What would you pay to use a public charger?

2012 pip arriving by 04/19,
i'd like to pay by the minute. assuming 3 hours for full charge, i'm expecting .33 at home based on .10/kwh. so, about a penny for 5 minutes?
i'd be willing to pay the equivelent of the price of gas just for the convenience and ability to keep driving electric.
i don't go that many places for a long enough time so probably wouldn't use it much.
sorry if this was too long!

 

Electricity is very cheap, and the cost of parking is much higher than the cost of the electricity. If I operated a $7.00/hour parking lot with 100 stalls that were 80% full, I can't see an economic incentive in paying for installation PLUS losing those spots to ordinary customers.

A better model might be to charge for it as a premium parking spot, at maybe a 33% premium.

A Prius gets only 11-15 EV miles on a full charge. When I park, it might not even need a full charge, but a full charge is the equivalent of about 1/8 gallon of gas -- around sixty cents, **if** my battery is depleted. I might pay a dollar for a charge, at most.

The Leaf is a different deal, because it wont run without electricity. It has 6.5 times the electric range of a Prius, so a full charge is worth a few dollars. If I stayed in a hotel that charged it for me overnight, I could see them adding $5-$10 to the parking fee for a Leaf, but more than that is price gouging.

 

Since you went to all the trouble to buy a PIP, Tesla, Leaf, Volt etc public charging should be FREE!
What better incentive for folks to buy one of these new technology driven autos , and enjoy their new toy!

 

Purchase is already subsidized $2500 with other incentives (green HOV stickers). Should charging stations be provided for free just on the general principle? Not at this stage of the game.

Cost per kWh is a very poor metric. No one will install for-profit charging stations if all they can expect is a penny every 5 minutes, unless strictly a loss-leader to get the Prius demographic in the door (i.e. Whole Foods, REI, Trader Joes). Trust me, you don't want to leave it to your government to be the primary installer of public charging stations.

In an area with free parking, I would have been willing to pay $1.50 for two hours, back in the day when I had a 4 kWh PHEV. Downtown, where parking costs $1/hour, I would have been willing to pay that and a bit more.

 

charging is free (for the price of parking) in some municipalities around northern california, when the charger is owned by the city. don't know how long that is going to last though.

for me, it's pretty simple. the cost of electricity should not exceed the cost of gasoline based on ~50MPG when the PIP is running in HV mode.

for my leaf it might be a different story... if i am not going to make it home without a charge, i don't have much of a choice but to pay whatever they are asking...

along these lines i'm dreading seeing PIPs plugged into public chargers... when you are driving a pure EV a PHEV occupying a charging spot that you may need to even get home is painful.

 

For this reason I feel there should be a "dual" charger that is capable of reaching a minimum of 4 parking spots, and an indicator that the charge is "Done"

This goes against the "rules" that the EV/PlugIn must be plugged in to be in the spot, but it increases the ability for multiple cars to "share" the plugs.

As far as costs go, I believe normal or premium parking costs should apply, but the $2/hr type costs in addition to any parking costs are unrealistic. I could see about $0.50/hr as being reasonable for actual charging time.

 

Free charges could attract people to stores, places of business, etc but the people can only shop for so long so I'd recommend free for the 1st hour, or 2 at the most, and then somewhere between .50 and 1.50 per hour to deter the power hungry 'campers'. This fee would be in addition to any parking space fee.

 

Volt owner..
Cost I'm willing to pay depends on the convenience and reason. I'll pay up to 25% beyond the price of gas+ parking, if its convenient. If I have do go through lots of gyrations to use it (e.g. move my car in the middle of the day), or out of my way (more than say a mile) then it better be heavily discounted compared to gas.

Even if it was free I would only charge midday if I have a good expectation of needing it for extended range, so only on days with extra errands or longer tips (like denver).

Per KWh seems most rational for public spaces but is often not allowed (cannot compete with the utiltities) but could be approximated with a fixed per hour. Let's face it the difference between 3.3kw per hour and 6.6 is not really dominated by the cost of the electricity but by of the space and the install.

 

In response to Efusco, I am propsing that this fee would be charged while in the spot, not just drawing power. Again, to deter 'campers'. If a pip user, or anyone else, only needed 30 minutes of power, yet left their vehicle in the spot for 3 hours, they'd pay for three hours.

