Most people. That's sort of my whole point. Non-enthusiasts hate complexity and the fact that charging isn't as fast and simple as queueing and fueling up at a gas pump is one of the biggest barriers to adoption. Telling people they need to use a phone or vehicle screen based reservation system would just add to the perception.
Why is the assumption that this would be anything other than 95% transparent to the user, the main exception being that, yes, they need to look at their screen to see which stall they are assigned to. Given that they probably looked at their screen 1000 times en route to the station, is that really a burden?
Okay, yeah, maybe there are some people that can't even be bothered with even using the nav system to navigate to the next Supercharger (and thus don't get the benefit of pre-conditioning the battery, etc.) but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of people driving to a Supercharger (or other fast charger) are doing so with their nav system activated. The exception may be people that live locally, don't have home charging, and rely on fast chargers. For those, yes, it may be necessary to confirm a simple pop-up on their screen that asks whether they want to join the queue when they arrive in the vicinity of the Supercharger.
For everyone else, the car can handle all the details such that when they arrive at the site they are directed to a specific stall.
Maybe there's value on the few critically busy days per year at the busiest sites, but what about 98% of the time? I can see several things that would make it a challenge to implement everywhere. Specifically, handling:
- the conditionality of needing spots assigned on the busiest days, but it being no problem most of the time to just pull up.
If this were a real issue (which I don't think it is), then the system could simply only enable itself when the particular site was full, and at other times it would allow "open" charging. But even on non-busy days, at V2 sites anyway, it would be helpful to have assigned stalls. How many times have you been at a wide open 8-stall site with no other cars and then another Tesla pulls up and plugs into your shared stall, despite there being 6 other options? I've even been to a V2 stall site once that was exactly 50% occupied, so I was going to have to plug into a shared stall...but which one? When this happened to me, I parked my car off to the side to go ask the other drivers what their status was, and in the meantime another car pulled up and took one of the spots (although karma was good to me because I found a spot where the paired driver was just leaving!)
You continue to make my argument for me! How is this handled today? Answer: it's not. But with a stall assignment system trailer (or really bike rack in most cases), as well has handicapped accessible spots, those spots would not be allocated until all others were in use, giving priority to people that had their "trailer" or "handicapped" bit set in their nav system/profile.
- queueing and traffic management/flow. You need a design that prevents someone who does not know how the system works or thinks it's in "free for all mode" from pulling up and plugging in not realizing that the spot is reserved.
Again, how is traffic management flow handled today? Again, it's not, which actually DOES create traffic flow issues and confusion. A queue/reservation system is better because there doesn't need to be a physical line like there is today. Waiting vehicles can park nearby out of traffic out of driving lanes until their stall is ready at which point it's as simple as driving to your assigned stall.
- pedestals being down but the fault not being recognized. You'd need a "assign me to another one because this one won't work" feature
Yes, just like it is without a system in place. Probably at most one car would be inconvenienced by this, as the stall would be taken out of rotation after the first report, and the affected car would be put at the top of the queue after such an incident.
Those are some of the complexities I can think of, and it's reasons like that that I think the system they're working on is better. Having it so that the vehicle redirects you away from the busiest sites and tells you about wait times so you can avoid them, but otherwise acknowledges that at most times there are no or limited waits at most superchargers functions well.
No reason that system couldn't continue to exist as well.