Category Archives: Electric Vehicle Charging

Volt Drivers! and some Tesla drivers.

While more Volt sales will be good for the environment it’s not really that good for the EV only population.

My workplace just opened a bank of 6 charge spots. They made the mistake of putting the cord where it can only reach 1 spot at a time. Not 2 or 4.

All of a sudden Volt drivers have found out and changed parking lots because of the free chargers. From closer to work to free charging. Talk about cheap! They are willing to take a train just for a few free miles.

In the other lot the chargers weren’t free, they were Blink.

If I don’t leave for work fully charged, and I often don’t since I usually go to work later in the day, I need to get at least some charge to get home. Volt drivers don’t. And if they had put a faster charger on the car you wouldn’t need all day to do it.

Volt drivers like to tout how many EV miles they get but they forget to tell people that they plugin like cigarette smokers take smoke breaks. Often. Although not as often as Plug-in Prius Drivers. All ten of them.

With the proliferation of Plug-in Hybrids EV’s are finding it harder to get a charge when they really need one.

It is also common to see Tesla’s and Volts using EV Only Spots like handicapped parking spaces. Some even have the nads to not even plugin. Some just put the cord in far enough to just make it look like they are charging.

How many companies do you think are going to keep putting up chargers when they expect some revenue from those chargers. I know your Teslas and Volts tells you when your done charging and if not the Charging Company does. They don’t put them there for the environmentally challenged driver.

Now that EV’s are getting into the mainstream or at least Hybrid EV’s you really need to teach your peeps some etiquette. Charging spots are to charge. Pure BEV’s while we are few really need to charge at these spaces. If you want to see more of these spaces as more cars hit the road the companies who provide the chargers need to see the revenue.

With more of these cars on  the road it will be you who won’t be able to charge. And while that may or may not matter to you since you have a backup engine I’ll bet it will. You will no longer be able to tout what great gas milage you get. Especially you Gen 1 owners. It will be because the charge companies don’t get enough revenue to support a charger. Will they have to resort to putting vending machines next to their chargers?

EV spots should be EV spots, not hybrid spots. While you usually don’t have enough capacity to get all your days charge at home and I do, when I need to charge on the road I’m not doing it because I want to, I’m doing it because I need to. Admittedly not all that often do I need to charge on the road but you need to move when your ten minutes are up.

When the EV becomes ubiquitous will the drives be as annoying as everybody on their smartphones in public?

I hate CNBC

Ok, it’s not just CNBC but pretty much all so called news outlets They don’t report news as much as sell you something.

I was on Yahoo.com doing some financial research on Tesla. While I’m looking at the research there is a video from CNBC with some talking heads and a so called expert from Garage Monkey  or some crazy name telling people that we will never give up our loud sounding big horsepower muscle cars. Or at least he won’t. We love the sound and the smell. Just look at how many classics are still around.

Well, yeah, there are lots of classics still around. In garages and museums. Unless you count the thousands that are rusted out and decaying in the barns and backyards of America. About the only place people still drive Classics everyday, Cuba. And I doubt that’s because they want to.

I remember the days of my youth riding in my fathers ’67 (maybe ’68) Dodge Charger. I remember what a cool car it was at the time. It was also a real piece of crap. It always had trouble starting and it didn’t have air conditioning . The sad part is I was to young to drive it. Had I drove it I surely would have never look at a classic ever.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s I got to drive classics like the Chevette, Chrysler K car, and Nova. There are more as I drove a lot of real junk back then. They sure didn’t make them any better. I can’t or don’t want to remember all those really bad cars of the day.

But like many folks in their late 40’s and feeling flush with cash after the market boom of the early 2000’s I went out and bought not just one but 2 classic cars. A 1967 Chevy Chevelle SS. Wow, what a cool car. Well not really. It would make a lot of noise and sounded really neat but it really drove like crap. It’s amazing people drove those things more than 10 miles a day even when they were new.

But being a glutton for punishment I bought a more luxurious classic car. A 1964 Chevy Impala. Also the SS version. This was a boat. I should have driven it before I bought but I got it sight unseen off eBay.

