jray3 said:
I'll give Vike a hearty second and differ a bit with Joe. I use DCFC close to home a couple of times per week, enabling most Saturdays with the Family Circus to exceed 100 miles, and a double-dip commute twice per week, when my wife heads out for the graveyard shift after i arrive home. That's a minimum 87 mile day.
Thanks jray! Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about - upgrading your 85% solution to a 99% solution.
jray3 said:
I've pushed back against Aerovironment's pricing plan, quoted below. The $20/mo unlimited subscription is a bad deal for occasional users, and the $7.50 single charge fee is way too hi for an i. They could've fixed it with pay-by-the-minute DCFC (which costa about 8 cents for a minute at 50 kW around here, but I'd gladly pay 25 cents). Instead, they're gaming the situation....
There is also the option of paying per session:
$7.50/Session – DC Fast Charger
$4.00/Session – Level 2 Charging Station
(Per session payment is only available by calling our Customer Service Support Line at 888-833-2148).
.
I'm not inclined to be overly generous in my interpretation of corporate motives, but I'm not really troubled by $7.50/session for QC. I'd love to have that option at that price in northern New Mexico, even if I'd rarely use it. A reasonable QC network between Albuquerque and Santa Fe would greatly increase the utility of EVs for potential buyers in both cities, which are inconveniently slightly more than EV range apart, but are each otherwise quite compact and EV friendly. Quite seriously, just half a dozen strategically located stations would make a world of difference to the area.
Thing is, if these stations aren't profitable they won't be built, and straight $/kWh isn't at all a fair measure of value, not least because that would be "reselling electricity", a practice that's somehow earned the status of a Crime Against Nature in most states. But even ignoring such idiocy, there's a world of difference to the grid operator between 15kWh drawn over 5 hours and 15kWh drawn over 20 minutes, and you can bet they're going to make you feel their pain with standby fees and the like. I don't know what the fix for this is, but we need to be reasonable in understanding what it means for an appliance to show up on the grid and demand 25-50kW for 15-30 minutes
right now.
"Fine for you," one might say, "but I'd actually use this often enough that $7.50/session would get kinda silly - I'd be spending more per mile than I would have on gasoline!" But then (and again, I'm no Aerovironment fan here, just sayin') if that's your situation and you'd be averaging more than 3 sessions per month (you mention using QC a couple of times a week), why wouldn't $20/mo. "all you can eat" work for you? It is indeed a bad deal for occasional/infrequent users (like me
), but they can pay for the convenience of having QC available when they need it with that $7.50 charge, which helps pay the freight for having that standby capacity available for random non-subscribers.
What troubles me a lot more than the $7.50 charge is the need to call an operator and have them remotely enable the QC for my use. This strikes me as highly unreliable, not to mention moronically inconvenient, since I'm sure this means I'll have to read my credit card over the phone (hey Aerovironment, the 1980s just called your 800 number to say they want their customer interface back!). At the very least, they should allow for non-subscribing "registered users" who are willing to pay the $15 service fee for an AV keyfob, then have their registered credit card billed on a per-use basis. It would be better still if they'd just process credit card transactions at the charger like a gas pump, but due to the current confusion following the Target CC debacle, I'd be willing to give 'em a pass on that until our antiquated mag-strip cards are phased out in favor of true smart cards over the next couple of years.
