Public or at-work EV charging & the coming wave of EV's

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reikiman
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Public or at-work EV charging & the coming wave of EV's

I had an interesting experience driving my car to work today. My day job is at Yahoo and there is EV parking in the employee parking lot. It's on the 2nd floor of the garage and events have worked out such that a flock of hybrid car owners have decided those spots are for them. Presumably the lack of EV's using the EV parking meant the hybrid owners began to believe they were qualified to use those spots. I saw the same thing happen at my prior employer (Sun) where I was the only EV owner using the EV parking and often other people would use the EV parking.

In any case - I already know that to use the EV parking I have to get there before 9:00 AM which is (ahem) an uncommon hour of the morning for a software engineer to show up at work ... This morning I didn't show up until 9:30ish and the spots were full with hybrid cars. Except for the spot next to them which is marked "IT Only" and I'd noted at other times electric NEV truck would be parked there. So that's where I parked. I badly needed to plug in because somehow I barely made it to work.

That set off a chain of talking with people which isn't finished yet. I left a note on my car explaining why I'd parked there. I left notes on the hybrid cars explaining that they do not own electric vehicles. I contacted the security people about EV parking and the supervisor understood the situation very well. And he gave me the name of Yahoo's transportation coordinator.

The security guy says he'll be arranging a pylon at one of the parking spots saying it is reserved for me (and including my name on the thing). That's wonderful, that if it works out I'll have my own parking spot, and maybe the hybrid car owners will get some education.

The bigger issue is that - in the fall there will be electric cars being sold by several car companies (Nissan, Wheego, Coda, GM, etc). This issue will come up at companies around the country as their employees start buying these cars. In the SF Bay Area there are old EV charging stations left over from the mandate era 10 years ago, but those charging stations are incompatible with the charging ports on the new electric cars. This means the companies will need to buy new charging equipment and it's unclear that companies will do so.

I'd written an article about this last fall: Planning for the coming wave of electric vehicles that was mostly about local SF Bay Area governments but the issue is going to be faced by companies too.

MikeB
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Re: Public or at-work EV charging & the coming wave of EV's

My office complex put in a bicycle rack near the entrance to our parking deck, last fall I believe. It took a few months, but most of the motorcycles that parked in the deck slowly migrated to parking in front of this bicycle rack, since it was a very convenient spot. Last week, lo and behold, an actual bicycle was observed to be locked to the rack! There's a few cyclists that take their bike up to their office, but I have no objection to giving the cyclists first claim to the bicycle rack if they want to park outside.

No charging outlets in my parking deck yet, and fortunately I've got more than enough battery range not to need them. However, It'll be interesting to see if they put some in in the coming years (and to see who migrates to start using the spaces near them).

Oh, and congrats on the reserved space. :)

My electric vehicle: CuMoCo C130 scooter.

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