What these cars did most of the time was sit in my warehouse. I had to move them every time I got a delivery. After the market crashed in 2008 I decided they were just to much trouble to keep moving. They were so crappy that I never wanted to drive them. They were pretty to look at though. If I want to do that there are plenty of people who have them in garages all around me. My best friend has a 1964 Corvette sitting in his garage. He’s not a big fan of driving it either. He’s afraid that if he leaves it parked to get something to eat that someone might steal it or crash into it. It’s around 64k of wasted potential. While it keeps going up every year if he had taken the 22k he paid for it ten years ago and bought almost any decent stock it would be worth twice what it is now. And instead of parking his Kia Soul in the driveway he could fit it in the garage. That’s right, he’s driving a Kia Soul. At least when he doesn’t need his big Dodge Diesel for moving motorcycles everyday. He buys and sells them.

So as long as we are giving opinions, here are some of mine.

Just like people hated answering machines when they first came out or cellphones (the people who didn’t have one yet). The technology and price of the electric car gets more attractive every few years. It might take 10-20 years to get to the point where that’s what people want or can afford but there is no question that the technology is here and if automakers actually build them and sell them in every market people will buy them. As more people get them, more people will want what everybody else has. Just like the Navy Converted from Coal and Wood to Oil back in the day.

Used cars will hit the market as well. Just like some people wait for last years iPhone before they buy it there will be people buying 5-8 year old electric cars and loving them.

No buying gas. No oil changes. No filters to change. The scheduled maintenance is pretty much rotate the tires every 10,000 miles.

I have about 2000 miles on my Ford Focus Electric and there has only been one day where I was afraid to take it on the trip I had planned. If I had known I was going to be where I was for as long as I was it wouldn’t have been a problem. They had a charger there and in 2 hours I would have been good to go. I was there all night.

While todays ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars are really pretty good, O.K. really good they still burn gas. A product that we fight wars for. A product that we have no control over the pricing or production since most of it is imported. We use almost 80-90% more than we produce. And while people still debate if fossil fuels cause global warming there is no debate that they cause pollution. Oil spills cause catastrophic losses to wildlife and livelihoods.

Do we want to go back to the days where air pollution was so thick in many cities you couldn’t see more than a couple miles. Do we want Los Angeles or Chicago to look like Mexico City or Shanghai. Should we go back to the days where Lake Erie is dead and the rivers of Ohio burn when you light a match?

The price of gas in Phoenix is over $2.70 a gallon again. Up more than a dollar a gallon in less than 4 months. The cost of my electricity is down. At least between midnight and 5 AM. The electric company wants me to charge my car at night. They need people to use all that excess capacity that’s available at night when people are sleeping and the temps are cooler so the AC doesn’t run as much.

Another thing is there are no refineries in Phoenix using a ton of electricity to turn all that crude oil into gas. Yeah, it takes a lot of electricity to make a gallon of gas. Then it takes a lot of diesel to truck it to the gas station. Then it takes more electricity to pump it into your car.

Almost everybody in the U.S. now days has electricity already coming to their house. It doesn’t take any more modification to get it to your car than it does to hook up an RV.

The only reason I go to a gas station now is to buy a snack and use the washroom.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell (FCV) and Plug In Electric (PEV) meet in the Thunderdome

It occurs to me that the best answer is always the easiest answer or the “KISS” principle. Keep It Simple Stupid!

And the simplest answer, Electricity not Hydrogen. I’m sure most of you who follow my posts (all three of you) already new that but why.

Well lets look at all the Mad Max movies. OK, I haven’t seen the latest one yet but I doubt they are fighting over solar panels and wind farms. I doubt they are fighting for the last Tesla when you can drive a bitchin’ transformers type super truck with the latest fossil fuel burning super loud engine. We all find a growl to be better than a whine.

