Chase is launching a program to place EV charging at 50 of its branches across the fruited plain. They are partnering with EVgo and plan to expand the pilot program to an additional 400 branches by the end of the year. More power to them. Pun intended.
Chase publications note that the vehicles using the stations will “deliver up to 9.4million kWh annually to provide nearly 30 million EV miles charged, equivalent to avoiding 12,000 mt of CO2 and planting approximately 196,000 trees each year.”
So, let’s see. As I read it, the charging stations will deliver a ton of electricity to EVs. They will do it quickly and conveniently. Fair enough. Chase neglected to comment on how many metric tons of CO2 will be created generating the 9.4 million kWh. But perhaps that’s not relevant.
I note that they comment that had they planted 196,000 trees those critters would have gobbled up the CO2 generated by the 30 million miles of ICE powered vehicles.
About 30 years ago, the “tree people” in Los Angeles began a program to plant one million trees. There were potlucks and block parties and fundraisers and sure enough, in a couple of years, those folks had planted over 1,000,000 trees in LA. I’m sure that our air is cleaner, and I’m also sure that the city is more beautiful. Parks are better, streets are cooler, all is more right with the world. We actually planted eight trees in our yard. It was fun watching them grow.
I wonder what the result would be if Chase had invested the same amount of money supporting the EV effort of the government and planted 200,000 trees around its branches each year. Think of the tag lines for their ads. “Come to the bank in the forest” or “We use your money to plant a tree.”
Gee, then then 97 percent of us that own ICE powered cars will have a place to park them in the shade.
Please remember that I’m all for folks who want to drive EVs. I think they should go for it. The Tesla is perhaps the greatest car every built. I just wonder why banks and shopping centers have to get into the energy business. See my comments that follow about letting the free market work. When folks have to pay the true cost of getting those electrons into their batteries, there will be a charging station on every street corner.
Elon Musk understood that electric cars don’t work unless there is a convenient way to charge them, particularly on longer trips. Therefore, in tandem with selling Teslas, he created a charging network. He made the network convenient, fast, and workable, in other words, Human Centric. Astrid Ambroziak, our Parknews.biz editor, has a plethora of stories about EV charging over on Parknews.biz. Check them out.
Other car companies have begun to understand that charging networks are not just important, but are essential to the popularity of EVs. Volkswagen has announced a “Human Centric” network that has charging stations that are fast, under canopies, easy to use, and even have waiting areas for drivers. You know, sort of like gasoline stations.
I’m not surprised that someone in a boardroom somewhere had to come up with the “Human Centric” idea. See, where then is no profit or competition in the mix, there is no reason to actually spend big bucks to attract customers.
Oil companies understand that to compete with commodities, you have to offer something else. Costco is rebuilding its fueling stations to make it easier and quicker for drivers to get in and out. Most other stations offer all sorts of amenities like 7-11 type stores, coffee, car washes, TV screens on the pumps so you can watch the news while you fill up, and the like. They don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because they are greedy capitalists and want customers.
When the goal of the EV charging station is to be a loss leader for the auto companies in order to attract customers to EVs, and it is being funded by the government, where is the incentive to make the station “human centric”? And when they do, will VW, like Tesla, make its stations compatible only with the EVs it manufactures?
We are seeing story after story now about charging stations that are broken, difficult to fix, short on spare parts, and few actual repair facilities. Just the other day, I walked through a charging station attached to a bank. Of six chargers, three were ‘offline.’ Can you remember the last time you saw a pump at a gas station out of order for more than a day, at most? When the pumps are down, it costs money.
As soon as the true cost of the electrons flowing into an EV is charged to the EV owner, and good old capitalist competition kicks in and fixes the charger supply chain, “Human Centric” will be a dream that we will only see in Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco, Beverly Hills, Manhattan, and Brooklyn (the cities slated for EV stations by Volkswagen.)
“Human Centric” is just another phrase meaning putting your customer first. And in our capitalist system, we do that to attract them, to make them happy, to entice them to buy our stuff, and through all that to make profit. Therefore, shouldn’t everything we do be “Human Centric”? It will make our customers happy, and our investors, too.
Industry News is our most read section. It’s to the credit of Parknews editor Astrid. She collects news daily about our industry and posts it at Parknews.biz. This comes from numerous sources like Google, the PR wire, and from news releases sent to us by organizations about their parking activity. These include manufacturers, cities, universities, airports, consultants, and individuals in the industry.
Then, once a month, we take the “Cliff Notes” version of that news and those PR releases and print them in Parking Today as Industry News. To make it easy for you, we print the people and company names in each one in bold.
If you want to be in Industry News, it’s easy. Simply send your news release in Word or PDF format to astrid@parkingtoday.com. Within 24 hours of receipt, she will post it, in total, on Parknews.biz. Then a few days before our print deadline, she sends the links from each parknews.biz story to our copy editor Melissa Sterzick, who creates the “Cliff Notes” version and posts it in PT under Industry News. And all that is FREE.
We created Parknews.biz because print magazines can’t print news in real time. They have deadlines that are up to four weeks before the issue date. Think of it like a baseball game that goes into extra innings. When you pick up the paper the next morning, it doesn’t print the winner. The paper’s deadline was before the game ended. So, Parknews.biz gets you the final score, and Parking Today gets you the summary. You can always go back to Parknews.biz and use its search engine to find the complete article.
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