Is Blink making EV's more expensive to drive than ICE cars?

[David_Cary]

$100 a month is truly amazing. Only makes sense for 1 situation - Limo or Taxi. But for that, the OP can hopefully make it work.

So regional - all our Chademos are free. Most of our L2's are free.

 

[Pmacafee]

"However, memberships ultimately do offer a less expensive charging fee because of high-end discounts. For instance, if a customer wants to charge their car on a routine basis, we can provide it as part of a monthly cost of USD 99. If they prefer to pay per kWh, it would cost them a bit more. There are benefits of having memberships and within those memberships, you need to have interoperability between charging networks. We would like to be able to sell a membership, which will provide access to a Blink charging station and NRG’s charging station, eVgo. Then eVgo and the Blink network should be able to reconcile.This way, the EV owners have the ability to charge at any charging station. That’swhere the market needs to go. Michael D. Farkas, CEO and Co-Founder, CarCharging"

contact them here: CarCharging, Inc.1691 Michigan Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, 33139 [email protected]. I would post this question on their Facebook or twitter account..

Thanks

 

[liuping]

Chademo adapter is ready?

It's shipping to people who pre orders. There is lot of discsion on it here: CHAdeMO adapter wait frustration

 

[astrotoy]

In a few days, my ChaDeMo adapter will arrive and there are several fast DC Blink charge stations near me just north of San Francisco International Airport. They could be of great help in keeping our limousine service's model S on the road all day long because it would be able to charge twice as fast as our HPWC.

The cost to charge on the Blink station is now about $.60/KWH. A full 85KWH will then cost me about $51.00. Gas around here is now about $2.50/gal, I guess that if my model S had an ICE engine it would get about 20 mpg or better. So to drive 260 miles it would take about 13 gallons of gas which would cost about $33. If gas gets back up to $4/gal then the cost is about the same, If I charge at the office, I think the full charge is about $12. So Blink's markup is over 400%? Are the tables turned? Where is ChargePoint on DC fast chargers?

Since you are running the Model S as a business, I guess the question is whether the additional cost of the Blink electricity is worth the time savings you get using it to charge. Similar to stopping at 7-11 stores for something rather than going all the way to Safeway. One advantage to Blink is because the cost is very high, you probably will not have to wait in line to use it!

 

[liuping]

Don't use blink. Their rates are absurd. The only reason to use them vs charging at home or on Superchargers is when your in a bind and have nowhere else to charge in order to make it to your destination. But as long as you plan ahead, nobody should ever have to use a blink charger ever anywhere. I'd avoid them like the plague due to their overpriced rates. They certainly aren't helping the EV adoption by price gouging consumers.

NRG eVgo chargers in CA are about $0.60 per kWh as well for CHAdeMO charge, since they limit you to a 1/2 hour charge $.20 per minute and a $4.95 fee per charge session. So Blink is not more out of line that them. People tend to forget that demand electricity rates in places like San Diego are $.49/kWh. They have to charge more than that, or they will never pay off the exspsige charging stations.

It will always be far cheaper to charge at home (especially at super-off peak rates), or use SuperChargers. But it's nice to have the option when traveling...

 

[Pmacafee]

NRG eVgo chargers in CA are about $0.60 per kWh as well for CHAdeMO charge, since they limit you to a 1/2 hour charge $.20 per minute and a $4.95 fee per charge session. So Blink is not more out of line that them. People tend to forget that demand electricity rates in places like San Diego are $.49/kWh. They have to charge more than that, or they will never pay off the exspsige charging stations.

It will always be far cheaper to charge at home (especially at super-off peak rates), or use SuperChargers. But it's nice to have the option when traveling...

I wish there was a commercial PG&E plan but the EV rate plans from them are only for residential.

 

[jkirkebo]

I'd take the supercharger route.

So you'd use a 1 hour longer route to avoid paying $20 for charging? Ok, but my time is worth more than that, especially with the rest of the family in the car.