But lets look at the PEV supply chain in it’s perfect world. You have a few solar panels attached to a Tesla Power Wall. We only need the Tesla Power Wall because we plan on driving in the day, that day and every day. If not we could charge one day and drive the next. Or even use the car to run the house for a day or two we don’t plan to drive. And for those days there is no sun or places where there is no sun we could have a wind turbine as a backup. No need to fight over who makes “fuel” no having to run down to your closest Bartertown and fight the simpleton with the dwarf genius telling him how to fight.

And in the current civilized world we just plug in if we don’t have our own solar panels.It takes no more effort to plug in a car than an iPhone. I have my Ford Focus plugged in at night and pay just 5 cents per KWH. Today I drove 30 mile. Pretty much an average day. I used less than 10Kw or about 50 cents worth. In my Mazda 6 that would have been $2.60 at the current gas price. In the time I’ve had the Focus EV  there has only been one day a week where I chose to drive a Gas Burner over it. And I really don’t have to drive the other car. I just choose to do an activity that requires a car with a 200 mile range. I have to find reasons to justify keeping the ICE.

So now lets look at the Toyota FCV. After all, they are getting ready to roll it out real soon, or at least that’s what their website says.

You pick up the car and drive it around a bit, probably a lot since you are going to want to show your friends how cool you are. How cool the car is. And it is cool, looking. Even I will give them that one. But then so was the Betamax when it first came out. You make a youtube video or two and go home and park it in your garage. Now what? Well the coming apocalypse happens. Mad Max in San Francisco. You can’t just plug your car into your Tesla Wall Battery. You have to go find someone who can make you some hydrogen. It sounds like you are going to have to make that trip to Bartertown after all. LOL I hope you’re as buff as Mel Gibson 30 years ago and not in the same shape he is today. But odds are your about as buff as Bill Nye the Science Guy. I mean you did just lease a hydrogen car and not a Ford Raptor.

OK, the world didn’t come to an end but you do have to go out and buy fuel from somebody. In the beginning there will be only a few fuel stations where you can fill up. While Toyota will pay in the beginning what happens to the price in the future. And if you think it’s hard to find EVSE outlets on the road what are the odds the FCV ever makes it out of California without really and I mean really big subsidies from somebody. That is unless the Oil Companies really see these FCV cars catching on big time because they are cheaper than a Yugo.

Why is it that Government and most Private Industry don’t want to get behind the PEV?

Could it be because it’s really hard to tax a distributed energy model. Governments like things they can track and tax. They like putting the production in the hands of the few and regulating any thing they see as a threat to that model out of existence if one or a few of the law makers don’t own the technology. Solar power is like the moonshine of the power industry. The sun is cheap and abundant and shines on just about everybody at least 30% of the time. You can make electricity on the roof of your house and store it in your garage. And I will bet you they didn’t see Elon Musk coming. They thought Tesla and Solar City would never get passed the failure stage. Now he probably has them really worried.

In Arizona my Utility SRP has added a surcharge if you put up solar panels. They could offer to put them on my roof for me and charge accordingly like Solar City but they are stuck in their centralized distribution model where they can manipulate the prices. Where they try and control the supply or tax the “moonshine” coming in to my house. No stills for you. Think soup nazi when you say that.

And that, my friends, is what the car companies want to do as well. They want to build cars where you have to go to someone to buy your fuel. Where there is a supply chain model and you are just a consumer of their technology. Buy from a dealer. Service done by the dealer. Buy fuel from a “supplier”. Consumers are far more compliant than producers.

If you really think that the Mad Max scenario is a possibility you should be buying and electric car and putting up solar panels. You should be pushing for more solar and wind energy and greater government investment in it. Drilling for oil and fracking for gas will just prolong the dependence on the good will of others and the benevolence of corporations and government. You won’t need as much gold or have to buy as many bullets. After all, no self respecting bad guy is going to jack you for that nerdy electric car of yours. As long as you don’t have gas the’ll go on to the next guy to fill their Raptor.

And while we are at it. It’s probably not a bad idea to start building homes with grey water systems and water catchment containers as well. We have the knowledge and the means to build fairly self sufficient homesteads and cities. I digress, that is for another day.

