Why is it entitled to want access to DCFC and being willing to pay for it?
As you all have noticed, I have a bug up my arse on this subject.
"The total cost of [public DCFC for a bare bones commercial] ChargePoint Express 200/-plug purchase and installation came in at around $50,000". This doesn't include ongoing Maintenance, Insurance, or Electricity expenses. A business needs to see some ROI. This can be hard ROI ; charging revenues & membership royalties, or soft ROI; patronizing the establishment & community goodwill. Assuming a gross margin of $3 per EV charging event, it would take 16,666 EV customer charging instances to break even.
As I recall, about 5% of Tesla owners use 90% of the Tesla charging infrastructure. Using that as a basis, there are 30,000 Bolts nationwide, and only 1500 owners will use chargers 90% of the time. For this single DCFC investment above, a Bolt (or other CCS enabled DC fast charge EV) would need to charge there 9.25 times/day for 5 years.
They're lucky if they get one a day. At 2 per day, that's 3,650 revenue generating charge events over 5 years to reach ROI. So they would need to price their charging at about $15 to connect, and 20cents/min with a one hour minimum ($32 to get an additional 90 miles max), just to break even over 5 years. This exercise exudes the added risk of new, longer range EV's (which reduce the need for charging), and competition from the DCFC at the burger joint across the street. This is all guesstimates on my part, but you can plug in your own numbers. Basically, I'm saying that whats required is what, ostensibly, Tesla does - a pre-paid subscription that funds a charging network.
When you say you're willing to pay for it, are you willing to...like Tesla owners, pony up $5,000 extra at time of Bolt purchase for the
Privilege?
Tesla owners have this cost built into the mix at purchase. It's a premium they are paying up front for, even though 90% are subsidizing the 5%. If every GM Bolt owner is reluctant to pay this premium, and yet demand GM stand up some national charging network, I consider that an "Entitlement Mentality"
An entitlement mentality is a state of mind in which an individual comes to believe that privileges are instead rights, and that they are to be expected as a matter of course.
The lack of a remotely comprehensive inter-city DCFC network is absolutely a valid complaint. Yes driving cross country is something that people rarely do but trips of 300-500 miles? A lot of people make those kinds of trips at least once per year and the inability to make such a trip in an EV is a barrier to people choosing an EV for their primary vehicle. The whole notion that people can just rent an ICE vehicle when they need to take a longer trip is borderline absurd, few people are willing to go through that kind of hassle.
Look at this:
http://evadoption.com/statistics-of...icle-charging-stations-chargers-and-networks/
and
Public charging stations don’t scale
Plenty in L.A. and plenty in Vegas, but only a single station (as of this writing) between them, in Victorville. There's one more that's coming online "soon" along the route in Baker, but even once that one becomes operational the only way to drive between L.A. and Vegas in a Bolt are either to plan for two charging stops in each direction or planning on driving your battery down WAY past most people's comfort zones (I estimate I'd roll into Baker with about 20 miles of range remaining).
Yes, multiple public DCFC's along highway corridors would be great! But there would need to be perhaps a 15% EV adoption rate overall for it to make financial sense.
This is what we need to do: I'm estimating cost for these companies like EVgo and Charge Point from edu'macated guesstimates I'm pulling out of my arse. I will email Charge Point and EVgo, invite them into the forum, and see if they will not only accept, but speak FRANKLY about their business model, their finance forecast model, and what's needed for them to become profitable.