This is gonna need a guy overseeing the cars being charged right? And so cutting on the profits/ROI of the whole thing, which is the only thing walmarts and stuff actually care about
I’m not familiar with the yank method of gasoline pumps where you charge yourself and then pay, ¿what stops you from just fleeing with a full tank?
In New Jersey a guy has to charge your car for you and you have to stand there the whole time
That’s how Argentina works too.
Freddos together stronk
You really can’t get away with gas runs anymore. Clerks no longer turn the pumps on with no reserve limit. Either go inside, hand them cash up front, or pre-authorization with your card before the pump will pump gas.
I used to do gas runs religiously back when I was a teenager in the nineties. I’m a very small part of why pumps no longer get turned on, on ahead of payment. Sorry for party rocking.
Saw one in West VA a few month back, little old lady at the counter with a handful of trump flags strewn inside and outside the store. Still paid because I’m cucked
You have to give your card to the pump up front. They precharge you $1 and then retroactively change the charge to whatever you pumped after you’re done. You can’t just pump and run. EV charging currently works the same way (I think), but a lot of variable priced transactions work that way as well, where you are pre-charged up front as a validation method and means of capturing your information to charge you later. For these cars, they likely cut off once you’re car reports it’s fully charged. You don’t need someone to watch these.
One thing I think is funny about all this though, is this idea that I need to charge my car at Walmart. My ICE car gets almost 400 miles (ca. 644 km) to a tank of gas (it’s from 2015). A lot of modern EVs come very close to getting that much mileage now on a single charge. Rivian gets 410–420 miles with the “max” package. The BYD Denza Z9 GT gets about 600 miles (965.61 km) on a single charge and the Atto 3 (EVO) get around 300 miles (ca. 483 km) on a single charge. Teslas are anywhere from 300 to 400 miles (643.74 km) depending on the model. I can’t “charge” my ICE car at home, but you can charge all of these cars every time you return home. The idea that, in your day-to-day life, every time you stop at a place of business you’ll be charging your car, is frankly ridiculous. It’s not an expectation of ICE cars, and I see no reason why it should be an expectation of electric cars. The charging times are only going to go down in time. The range is also only going to go up in time. In many cases, charging is more ideal to do off peak-hours which is in the evening, especially in places that have a variable rate for electricity.
I’m an EV owner in an apartment with no charging…
About to head to the grocery store with chargers now for my weekly shopping and charge. Works for me.
Don’t get me wrong I wish I could charge at home it’d be half as cheap or more. But still better than gas.
It’s good if you’re like an apartment dweller or traveling, not every trip begins and ends at home, and not everyone has a charger. Especially ones that can charge a 400mi battery, that’s 240V high amperage special wiring you gotta get done that will costs hundreds. Public charging is cool and good, the tragedy is this stuff is privatized. The back of truck solution is actually pretty neat
You don’t need a level 2 charger (the 240V dedicated circuit) for home charging, a regular outlet will do fine unless you’re driving that whole 400mi every single day.
If you’re charging at 120V 15A which is a typical home circuit you’re probably pulling 12A getting 1.44 kW or say 14.5 kWh on a 10 hour overnight charge.
The current TSLA battery pack of 82 kWh gets you 400 mi, so that 10hr charge at 120 is good for ~70 miles which probably covers most people’s daily usage patterns.
It’s really only an issue if you have to travel somewhere
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
They precharge you $1
Amount depends on the gas station because sometimes I get a $200 preauthorization hold other times it’s $75 or lower
As for the charging at Walmart, it’s probably a way to extract value from idle/excess parking lot capacity
Edit: not everyone can easily charge at home either. There are lots of apartment complexes around here near the local Walmart just installed chargers which compete with the Tesla chargers down the road
Remembering the recent “Technology Connections” video, I think the goal of Destination Charging is to charge slowly which makes it cheaper for some reason IIRC,
So this would allow people without a home garage to charge their car cheaper than a fast charge station. Also would allow people who do have a home garage but don’t have a medium speed charger infrastructure (which actually allows them to charge their cars overnight to completion) to top their batteries while their car is sitting useless outside their homes.
I always wondered what’s stopping someone from getting a disposable visa card, running it down to like ~$5, then filling up their card.
Used to do it to vending machines when I was in college but it only worked on a couple out of the dozens I’ve tried
At charging stations you usually have to auth with an app and provide a credit card before the thing unlocks the plug or flows power. This part is pretty straight forward.
Same thing with the gas pumps you roll up, tap or swipe your credit card then it unlocks the pump and lets it flow gas. The thing isn’t always on.
People jacking the power cords is the biggest risk but it’s the same at like a Tesla supercharger or whatever. In practice it doesn’t happen much.
I think the charging cables themselves are way more of a risk than the cars themselves (at least from Walmart’s perspective). Those cables have a lot of copper in them and it’s easier to steal those than the cars, and they’re balls-deep in surveillance tech so they’ll probably do the thing where they let people do it enough until they reach felony levels and then send the cops after them.
USA gas pumps get unlocked at the cashier so you ask them and pre-pay there or at the pump through a credit card. Then you get to watch ads while you’re pumping gas
Hmm, so they are deffinitely gonna need a guy watching over the cars being charged. The cable cords are part of the cars right?
There are tens of thousands of charger cables sitting out unprotected around the country as we speak. I roam the highways at night, charge my car in random lonely places, I’ve almost never encountered cut cables, maybe once or twice in ten years of driving EVs.
I could see Walmart charge cables being a unique situation that attracts more criminals than usual but honestly they already have unsupervised Electricify America fast chargers at Walmarts all over the country and to my knowledge there’s no epidemic of cable theft keeping people from using the chargers
No, the cords are part of the charging station, and I’ve never seen a charging station with an attendant.
The car has a port that the station’s cable plugs into, and then most electric cars are able to lock the port so that the cable can’t be unplugged except by the driver.
cars are able to lock the port so that the cable can’t be unplugged except by the driver.
Aah nice
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
