ElectricMotorcycleForum.com
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Richard230 on January 21, 2014, 10:13:10 PM
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According to an article published in my newspaper yesterday written by Dana Hull of mercurynews.com, Silicon Valley workers who own EV's are fighting with each other over work place charging stations. In particular the German software company SAP had installed 16 EV charging stations at their Palo Alto campus in 2010. At that time only a few of their workers owned electric vehicles. Now there are 61 EV owners and they are all fighting over the 16 charging stations. These disagreements include pointed emails to owners who's cars have completed charging asking them to move so someone else can charge there. Other workers are pulling the plug on cars that seem to have already recharged. Actions like this have been given the name "charge rage".
SAP is now drafting charging guidelines for its EV-driving employees. SAP's Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf, says that "If you want to attract the best people and top talent, EV charging is a must-have. It's a recruitment tool". ChargePoint believes that there should be at least one charging station for every two EV owning employees. CEO Pat Romano is quoted as saying that "If you don't maintain a 2-to-1 ratio, you are dead. Having two chargers and 20 electric cars is worse than having no chargers and 20 electric cars. If you are gong to do this, you have to be willing to continue to scale it."
The article goes on to mention that Yahoo has more than 100 EV owners and they fight over the limited number of chargers regularly. A former Yahoo worker said that he pulled the plug on a Chevy Volt so that he could plug in this BMW Active E - leading to a very upset Volt owner who blasted him with email messages.
Infoblox has 260 employees at its HQ in Santa Clara, of which 27 have plug-in cars, but the company only has 6 charging stations. To deal with this problem they have created an "EV user" distribution list, as well as a shared calendar for managing charging slots. Using the company's Outlook system, you can only book a 2-hour window for using a company charging station. "But Rule No. 1 is: No one touches anyone else's car without permission", according to Infoblox's VP of marketing, David Gee (and the owner of a Tesla Model S). No mater what your employee classification is in the company, everyone has the same rights to use a charging station. Mr. Gee says: "It's a highly egalitarian community. Public shaming is the best motivator."
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This is so funny, I did copy it and post it on the tesla sight- hope you good with that ;)
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This is so funny, I did copy it and post it on the tesla sight- hope you good with that ;)
Fine with me. I was only tying to summarize the article in my newspaper, the San Mateo County Times, a publication of the Mercury News, which owns most of the newspapers in the SF Bay Area. I am surprised that all of the Tesla and Leaf owners in Silicon Valley have not already read this article and are chatting about it. ;)
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I am so glad that Zero can "sit this out" by having a default standard outlet option. There are enough outlets in our parking garage that I don't see such a thing happening to me for years.
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For commuter applications, especially for two wheels, 110v makes a lot of sense. It's cheap to deploy - if not already deployed - and works with lots of things besides EVs.
8 hours of charging on 110v can push out ~ 12 kWh, which is 50 miles of range on a four wheeled vehicle or 100 miles of range on a motorcycle.
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For many electric cars a 110V electric outlet would be useful, but they need to be located where they are useful. We are nowhere near having that issue on the East coast, but we're trying to develop that problem as quickly as possible!
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One of the great things about motorcycles is that they use less energy. A standard wall outlet works fine when commuting on a Zero.
Just one more reason why motorcycles are better than cars.
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Totally agree. I sure would like to have an electric car but the EV bikes have so many advantages!
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I'm the only person at my company with an electric car so far, so when my employer agreed to let me charge at work I made sure to set a good president. I purchased the 220v charger, they paid for installation and electricity, so that's my charger. If someone else gets an electric car and wants to charge here can either ask me to share, or purchase their own.
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Great to see the charging points are in demand but this is terrible publicity for EV's. As if it wasnt hard enough convincing people to ditch gas without the possibility of being unable to drive home because you couldn't get a charge at work.
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When I first started riding, I had issues at some places charging, so I would just ride my bike into the office, up the elevator, drive through the office area and plug it in on the balcony... beauty of an elmoto!
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When I first started riding, I had issues at some places charging, so I would just ride my bike into the office, up the elevator, drive through the office area and plug it in on the balcony... beauty of an elmoto!
Gutsy! ;D