Today is the day to start insisting that companies build enough electric cars that everyone in every city and state who wants them can buy them. That places stop putting restrictions or fees on adding solar power to the grid.

If they wan’t to develop Hydrogen for trucking or shipping then by all means go for it. But lets not kid people and try to convince them its better and cheaper than a battery electric vehicle. It’s not and it won’t be anytime soon. Electricity powers almost everything, except cars. If you don’t think so then just flip off you circuit breakers for a day or two. I’ll bet many of you wouldn’t even know how to get your car out of the garage if that happened. Go somewhere there has been a hurricane or tornado. Try to get gas pumped or use your credit card to buy something. No electricity means no business.

Let’s go all in on electric. This is where Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of today. Lets not take 20 years to figure this one out.

Here are some links to videos I find that support my case.

http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall

FullyChargedShow BMW i8

Toyota Mirai

Boy was I wrong says the USA Today

The other day I posted about how Americans wont be fooled again, buying gas guzzling SUV’s because fuel prices are at a relative historic low, as are wages.

But instead of being proven right I read an article just days later that we are not buying hybrids or high gas milage vehicles but once again the sales of SUV’s are on the rise in the  April 22 USA Today “Earth Day or not, hybrids take a hit”.

The article states that many electric or hybrid owners are less likely to trade their current vehicles in for another hybrid but would get an SUV instead.

The article goes on to say that “For better or worse, it looks like many hybrid and EV owners are driven more by financial motives rather than a responsibility to the environment,” says edmunds.com Director of Industry Analysis.

Although the impact on the environment does have a cost though we choose not to quantify it. It’s an unaccounted for externality that makes the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) Vehicles look cheaper than they actually are.

I question who the sample size or who these vehicle owners are.  Just a look around the streets and highways of Phoenix, Arizona (where I live) you will see lots of hybrids. And many of those are older cars from the first generation Prius as well.

From the looks of things, hybrid owners don’t replace their cars that often. In the last year, as well, I have seen many new model (2014+) hybrids on the road. My mother just bought one, a 2015 Prius V. So in my opinion, any car company that forgoes hybrids and BEV’s or PHEV’s and builds lots of SUV’s is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past that allowed Japanese car makers to take much of the US market share that they retain to this day.

As long as car makers let fuel prices decide what they build instead of sound long term strategies the shortsighted idea of current fuel prices staying low forever will lead car makers off the cliff of bankruptcy over and over.

Efficient cars should lead fuel prices lower instead of low fuel prices leading to cars that consume more fuel which has historically lead to higher fuel prices.

Innovation leads to success. Henry Ford was an auto industry innovator. Maybe the last one. Why? Because many of the innovations of the auto industry in the last 50 years were forced on them by regulation. Seat Belts, MPG requirements just to name a couple biggies. For the most part the auto industry is like your grand parents. Dragged into the next century kicking and screaming if they don’t die first.

The article also states that GM has temporarily halted production of the Volt. Well, considering they announced that next year they will have the Volt 2.0 that’s going to be significantly better, who’s going to pay full price for last years technology. They might as well keep dropping the price till the last buyer wants it so cheap it makes more sense to donate them to a charity for the tax break.

People who can pay full price for an iPhone don’t go running out once the timeframe for the new iPhone is near. Which is why Steve Jobs kept the next big thing a big secret till it was ready for sale.

And while car dealers give rebates and incentives on last years model all the time cars like the Volt will be much more sensitive to new model announcements. Many of the people buying these cars want the latest and greatest tech. This will also become more common on all cars as things like blind spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control and a host of many other technologies become more prevalent in cars of all trim levels.

The USA Today article also talks about dismal sales of Plug in Toyota hybrids being down 61%. That might have something to do with the fact that it’s hard to find one on a dealers lot if you don’t live in a CARB State.

Toyota only sold their Rav4 EV in California. Yet I personally know 3 people who bought one and brought it back to Arizona. They love that SUV. Even though it’s sort of a bastardized RAV4.

Honda only sold their Fit EV in AZ for a very short time and then only leased them. And then discontinued making then shortly there after.

