Hurley82
Member
The tech is in place on many ev’s to stop them from being unplugged. Also 95% of the time public chargers are irrelevant assuming you have the ability to charge at home and aren’t constantly road tripping.I agree 100%, in my small-ish town there are only 5 public chargers and 4 of them belong to dealers. I don't have my 4XE yet, but I can't imagine the Toyota dealer will simply let me plug in my Jeep for a couple of hours. The one public one is downtown, but the location is a bit odd - we have some cool little restaurants down there and a neat little round-a-bout and square, where a public charger could go, but nope; they put it like a block and a half away at some open lot thing. I can't imagine it gets used a lot.
On the other hand, we went to Hawaii for a vacation where I rented a 4XE Rubi. They had several chargers at the mall there, HOWEVER finding an open one was a real joke. The vast majority were occupied by Tesla's who seemed to stay parked there all day and if it wasn't a Tesla it was some other car like a Chevy Bolt or something, that would also be parked there all day (or the chargers were broke down, which seemed to be quite common). People had speculated that it was employees who parked there since most were closer to the entrances and in one case, I saw the same car there every day and every time I drove by.
The infrastructure is obviously the first step, can't charge if there ain't no chargers, but there is also a cultural/respect thing as well - not unlike the tragedy of the commons - where people don't need to hog the chargers all day just to use the closer parking space. What is the appropriate protocol if someone's vehicle is charged? Do you go up and remove the charger? Reminds me of washing my clothes in the college dorm, people would toss your wet clothes on the floor to use the washer - I would be pissed if I was charging my Jeep and some D-bag unplugged mine because they feel like they need the charger more. This will become a MAJOR issue if we don't use some kind of tech to help this out - there will be fights, if there haven't been already...
Sponsored