Ending charge anxiety

battery is depleted and it starts to burn gasoline. These figures can fall by as much as half in cold weather, when the battery does not operate efficiently and the climate-control system slurps energy to warm the cabin. • Chargers are not placed by the people who use them. Chargers are often placed in visually prominent locations, but they end up in places that are not always the most convenient. Say you're going to the mall: In a regular car, you'd scope out the spot closest to your destination. If you want to plug in your car, however, you're stuck parking wherever the charger is, even if that means a 15-minute walk. Because vehicle chargers are underused in some areas, but often placed close to building entry points, they are sometimes occupied by cars left by drivers thinking they're not likely to inconvenience anyone else. • Plug-in cars take different amounts of time to charge, depending on the charger, model of car, and level of battery depletion. Furthermore, because the range estimate is dependent on the weather, it's hard to judge how much charge is really needed. If a battery is 25 percent depleted from the outbound leg of your journey, it may take significantly more energy to get back home, especially if you're heading uphill or if there's a cold snap. The result of these four factors is manifest in charging-station use that is perfectly logical at the individual level. PHEV owners like to charge their cars to full capacity as often as possible. When lots of people are trying to do this, it creates problems: too many cars, not enough chargers. More specifically, there are too many cars with full batteries parked at chargers that could otherwise be used to charge other cars. Think charging for the W ho would think that electric vehicle charging stations— relatively simple technology compared with, say, facial recognition—could be so hard to use? It's not the interface on the device itself; that part is fairly simple. Tap a card, insert a plug, walk away. The problem lies in how the chargers are used. Often the problem is attributed to " range anxiety, " which refers to the fear that an undercharged or insufficiently capacious electric car battery will strand its driver. From this perspective, one can understand why drivers of electric vehicles, and especially plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which typically have …