I’m not sure car dealers like EV’s much, especially BEV’s as they require so little maintenance. A large profit center for dealers.

When I was car shopping with my mother earlier this year their were no plug in Prius’s to be found in Arizona. How can someone buy one when dealers don’t have them to sell?

And when I went shopping for my Ford Focus Electric (FFE), you couldn’t find any of those in Arizona either. At least  The dealers sold them all 20 minutes after they hit the lot. I had to go to California to buy mine. And the economics made sense. And they still make sense as gas prices are actually 15% higher than the day I bought it. The price of gas would have to go to 70 cents a gallon to equal the price of electricity per mile. And since most of the electricity produced at night is from nuclear the amount of carbon per mile is much lower.

The tags in AZ for the equivalent Ford Focus are $500 for the first year. The cost of the tags for my Focus, $60 for 5 years. Access to the HOV lane. I would say you can’t put a price on that but you actually can. There are people who can no longer get a HOV access plate with a new hybrid car who are leasing plates from prior Prius owners for $1000 per year.

If people are buying SUV’s and trading in their hybrids it has nothing to do with the economics. It has more to do with the emotions.

Hybrids for the most part are pretty boring and very utilitarian. The Toyota Prius does make a great Taxicab though. It has a very large back seat with lots of legroom.

The fact that hybrids are so boring is why Tesla is so successful. Their cars, while quite expensive are actually fun to drive. They don’t handle like a box truck. They aren’t the bottom of the line trim levels. But the VW Golf E, The Kia Soul E and Ford Focus E are actually very nice cars as well and at the top trim levels can be had for less than 30k after the tax credit.

Had Ford not dropped the price of the FFE to 32k and the dealer not also dropped another 2k off the price I would have probably bought a Volkswagen Golf Electric. Another car maker who chose to go top of the line trim instead of bottom of the line trim. Just like the FFE. That’s what swayed me away from the Leaf. In order to have the price make sense the only Leaf would have been the S or bottom trim level.

One other thing car makers need to do, not just in their EV vehicles but all vehicles is stop selling expensive Nav packages with old useless tech. Almost everybody today has a smartphone. All they need to do is put the necessary interfaces for people to use their smartphones. At least Tesla chose to make their tech an improvement on current display tech vs using 3 or 4 year old tech in the average new car.

Like 15 or 20 years ago nobody new they wanted let alone needed a smartphone and that they would become as ubiquitous as watches were just 20-70 years ago. In 10-20 years the Electric Vehicle that primarily drives itself, will be the new iPhone. All it takes is some leadership and vision from an industry that has a dismal track record of predicting the future.

Elon Musk will be seen as the next Steve Jobs but just like Apple it took companies like Google, Samsung and LG to join in on the road to the future we now know. Maybe it’s time those companies take their huge stockpiles of cash and start building cars while the current car companies fade into the sunset and stop perpetuating the myth that bring hydrocarbons is good for the planet.

While GM got it’s bailout, like Chrysler before it, this will probably not be the last time we see a big automaker in need of a financial lifeline. It’s time they stopped being pretending to be experts. The last thing they need to do is build the next Hummer. If they can’t lead they need to follow or just get the hell out of the way.

This time if we support innovators with the bailout money instead we can transform our society into the future sooner rather than later.

Are you in charge of an airport parking lot? Or any parking lot.

Parking at the airport

Parking at the airport

This is the employee parking lot at the airport where I work.

It might be a little little hard looking at it but can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?

Well, for starters the space I’m parked in has a sign that says you can only park here for 72 hours. The space opposite says the same thing. The next two spaces adjacent to me and also opposite of them have 10 hour parking limits on them.

So lets start there. As a pilot I can be gone for up to 4 days at a time. Yet the limitations on the space are 3 days, not four. Another thing you might notice is that I’m the only EV parked there. Now I’m being a bit unfair with that statement because when I took this picture the spaces had just opened up. There is also special parking for Hybrid and Electric Vehicles in a  parking garage at the terminal. Probably not for long though as these spaces are very new. At the other garage there are no charging stations. This parking lot is far away and nobody wants to park here. It’s not covered and it’s not protected. It should also have lots of solar panels as this is the desert. But that’s another issue. Then you could charge all the EV’s you wanted to for free.

