RTPEV
Active Member
That certainly is questionable behavior, and I agree, it's the other extreme of not having the ability to reserve a spot at all and not being able to get a charge because the spots are NOT reserved and continuously ICEd.From personal experience, this is as bad an idea as it gets. Last month I stayed at a hotel that listed a Tesla destination charger. Given the location and the charger availability I decided it should be a nice choice to enjoy couple of days stay. Nowhere listed was the fact that you could reserve it exclusively. So some other Tesla driver did so and ICE'd the charger without moving his car for more than 30 hours (at least every time that I passed by he was there and didn't look like the car was moved at all). I asked the front desk to help contact the other driver but of course they were spectacularly unhelpful, and not only with this issue. But they put a big sign with "This EV charging spot is reserved EXCLUSIVELY for Mr. ***** from xx/xx to xx/xx" after I asked for assistance... The other spot where you could park to charge from the dual connector (but didn't have "Reserved for EV" signage) of course had an ICE vehicle parked. I didn't supercharge before arriving so I was at 15% SoC on arrival. I had to go to a local SC late at night in order to be able to use the car the second day we've stayed there. The red model 3 parked was in the same spot always. I looked at the charger and of course since the morning after the first night. it was not charging, steady light on the EVSE....So lets not encourage bad behavior on behalf of hotels or drivers. Pine Inn, Carmel-by-the-Sea is now on my *sugar* list of hotels that I will not stay at, even for free...
Possible solutions here are:
- Keep adding additional charging stations until the level of contention reaches a manageable (rare) level (probably not practical/desirable in the short term).
- Limit the duration of the reservation to one night per stay, or one night per X days, or something reasonable to allow for sharing. If using an automated reservation system (such as ChargePoint apparently has), this could even be managed down to a maximum number of hours.
- Apply some level of common sense and at least talk to the parties involved to work out some kind of arrangement.
- Institute some kind of idle fee, although as previously discussed, it should be carefully constructed so as not to require waking up in the middle of the night to unplug. Some of the sites around here, for example, allow for a different rate to be charged after a certain amount of time. If the rate increased after being plugged in continuously for 12 hours, that would possibly be reasonable. Sure, someone that plugged in at 4pm would have a cutoff of 4am, but they could be able to unplug before retiring for the night and likely have a full or nearly full battery. It's not perfect, but it's better than hogging a station continuously for 3 days straight!