An electric car sits in the charging space at Albany’s public EV charger off Water Avenue Monday afternoon.
This was a first: Never before Monday afternoon had I seen a car sitting in the space reseved for Albany’s city-owned public EV charging station downtown. But there’s more to the story than that.
As I explained on Jan. 30, the charger is on my riverfront bike-riding route, and I often check whether it has started working.
It wasn’t working Monday, and the all-electric Kia Niro sitting there was not plugged in.
As I was checking this out, three people ambled over from the direction of Broadalbin Street and the downtown restaurants and shops. They had come in the Kia and were about to take off again.
One of them was Johannes Finke, and the EV charger was the reason he was there.
Finke is from Frankfurt, Germany. He’s the head of product management in the travel section of the ADAC, the German auto club.
Finke had arrived in Portland the night before, and now, together with someone from the Oregon state travel office, he was scouting EV charging stations in the downtown areas of Oregon cities.
If travelers from Germany want to explore Oregon towns in electric vehicles, he explained, they need information on what’s available and how things work.
The Albany non-charging charger was not the first he encountered on his Oregon trip. Elsewhere he found chargers that were damaged by vandalism, unavailable because of maintenance being done, or just plain out of order.
He also mentioned what’s required to use chargers — downloading apps to one’s phone, having to register, and so forth.
Another point the group made: There should be signs pointing the way so that tourists in electric vehicles can find chargers downtown. They did not see such signs in Albany.
The group told me they’d email me the results of their EV scouting mission in Oregon towns.
With that, they got into their car and headed for Corvallis. They told me they did not actually need the Albany charger because their Kia had plenty of range left. (hh)
At Albany’s nonfunctioning charger, Johannes Finke talks about his Oregon trip.
Although I don’t have an EV I have been wondering about the availabilty of functioning charging stations in Oregon. I’ll look forward to reading follow-up if it becomes available.
Sounds to me like in Albany the EV charger situation is a bust. We don’t seem to have the discipline, the money, the know-how, or the will to maintain them.
Walmart has an excellent charging station as does the Wilsonville library but they are right on about the app crap. You will not be able to plug in and use your credit card on most of them without signing on an app. We should ask Hartman if the governor he’s in love with is on this charger problem or is she still building 36,000 houses per year.
One wonders why the writer is angry over the fact that one must download an app in order to use the EV Charging Stations and that “You will not be able to plug in and use your credit card on most of them …”.
But this begs the question: is a Credit Card not an app of sorts…and if credit cards are apps, then what are cash-only customers to do when their EV needs charging. An app is just a symbol needed to utilize a service of some sort. A credit card is the same. So, if the writer wishes to gripe about apps, then the writer should also be griping about credit cards. It is a slippery slope, indeed.
We may have to retreat to the days of barter, when, if one required a service, one would trade a Chicken or perhaps a pig for the desired service. One can imagine persons desperate for a dose of voltage trading almost anything for their electric fix, with stacked of rickety chicken coops piling-up in the Walmart parking lot and Snidely Whiplash greedily collecting his due.
Of course, these matters are all to small a concern for the writer, who would rather spend time criticizing a duly elected governor for attempting to actually do something about a very real problem when it is so much simpler to attack credit cards and apps for EV charging stations. The writer’s priorities are as simple as they are sophomoric.
There is absolutely no reason one shouldn’t be able to simply run their Credit/Debit Card in a Charging Station like one can do at a gasoline pump. Any road taxes can be collected the same way, as part of the total price.
Why doesn’t YOUR governor require all EV’s be required to have a certain % of their surface area covered with solar cells? Call it “forward thinking”. Every bit helps.
There are some, older ones from what I have seen that does, but most are app based for tons of good reasons.
The first is safety. Not that long ago there was a large number of credit card readers installed that gleaned for magnetic strip for bad actors to make a fake card and steal your money. Depending on the app, this potential is lessened or eliminated depending on their payment agreements. The company I use the most allows for Apple Pay so my purchase is secured by Apples token system. Another uses PayPal so again my credit card is not given at a station. This is extremely important since these are usually unmanned so tampering could be increased.
The second is credit card fee structure. Again I use a few companies and I have one that does a prepay approach with a minimums charge so they mitigate charge fees, especially important on slower charging Type II cars as an hour of charging could only be a buck or two.
I know people that love cash, some that love cards, and some that love a digital wallet. These capitalists had to decide on what worked best for their business, just as you get to vote with your wallet.
I would rather be sophomoric than a dolt.
Roommate has an EV. I’ve lost my spot in the driveway since they need the outlet. Planning a long trip requires knowing not only where a charging station is but if it has the correct charging port and hoping it is working. We’ve had to stalk charging stations more than once.
The way things are now, I don’t see how the state is going to be ready to go EV. At a charging station, a charge to 80% (percentage commercial chargers consider charged) could take 30 minutes with some threatening to penalize monetarily if your car is there a certain number of minutes after the charge. With the relaxed rules on parking requirements and the massive multifamily units going in, I imagine it could become a luxury for many to be able to charge their vehicles at home.
Could we please dispense with the name-calling?
It’s Hasso’s blog comment section, known far and wide for disinformation rarely held in-check, uninformed speculation, and the same dozen individuals in need of a moving truck. Speaking of, where’s our wise man from Boone, North Carolina?