on 10Feb23, I cut out the fluffy parts, like how this will be a good change for me. Written well by their attorney with no promise of how long they would do this or what J models they will service:

"Commencing on February 13, 2023, Royal Jaguar of Tucson will begin operation as a Jaguar Authorized Service and Approved Certified Pre-owned Sales Center. We will no longer be selling new Jaguar vehicles after this date.
Be assured that if you currently own a Jaguar and conduct service at Royal Jaguar of Tucson, nothing needs to change. As an authorized Jaguar service center, we will continue to offer best-in-class Service and Parts experience, performing all aspects of repairs, including warranty work."



JLR has screwed this up something awful...

 

More pictures of the Theory 1 below. Alas it is just a concept car. We won't be seeing one on the road anytime soon.

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/con...eory-1-concept

 

While this Is unfortunate, especially for warranty work, for any other work, there are plenty of options between DIY and dealer.

 

These are two big inaccuracies with your assessment. Most family households under the median income level do NOT have two cars and a vast majority of those families are renters in apartments without garage space or chargers. EVs absolutely work for the families you describe, but there is a LARGE swath of the American public that does not fit that model and an EV cannot (today) fit their lifestyle.

With the exception of the Tesla SuperCharger network, the current landscape of public EV chargers leaves a LOT to be desired in both location and reliability. In a couple recent industry studies, fully 30% of charging infrastructure (mostly Electrify America and EVGo) were either not working, or not charging at advertised speeds. I'm sure the gasoline infrastructure went through similar growing pains in its infancy as well, but the reality is the EV infrastructure is not ready for the vast majority of US household lifestyles and until that changes, EV adoption will be slow or flat.

 

Re: idle time fees during free charging period

When you use a charger during a free period, the billing is set up in such a way that you actually get charged for the electricity you use while charging and then the electricity provider gives you a credit equal to that amount back to your account so that the end result is $0. When the free period ends, you stop getting the credits back to your account.

Charging time = cable connected to the car, battery increasing in % capacity

Idle time = cable connected to the car, battery not increasing in % capacity

Idle time fees are essentially a fee to encourage you to move your car out of the way so that the next person can use it, in the same way you would not leave your car in front of a gas pump at a gas station after filling up while you go inside and grab a sandwich at the Subway shop connected to the gas station. Idle fees are not credited back to your account, so it’s not free, even during the “free charging” period. (When it hurts their wallet, people change their behavior.)



re: Napa trip

I’m close to Napa as well, and I’d take the F-Type every time even if I had an EV because the curvy roads are more fun to hit in the F-Type.

If I had an EV though, and that was my only car, I’d rent a gas powered car on Turo to make the trip. Again, curvy roads and all. (The last gas-powered car I rented from Turo to drive to Napa was a white, convertible Maserati GranTurismo. Fun as hell! The cool thing about Turo is, you can rent a high-end gas-powered exotic car, drive it around for a weekend trip, and then give it back to the owner. It’s like having your own exotic car club, but not having to pay the annual fees!)

Let’s say you only have one car, and you can’t afford to rent a gas-powered car on the weekends for when you want to take longer trips. (Really though? Many weekend trips to Napa or Tahoe, and you can’t afford to rent a gas-powered car?) In those cases, it totally makes sense to just buy a gas-powered car or a hybrid.



Re: living in an apartment in the City

In a metropolitan area, you typically have better access to public transportation, so there’s a low-rate of car ownership overall. In NY or SF as a 20-something year old SINK (single-income, no kids), I see a lot of folks who own no car at all. In NYC for example, about half of the households don’t even own a car.

The young 20-something year olds who I work with who aren’t married yet and have only one car in the SF Bay Area; they have EVs if they have a car and charge at work. Some don’t even have a car; they live in SF and take ride-share everywhere. Waymo has those driverless EV Jaguars everywhere, and they just call them with their phone. More often than not though, they don’t have to go into work anymore. They work from home, so they only use their car for errands and weekend trips. They charge their cars when they get to their destinations.

For example, if they own an EV, and they make the long trip to Napa, they leave in the morning with a mostly full charge, they drive 50 miles to get to Napa, go to a couple of wineries, and then drive the 50 miles back. While they’re wine tasting at each of the different wineries they plug their EV car in. This site for example has a list wineries with EV chargers, but your EV car can tell you the same thing: https://winecountrygetaways.com/tast...tion-wineries/. There will only be more wineries coming online because there are so many damn EVs here, so check back one year from now and that list will have doubled. Look around your town. Where are they currently installing the next EV charger? My workplace has 20 parking spots. Five years ago, they had 0 chargers. Now they have 3 and are adding more. My Tesla 3 buddy works at a bigger company and they just replaced the nearest parking lot to the business park he works at with a whole parking lot of new chargers. There’s like 100 new chargers that were added just in the last month. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Do you build the charging stations before the locals buy their EVs? It’s a risk for sure, but the number of new charging stations around where I live are popping up in a lot of areas where people shop and eat. Every other car is a Rivian, Tesla, BMW EV, or other EV, so it totally makes sense.



