Once you can charge up your ride anywhere, what happens?
Click above for more shots of the Vectrix electric scooter
There's an interesting line in a recent TIME magazine piece about a guy who's enjoying his new Vectrix scooter. Here it is:
Once you start looking, you find plugs everywhere," says [James] Morrison, who charges his two-wheeler at parking garages, outside Starbucks stores and even in gas-station parking lots.
Even though utilities are doing a lot of work on the smart grid, it'll take years, and this presents quite a window for people with plug in vehicles. If you've got the money for an EV today, you can afford the juice to move it, but that line made me think of a few questions for our readers:
Will property owners need to start locking up their plugs to stop EV leeches? Do you think businesses might start advertising "free electricity while you shop" offers to EV drivers? Would you plug your EV into any outlet you could find, just to drive for free or would you talk to the shop owner about paying a few bucks to plug in for an hour or three?
[Source: TIME]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
James 7:50PM (11/13/2008)
Wonderful, I am now an EV leech. :-)
I was the person quoted in that article. What the article left out is that our parking garages have EV parking spaces and outlets available for those people. We also have permission to use the outlets outside of the coffee store as long as we are customers.
I ask for permission to use an electrical outlet whenever possible. Nobody has ever said no. Most people are excited to see an actual EV.
In time I think businesses will compete by offering free recharging to customers who shop at their stores. The cost of the electricity is very small. For the Vectrix or Hymotion Prius, it is less than 10 cents per hour to be plugged in.
www.peakoilgarage.com
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Sebastian 12:23PM (11/14/2008)
Hi James. Sorry to imply you were an EV leech. I didn't, because I don't know your situation. I just thought that your comment made a good point that there are a lot of outlets available. This is great for the PHEV/BEV makers, because it means the infrastructure is already in place. But it also could open up new problems - or opportunities, as I mentioned.
ram 8:54PM (11/13/2008)
This is going too far. Without knowing the scale of the actual cost, you are berating the person. It probably costs less than a $0.25 to charge the batteries that the scooter has and it does not make a big difference to anyone especially the garges with so much electricity that is consumed. If he was charging from a private entity without telling them then you may have a remote point.
May be you just get kicks at looking at a story and finding something wrong wtih it. You could have made a point in a better way.
Just immature of you on how you look at this thing.
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Paul 9:21PM (11/13/2008)
Some major retail business are already starting to get on the 'free charge' bandwagon.
In Sydney Australia there are informal agreements with some Woolworth supermarkets and Westfield shopping malls that allow free charging of EVs in their car parks using power outlets that were, in most cases, already there.
Isn't this how petrol stations became so widespread 100 years ago when corner stores and auto mechanics installed fuel tanks and bowsers to attract more traffic?
The major PLUS point being that every building in the western world has AC power while only fuel stations have fuel systems. Sounds like a no brainer!
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ian 10:02PM (11/13/2008)
In interior Alaska, where you pretty much need to keep heaters on your car plugged in all the time you aren't driving if you want to be able to drive all winter, you see many private lots with a profusion of outlets. Public lots tend to have none. If you want to go to the movies in winter, you are going to damage your engine to do so. (Either that or you leave the car running) Granted, electricity there is significantly pricier than in most parts of the US. But that's just at most 6 small heaters (usually 2-4), of a couple hundred watts each. When you're replacing the car's fuel with some business's electricity, it's a bit more significant.
You're not going to see most businesses offering "free electricity while you shop" unless electricity gets a lot cheaper.
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Andy 7:53PM (11/14/2008)
If the electricity costs are more than the gain in business, the owner would want to cut it out.
If EV's get more commonplace and businesses have to offer free charging to compete. They will have to limit the Kwh drawn. Current limiting devices or something.
There will always be see some joker with a truck load of batteries trying to suck the blood out of businesses.
ian 10:08PM (11/14/2008)
Unless electricity gets a lot cheaper, or we're talking about businesses with really large margins and really strong competition (AFAIK, there are not many of those), it is GOING to cost more than it is worth.
Any place where you could expect someone to stay for more than an hour, it would benefit the customer if the business provided outlets for engine heaters in Alaska. But they don't. And that is less power than charging a car would be.
What I'm saying is that there already is an example, maybe multiple examples (how many other regions get cold enough...-20F or colder...long enough...weeks or months at a time...to require one to have heaters?) of a very similar situation, which has been in existence for decades. The state that has arisen from this situation is one of no outlets for cars.
The differences with electric cars are that instead of causing wear and tear by not plugging the car in, you run out of energy and it stops running. In the short term, more inconvenient, in the long term, less. And they require more electricity than do engine heaters (I'm pretty sure it should be several times more. Assume a kilowatt for the engine heaters, and assume the electric car puts out 50 horsepower while you're driving it, and you've got a little over twice the power to charge a car for 60 miles of driving (at 60 mph) (I'm making a lot of assumptions here), compared to plugging a car in for 14 hours.
Unless you can charge the drivers for it, it you're not going to see a profusion of outlets in every parking lot. It'll only be the ones where you HAVE to have it.
James 10:22PM (11/13/2008)
"You're not going to see most businesses offering "free electricity while you shop" unless electricity gets a lot cheaper."
The real cost of having your electric vehicle plugged in for an hour is about 10 cents. My Hymotion Prius pulls about 1,000 watts while charging.
That is not a significant amount of money. I think many businesses would be eager to attract customers with the offer of a "free recharge" if you shop at Best Buy. It would be like having your parking validated.
If someone is spending $300 on groceries, I could easily envision the different grocery stores offering free recharging to attract business. It is like a coffee store offering free internet access so that you buy coffee and a danish.
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gorr 10:49PM (11/13/2008)
Did you think about the accidents it may cause...
Pedestrians falling down on the asphalt while didn't see the electric cable. Rain and electrochocs from used electric cable. Fire hazard in deficient electrical installation in old building. Kids playing with electric cable. Other electrical users discharging your battery for recharging them.
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James 11:31PM (11/13/2008)
gorr, I am not sure whether to laugh at your weak attempts to make a joke or cry about how far we still need to go to explain this to the masses.
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tim 9:38AM (11/14/2008)
This revolution will lead to evolution. Future external electrical plugs may come in locking or non-locking types just like gas caps for ICE cars.
There are two ways to look at it:
1) If there is no lock, that plug is a public site and the charging is "on the house".
2) If there is no sign stating that the plug is available for public charging, then it is PRIVATE property and plugging-in there is stealing.
Opinions vary.
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Stan Wellaway 9:44AM (11/14/2008)
Bars and restaurants - providing a one hour or two hour charge depending how big a meal you buy. They are not going to lose out by offering that.
Hotels offering an overnight charge as part of the room tarriff.
Leisure centres letting you recharge while you are in the gym or in the pool.
Shopping malls and out-of-town stores offering free charging if you spend more than 100 dollars.
Churches offering free electricity while attending a service (with a reading from r-EV-elation)
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bill 10:12AM (11/14/2008)
Correct me if I am wrong (being male that is most of the time), but very little is really free. If businesses offer "free" electricity to plug in hybrid owners the rest of us plus the plug in hybrid owners will be paying for this "free" service via higher prices. Funny how that works.
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Dutch 1:03PM (11/14/2008)
Maybe and maybe not. Perhaps it's just moved from one column to the other in the marketing budget (we're already paying for). Wouldn't it be great if a retailer sent one less piece of direct mail to pay for "free" charging at its retail sites - win/win!
Dutch