 

Not me ... IMO It's gouging to have to pay over 50¢ per kWh ... so if there's any way I can get to another point (home - or remote charge) I'd do it. And if I got stuck near the only EVSE for miles & miles that's requiring $1 or more per kWh ... then I'd call the auto club, and let 'em flat bed me home. For crying out loud already !!! The plug in community is (in a teeny way) doing the liquid fuel community a favor ... because the easier it is to use 'E' fuel ... the more liquid fuel that's left for the ICE folks. Is that too hard to understand? Or does gas have to hit $9/gallon first.

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I pick up my PiP tomorrow. The parking lot I use near downtown Boston charges me $13/day. To my surprise, they have two ChargePoint chargers installed, ready for 4 cars. I have never seen any car plugged in - I expect to be their first "customer."

Since my PiP could charge six times over in the 9 hours I leave it at that lot, I can see some sort of 'per hour' fee to encourage me to move it away from the charger- maybe $0.50/hr. Until there's more customers, I would consider anything more than about $0.25/kwh to be price-gouging. Once there's competition for the parking spaces, I expect it will be cheaper for me to just use gas (much as I don't want to).

I get about 40 mpg in my 2002 Prius, and I'm expecting about 10 miles on a full charge (my one way commute), so at $0.25/kwh (about the going rate in Boston), I think electricity would cost me about what I pay now for gas - about a dollar to go ten miles.

 

I pay 12 cents per kWH.
Around 3.4 kWh Full Charge in 2.5 hours cost 40 cents or 16 cents per hour for 120 vac charge.

16 cents + 56% Charger Owner profit = 25 cents for 120 vac charge.
50 cents for 220 vac charge.

If 25 cents charged when plugged-in, whether charging or not, would provide the Charger Owner 9 cents profit when charging or 25 cents profit when plugged-in after charge is complete.

If the use of a Charger was 10% of the hours 8am-8pm, then the Owner would get at least 9 cents x 10% x 12 hours x 365 days/year = $39.42 profit per Charger per year.
If 20% use = $78.84 profit. If 30% use = $118.26 profit.

Though it's not a lot of profit, I wouldn't want to pay anything more.

 

2012: Remember the winter of 98-99, when gas was less than a dollar a gallon and everyone was buying SUVs and full size trucks? Those were the days...

2025: Remember the winter of 11-12, when no one used charging stations and you could plug in for just $2 per hour? Those were the days...

Enjoy it while you can folks, it will only get more expensive.

 

In my small town, there's a single station that covers two or three spaces. I don't know if owners will remove the charger from one car to another; I'll have to see how it works out.

 

I do not own a PiP and do not expect to ever own one.

I do own a Tesla Roadster. It's not a road-trip car for me (though it can be) and with 245 miles of range I probably will never need to charge away from home.

But if I were going to take a road trip in it (e.g. if a very special person pleaded with me to take her on a road trip in the Roadster) I would pay whatever I had to for charging. $1 per kWh? yeah, if I had to. $2? I suppose, if nobody is offering a better deal. The PiP can run on gas. My car can't. But anywhere within a 200-mile round trip, I'll charge at home.

Charging should never be free unless the owner of the charger feels like offering it free. Simply owning a car that can be plugged in does not entitle anyone to free electricity.

 

At the moment most public EV charging is free but this is about to change as the two major networks, Chargepoint and Blink, are begining to phase in charges. Most charging is done by the hour so a car that charges slowly like the PIP costs more per mile than one that charges quicker like the Ford Focus EV. A typical charge would be $2 an hour which for a PIP at 50mpg is the equivalent of $10 per gallon. The most expensive I've seen so far is the Blink charger at Pala Casino outside Temecula which reportedly costs $4 per hour (that's $20 per gallon equivalent for the PIP). I wrote an article about this whole mess for EV World Insider a few months ago.

EV WORLD INSIDER: Bill Moore's Perspective

Noel

 

Noel, that's a great article. One thing to consider about PHEVs is that most owners will want to get their MPG as high as possible ala DrInnovation, so there would be substantial willingness to pay a premium for electrical energy over the equivalent amount of gasoline energy.

 

As I said in the article there are those that will fill up without considering the cost, but most people are just not going to pay the equivalent of $10 per gallon just to get a little bit better mpg. The lower the cost the more people are going to charge rather than pump and a free charging become a no brainer.

Based on current gas prices here in LA the breakeven point is around 92 cents per hour - I think many PIP owners would pay $1 an hour but above that the charge starts to look like a very bad deal,

Noel