But a lot of households (i.e. the bedrock of America) are made up of families that have at least 2-cars in their household. In Kansas when I visit, usually I see homes with garages with a full-size pickup truck (these aren’t your dad’s pickup truck from 25 years ago; these are full on luxury vehicles with an extended cabin, seat for 5 adults, leather seating, premium sound, etc etc etc), and the 2nd car is usually a sedan. The full size luxury pickup truck is what you take on your long road trips (especially if you’re towing your boat or your luxury air-conditioned fifth wheel to the lake). During the week, one of you (usually the wife) is driving the sedan to work and paying $150/month in gas. Keep the ICE vehicle, but if you’re trading in your existing ICE sedan or SUV anyway not trade that in for an EV and pay $75/month in electricity for the driving the same mileage? If the wife has an ICE SUV, why not trade it in for an EV SUV? I get it, the upfront costs are there, but you already have another gas-powered car in the family that you use for long-haul trips. Why not trade it in for a _similarly priced_ EV with the same upfront costs of the ICE car you were about to buy?

It’s not the economics that’s holding that family back from buying an EV. The math doesn’t lie. It’s the emotional piece of it.



Re: spirited driving

I have a “daily” and in addition to the daily, an F-Type, and my wife has a 4-banger boring sedan with very little oomph (but it has a heated steering wheel, so she’s happy!).

I try to daily my F-Type, but for those days when I’m working on it, I need a backup car. My current backup car is gas-powered and paid off, so I’ll drive it until it doesn’t make economic sense anymore. When I replace it though, my next backup car will be an EV. If I’m just running errands around town, the EV is way more cost effective, and I can’t drive spirited around town anyway because it’s 25-35mph max with tons of kids around.

But the majority of households are not going to a breakfast rally for spirited driving. They’re busy with their jobs, home ownership chores, honey-do lists, taking the kids to their weekend sporting events, etc etc etc. That demographic can afford to have one of their cars be an EV, and rent a gas-powered car the 1% of time they actually need it.

 

re: most famliies
If you add "under the median income level" to my original statement, then yes, I agree. But even then 90% of households in the USA have at least one car. Let's say you are in that "below median" income level and can only afford one car. Your car breaks down and you decide to trade it in for a used ICE car. Look at _similarly priced_ used hybrids. Half of all trips in the USA last year were less than 3 miles! It makes economic sense, especially if you add "below median income level" to my original statement.

re: infrastructure
Totally agree with you here on current state of infrastructure. But in my area there are whole parking lots that are being converted to EV charging stations. Every grocery store, shopping area, restaurant area, rest stop, you name it, whatever your destination, they're building new charging stations.
I just watched Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy Wars recently. During one scene when they were traveling by stage coach, I wondered what it must have been like when society started to move away from that infrastructure to the gas-powered ICE infrastructure. The first cars on the road didn't have any gas-stations to go to, and yet we still got to today with a gas-station on every corner. It didn't happen overnight. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Do you take the risk (and reward if you're right!) to build out the infrastructure needed 20 years from now? I see opportunities where others might see unwanted change.

We're diversifying our energy supply chain. My $0.02: that's a good thing. You may disagree, and that's ok, as long as you don't want to shoot me in my face for a different opinion.

 

I don't recall Henry Ford using the government to raise the price of oats and hay. The automobile was a better idea, adopted by a free market in due time.

 

If the attached parking is under the building be thankful there are no chargers. You really don't want to live above a charging EV whose lithium battery goes into thermal runaway.

 

That's a good point! During Henry Ford's time though, the energy supply chain was 100% domestic (all of the oats and hay were produced locally).
We weren't beholden to Arabic countries for over 50% (at its height) of our energy supply coming from imports from said countries who would then stop selling to us as a way to influence our foreign policy. The world is becoming a smaller place, and so we adapt. Thankfully we're down to about 12% of our crude oil imports coming from OPEC and Persian Gulf countries today, down from over 50% in 2005.

 

I've been living dangerously since forever. As a kid, I often rode in the back seat of my parents' Ford Pinto, which was known to have the gas tank in the back of the car explode when rear-ended.

 

Like in Korea, where a Mercedes EQE 350 caught fire in an underground garage and took out 900 cars. The government has launched an investigation and asked EV owners to park on the street. Really long charging cords required.

Mercedes EV Fire

The gist, for those who can't pull up the article from behind the NYT paywall...

"The flames and smoke from a burning Mercedes-Benz electric sedan spread rapidly through the underground parking lot of an apartment complex in South Korea this month. The fire damaged almost 900 cars, and 23 people suffered smoke inhalation.It took firefighters more than eight hours to put out the blaze, which reached temperatures above 1,500 degrees Celsius, according to officials in Incheon, the city near Seoul where the fire broke out around dawn on Aug. 1."

 

John Cadogan did a video on the Korean Merc fire. CCTV captured the moment it started off-gassing, rather spectacular. But you don't want to be near it when that happens (unless you're in full hazmat gear)!

 

#SavingThePlanet #NoGasInMyCar