 

[cwerdna]

NRG eVgo chargers in CA are about $0.60 per kWh as well for CHAdeMO charge, since they limit you to a 1/2 hour charge $.20 per minute and a $4.95 fee per charge session.

I haven't followed this discussion closely, but yes, Blink's Nor Cal CHAdeMO pricing per kWh is absurdly high. That's why I've used them 0 times w/my Leaf. And yes, their equipment is notoriously unreliable. One always needs to check Plugshare to see if there are any recent negative/positive reports before bothering to venture there. Then again, that's true of any public charging infrastructure.

Re: NRG eVgo, it looks like they re-did their plan page a bit: San Francisco Bay Area - eVgo.

 

[Gizmotoy]

It's why I like Tesla's approach to the network so much. Take the money up front to pay for the expensive bit, enable it for life on the car, and then just manage the network, instead of dealing with accounts, swipecards and angry customers because the charger has lost Internet connectivity.

I agree with everything you said, but note that this could be an issue with Tesla's Superchargers as well. They rely on validating your VIN before allowing you to charge. If they lose connection, you won't be charging.

 

[jerry33]

I agree with everything you said, but note that this could be an issue with Tesla's Superchargers as well. They rely on validating your VIN before allowing you to charge. If they lose connection, you won't be charging.

Source? My understanding has always been that the two items required are a the Tesla connector, and software in the car that says it's SC enabled. No internet required.

 

[Gizmotoy]

Source? My understanding has always been that the two items required are a the Tesla connector, and software in the car that says it's SC enabled. No internet required.

We know of at least one salvage Model S that had Supercharger access revoked even after pulling the SIM, implying that the logic is in the Supercharger. We know the Supercharger authenticates the vehicle, and we also know that every Supercharger is connected to Tesla's network for monitoring. Further, we know that there is proprietary CAN-like communications occurring between the SC and the vehicle, which is likely to be an authentication handshake (if you're so inclined: Supercharger protocol for diy CHAdeMO adapter ) as the vehicle sends its VIN to the Supercharger, and then monitoring once authenticated. Really interesting stuff.

Thinking out loud, from a security standpoint, it's extremely risky to simply trust the vehicle. When you're controlling a device's access to a resource, you don't trust the device to tell you if it's permitted to access that resource. You demand authentication, verify it, and then permit access. If you don't, you're always vulnerable to a bad actor, whether that's a defective Supercharger-enabled car you can't prevent from breaking all of your Superchargers when it plugs in, or someone who has altered their vehicle to allow access, or a targeted attack on the Superchargers themselves to allow charging of non-Tesla vehicles.

 

[Cebe]

And you can always put the logic in there that let's you start charging until the supercharger says you're not allowed to; that way, if connectivity is lost, you can still charge. And I doubt that the down time for the connectivity would be such that they'd worry about a large number of non-superchargable 60's getting in there unauthorized...

 

[cwerdna]

And you can always put the logic in there that let's you start charging until the supercharger says you're not allowed to; that way, if connectivity is lost, you can still charge. And I doubt that the down time for the connectivity would be such that they'd worry about a large number of non-superchargable 60's getting in there unauthorized...

Besides that, they could always have some sort of local replica (at each site) of the authorization database as a fallback or even a primary database for that site w/Tesla maintaining a master source of truth. That wouldn't require constant reliable connectivity and could be pushed/pulled depending on any # of factors (e.g. set schedule, certain # of changes, etc.)

 

[deonb]

Thinking out loud, from a security standpoint, it's extremely risky to simply trust the vehicle. When you're controlling a device's access to a resource, you don't trust the device to tell you if it's permitted to access that resource. You demand authentication, verify it, and then permit access.

Sure, but you don't need to be online for that.

Tesla can generate a signature from the vehicle VIN with a private key that only Tesla corp have access to, and with the SuperChargers having the public key. They can then download the signed message to the car, and the car can present it to the SuperCharger to verify it.

No online access needed, and no need to tell the SuperCharger about all the vehicles on the roads.

I'm sure Tesla does have online access for monitoring and for downloading blacklists, but I would imagine that they can authenticate vehicles without being online.