$0.40/hour idling fee not punitive enough

[sorka]

Nobody in the car. The supercharger is in a hotel parking lot so I'm guessing the driver was staying there. I've seen this a number of times before but this is the first where they unplugged the car and left it there.

Fortunately the site does not get a lot of use. 6 stalls and in the 2 years since it's been installed I've never seen more than 2 cars using it at any one time. So at least no one was left waiting.

Clearly Tesla needs to determine idling based not just one when they finish charging but when the car is finally moved out of the spot and not to return. i.e. should should be charging idling fees even if you just show up and park but never plug in.

 

[S4WRXTTCS]

Clearly Tesla needs to determine idling based not just one when they finish charging but when the car is finally moved out of the spot and not to return. i.e. should should be charging idling fees even if you just show up and park but never plug in.

The GPS isn't really exactly enough for that.

While I was at the coast I moved my car after charging because I wanted to walk along the ocean. I moved it maybe 20 ft to the one over that wasn't a supercharger. I doubt Tesla could tell if I was at a charging spot or not at the spot. Besides if they did that I would be really annoyed and I'd pull the fuse for the cell connection.

I think people often get too hung up on trying to have a perfect solution when there isn't going to be a perfect solution. You only need to get the vast majority of people to follow good etiquette.

I did before they even implemented the system, and I really wish the first system was an advisory through push notifications on the app. The vast majority of people use the app so why not? But, that isn't what Tesla decided to do. Instead they went with punitive fees directly. So I think they're trying to get the 95-99% or so. Somewhere in that range is what I speculate.

The last 1% is really hard. They're either completely ignorant people or they have so much money that they could care less.

So why heavily penalize the majority because of the acts of a the few?

We seem to be obsessed with the idea that Model S owners are a bunch of rich a-holes. When there are quite few of us that are either decent rich people, or people who bought a lower end one or a used one. There is a massive difference between a used 2013 60 versus a 2017 P100DL.

As an aside I tend to be against punitive damages. I'm more of a soap Nazi kind of guy.

 

[Kenriko]

100% agree. I'd give the 10-minute window but that's where it ends. You can't use the supercharger unless you have a CC on file and you are billed immediately if you camp out at a charger. If someone shows up for service and there is a $500 bill for overcharging they are going to have a fit and claim they knew nothing about it (insert goodwill wave here). If they get nicked $10 the first time they are going to take notice and it won't happen again, or at least they are on notice.

I follow the talk on the San Mateo SC because it's near home and people often say that cars are (still) camped out there the whole time they charge with nobody in them and nobody comes back the entire time. A little pain right away would stop that.

The San Mateo charger is in a downright STUPID spot.. that shopping center was full/without spaces before they added the Supercharger. Worst idea ever to put it in that parking lot.

 

[ecarfan]

FYI, I did not start this thread. The first post above was moved from the San Mateo supercharger thread so now it's completely out of context.

I moved the first several posts in this thread from the San Mateo Supercharger thread. I made two errors:

1 - I meant to start this new thread with @Khatsalano 's post, not yours. My apologies.

2 - I created the thread title based on his post but mistakenly typed "/hour" instead of "/minute". Now that this thread is in a different subforum I cannot edit it because I do not have mod privileges in this subforum.

I moved the posts from that thread to this one because the discussion was about the idling fee and that is not specific to San Mateo, obviously. So that was the right thing to do.

 

[sorka]

The GPS isn't really exactly enough for that.
.

GPS? Who said anything about GPS??? When the tesla is done charging, if it doesn't unplug AND go into drive AND move, the idling fees commence. GPS isn't required to know within inches and feet how far it's moved out of the spot it was in.

 

[Patrick W]

That seems so crazy. So the person walked all the way back to their car to unplug it, but couldn't manage to get in it and move it? Was the rest of the parking lot full?

No. Plenty of parking elsewhere in the lot. Go figure...

 

[AnxietyRanger]

Being a hotel, maybe they were drinking in the bar - or sent a child to unplug the car.

I'm not trying to excuse the behavior by the way, I actually think non-charging cars at Superchargers may be even a bigger problem (e.g. ICEs) that should have been fixed first before punishing a Tesla owner being 6 minutes late from an unpredictable charge end time.

 

[sorka]

Being a hotel, maybe they were drinking in the bar - or sent a child to unplug the car.

I'm not trying to excuse the behavior by the way, I actually think non-charging cars at Superchargers may be even a bigger problem (e.g. ICEs) that should have been fixed first before punishing a Tesla owner being 6 minutes late from an unpredictable charge end time.

More excusable might be they unplugged but then realized they needed to go to the bathroom real quick and ran back inside real quick.

 

[aesculus]

Being a hotel, maybe they were drinking in the bar - or sent a child to unplug the car.

I put these statements together into one in my brain, but I assume you were referring to two different scenarios.

 

[AnxietyRanger]

Estimating individual Supercharging abuse-looking cases from afar is a bit like assessing moronic-looking individual behavior in traffic without actually being able to talk with the "moron".

In our isolated bubbles, separated from communication with the other party, we can and often do see things differently than the other person or their intent. We make a judgement based on limited data and preconceived notions.

Like right here on this forum someone assumed people driving away from Supercharger in another car were local chargers abusing the system and leaving the car there for an extended period. Yet we soon got an example of a case where, while it looked that way, it was perfectly reasonable use (two cars, an ICE and an EV, driving to a destination and using the ICE to quickly visit a rest stop during charging of the EV).

Sometimes from the other person's perspective the situation was quite reasonable - or at least human, without malicious intent or negligence - yet from afar it looks like terribly bad behavior given the limited data and existing prejudices.

I mean, sometimes bad looking behavior of course is just bad behavior (and sometimes bad behavior where there was no malicious intent, but there was negligence that should have been obvious), but not always.

I've often wished that in traffic there would be this "sorry, my bad" honk or sign, because sometimes you clearly see afterwards that something you did might have come across wrong.