I just worry about people trashing it by essentially treating it like a hybrid. That battery being constantly at 10% and the engine running non-stop will kill both of them prematurely. And then they’ll blame the damage on it being an EV…
Shell recharge is Volta. They bought it and rebranded them. Now they’re dismantling all the level 2 side of the network (IE all the Volta chargers) and only keeping the DCFC side.
I saw a ton of chargers get installed at a local park, all this infrastructure upgrading to support them all, even saw them switch the branding from Volta to Shell, and most of them seemed fully set up, some were just missing the cord, but none were ever turned on. Probably 20 of them in total. Now I see that they’ll never get set up…
Though to be honest, I had a Volta account, but when shell bought them, they sent me non-stop reminders that Volta doesn’t exist and I needed to make a Shell app to even use their free chargers, but I never saw the use in doing so. I used Volta so rarely anyways. It was just nice when I went to the mall.
Near my friend’s house the city is desperately trying to push EV adoption with city-funded chargers and everything. The cables were cut before they were even fully installed. The power distribution cabinet was gutted. Literally the city switched all street lights to solar lights because the copper in the street lights were getting stolen so often, their solution was to remove the copper power cables from the streets. And these aren’t like under an overpass where people wouldn’t see. This is 10ft outside a gas station convenience store.
I go to chargers that are constantly rotating pictures offering $1k rewards for identifying any person in the photos because they’ve stolen the cables from those chargers (thankfully those are never broken when I go to them)
And I KNOW those cables are expensive. For my home charger, which only does 50A, the cable is $200, the bulk of the price. Fast chargers have to do 100+A.
Everything inside the cabin runs at 12v. The only area where the gets fuzzy is that your 12v is charged via the main battery, so ULTIMATELY, you are draining the main battery. (Unless you have a poorly designed EV like the early ones that just… Didn’t charge the 12v or only did so during charging) So really, anything but driving and using the climate control is… Negligible.
I’ll try to repark at a different station. If they’re at full/busted (should’ve known that’s why that one stall was open…) then it is what it is, it becomes a game of how long am I willing to wait for a charger to open up. And suddenly the people who unplug and then sit in their car talking for 15 minutes really piss me off… The last 2 fast charging stations I’ve had an issue with had ALL chargers broken except one. So obviously when I didn’t get the working one, I sat there seething until they moved.