But lets get back to the other problems with the picture above. My car and most EV’s don’t take days to charge. Generally only hours. From 2-18 depending on the amperage of the charger.

The best way to install Car Charging Stations.

The best way to install Car Charging Stations.

My vehicle only took 3 hours to charge since when I parked there I was half way charged already. So now I’m there just taking up valuable real estate for another 2-3 days while somebody else could be using it. Had they placed the chargers like this picture at Target, when I was done charging someone else could park next to me and take over the plug I was using.

 

The next issue. The odds of all the 10 hour spaces getting used here are pretty slim. There should be far more 72 hour spaces than 10 hour spaces. Most of the folks working at the Burger King are not going to have Electric Vehicles. Hybrids maybe. Most of the people parking here are going to be Flight Crew. That will change in the future as the price of EV’s comes down but right now EV’s are generally second vehicles and the median family income of EV owners is 100k a year.

Another thing you should do as an Airport Parking Manager is make the spaces next to the ev-carsregular electrical outlets in the parking garages EV only spaces. Most of us have the equipment to plug in our cars just like all the people in the airport who plug in their cell phones and laptops. And over the course of the 3-4 days we are on a trip our cars would charge up in plenty of time for when we return. If my car was on empty when I got to the airport it would only take 15-18 hours to charge off a 100v outlet. A Tesla on empty would take maybe 36 hours.

While I do appreciate what you are doing for the EV community by installing these chargers, there is no question you could do more for less.

It doesn’t take a lot of money to make your business or workplace EV Friendly

Maybe you have been told that you need to install expensive charging equipment to charge Plug in Vehicles. You see these charging stations many places now days. They cost about $3000 each plus installation.Blink Chargers in front of a business

Notice that there is only one charge station per space. This is actually a big waste of resources. If you are going to install chargers like this you should place them where they can reach at least two spaces or if it’s not to expensive to run the wiring to place them where they are accessible to up to four spaces at once. Like the picture below.

The best way to install Car Charging Stations.

The best way to install Car Charging Stations.

Some cars may only need 30-minutes to an hour to charge and others may need 2-3 hours. If these were at a mall one driver might be getting coffee while another might be seeing a movie. By putting the charger where more than one vehicle could access it the movie goer might be charged before the movie is over and another driver could unplug and start charging their vehicle.

A portable charger for an electric vehicle.

A portable charger for an electric vehicle.

 

But why install expensive equipment when all many EV’s need is a plug. Many of us have our own portable charging equipment like the picture to the right.

Most if not all Electric Vehicles come with a portable charging cord and adapter. Most if not all work on standard 110v power outlets.  The one you see here has been upgraded to not only use 110v power but 220v as well. So if your business has a standard power outlet or can install a 220v outlet or two near a parking space or two, you are now an EV Friendly workplace or business.

RV Plug Enclosure

RV Plug Enclosure

You can buy an outlet and waterproof enclosure like this at Home Depot for as little as $60 and they can be installed for as little as $100 in many cases.

Save the money on the expensive bling (sorry, Blink) and let your employees or customers charge for free. Let your EV customers know that you have a plug and they will more thank likely spend more time and money at your establishment.

Another thing you can do is if you have 110v outlets scattered around your parking lot, designate the spaces near them as EV Spaces. Just like you see people at the airport plugging in their laptops and cell phones to the nearest outlet, EV cars would be able to do the same thing. And at the speed a 110v outlet charges they will be spending far more than the 25 cents an hour or so in electricity they might be using. Even if you let them charge on a 20-30amp 220volt outlet the most it would cost is about $2.50to fully charge the vehicle.  If you sell high ticket items or even charge $20-30 for an average meal the extra business you would get would be worth the expense of catering to the EV market.

EV driver are also among the top earners. Even hybrid drivers are usually far above median income earners. This is a pretty good customer base for any business.