Adding to the rant
Like many countries, France has an near infinite number of charging stations, all of which require a different card and paid membership.
All of those companies used state funds to build their infrastructure.
So part of the reason for the whole envelope situation is that letter envelopes will go through postal sorting machines which will bend the contents so anything that can’t be bent (for example I once needed to mail a forgotten car key to a family member) can’t be sent in a letter envelope.
Usually the solution is padded envelopes, or for certain things there may even be special postage available like USPS’s Bound Printed Media rate for mailing books (which can I add is such a hilariously federal government-grade obtuse way of saying “books!”) but there’s also “non machine” postage rates available too.
Basically boxes are the easy solution but there’s more efficient solutions available if you’re willing to do a very small amount of research. For people packing it can be as simple as “I can quickly toss this in a box and not worry about it further”
I guess this is good for privacy and physical durability of the entire package.
Vehicle charging is such a complete worldwide shit show. Could you imagine if it was the same for getting petrol? “Ah, can’t fuel up at this station, the nozzle is the wrong size” or “you can’t fill up here, you need to use the Exxon app” or “sorry, half the pumps are currently broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon”
If you have a company car with fuel card it was a shit show. I definitely couldn’t fuel up everywhere.
At least now I only have to go out of my way to charge when I’m on holiday.
Really? It seems to me that wherever I go they use the same plug*, and I can charge with my debit card. (Except one place in Germany, but I think it was an error in the payment system.)
Yes, there’s technically two different plugs, but they go in the same socket in my car. It just that the fast ones have a larger plug.
The problem is that some of them are much cheaper if you have the right card, but I believe the most expensive ones are still cheaper than fueling an ICE car.
In North America, there have been several competing standards for years. Manufacturers finally seem to be coalescing around NACS (nee Tesla), but there are still a lot of cars which use CCS (two different types, none of which are the EU CCS), J1772, and CHAdeMO. Adapters abound, but it’s a mess.
Yeah I think it’s mainly North America (us?) that’s the problem.
However the standards process worked, it created poor choices and was not effective. Twice. At least we’re finally coalescing on a de facto standard, and NACS is better than the previous two choices
But yeah the app situation is bad. While I appreciated using chargers that use my cars internal ID, and just worked, that clearly doesn’t scale. Now that we’re trying to scale out to general use so we really need credit card readers instead of a plethora of apps.
Not requiring an app was one of the prerequisites for federal incentive money, but the short-sighted administration retracted that
Electric car charging works anywhere if you have an adapter
If you have a vehicle with a weird fuel type then there’s very few gas stations you can go to
Electric car charging works anywhere if you have an adapter
The right adapter. And a smartphone with the right app you already signed up for an account on (and it hasn’t randomly logged you out as my Blink app did just this morning). And there’s a vacant charge point. And it’s working. And someone hasn’t ICEd it.
And someone hasn’t ICEd it.
Damm, I know electric cars are woke and all, but it’s still wild they are putting chargers in inhumane camps now.
And how many of those exist?
Adapters? As many as you wish
This can happen if lettermail is exclusive to be delivered by the country’s postal services but the vendor is using a courier.
On the other hand, Anazon once shipped me a lightbulb for my oven in and envelope. It came nice and flat, in many, many pieces.
You sure it wasn’t one of those “Flatpak” do-it-yourself lightbulb kits? I always thought they sounded a little out of my realm, tbh. Never was very good at assembling models…
The original Edison bulb we used to call em.
This is what a boxed<boxed< int >> looks like
Rookie numbers. I’ve bought some privacy protect foils for the windows in my old flat and made the mistake of “send when ready”.
Btw, they use waste paper for that now.
‘envelop’
Um, I spelled it that way not to ruin the bit. Definitely not because I had no idea that was the correct spelling. It was to maintain the integrity of the bit!
This is one of those words where English is a little indefensible. Hah.
A good example of spoken emphasis changing the meaning, too.
About your additional rant. Not saying your experience isn’t real, yet when I travel through France from Belgium basically all fastchargers I’ve used accept my eflux card(Total, Shell, Fastened and another I forgot the name of). A total one had some sort of network malfunction once and I switched to credit card.
The slow chargers are more hot or miss though. But credit card again seems to work at those I’ve used at least.
I agree it’s annoying you can never be a 100% sure and that you basically have to use apps like ABRP for longer routes if you want to make sure your card will work.
Honestly, thanks, I’ll look into that. I think though this is more what’s available on the auto-routes, but I never heard of this one.
I also think the Shell card supports most of them. If anything it’s probably best to look into ABRP since they’re great to help you plan trips that align with all your needs.
Employee no. 5823 was all out of fucks to give that day.
Thats about right, I once worked at a company and the postie wanted to see what was in massive box.
It turned out to be 3 sticker signs at the bottom of a box the size of a 3 consoles, it was 99.9% air
I work in biomedical research. We had an item delivered in a 40x40x40cm, dry ice container. It was a tiny vial smaller than my thumb.
A very expensive, tiny vial.
I believe EU regulations say that at least fast charging stations is required to have credit card payment option
This only applies to fast chargers built after a specific date because they wouldn’t or couldn’t force companies to add it retroactively. Though I suspect most did so anyways, especially those near touristy roads like the péage network.
I would love to hear more about this. I’ve tried so many times.
France also?
Damn, I somehow expected France to get centralized energy infrastructure right…There’s a few companies that have ‘universal’ cards (that work in about half the stations), but they charge around €1 just to plug in, and because I have a PHEV, it pretty much makes it cheaper to use gas. Which I really try to avoid.
Germany has the same problem. I just met a lady who’d had to drive an hour out of the way to find a charging station she could use. Then it turned out one was broken and the other one was in use by my brother in law. Luckily he’d just finished.
In the us, Tesla has a much higher reputation for chargers that actually work when you need them. Usually the credit goes to better sensors and more responsive service, but an underrated factor is larger charging stations with many more chargers. One failing of twelve is less impact than one failing of four, for example.
As yet another anecdote showing how regressive/spiteful US treatment of EVs is …… over the summer I saw an article about a new vendor winning contract for New Jersey rest areas. Part of the contract was to replace 12 charger Tesla supercharger rest areas with “equivalent” four charger that cost 20¢/KwH more
In my country, they will just ship it with a plastic envelope, as courier will charge based on dimension as well as weight so a small card shipped in this way will be the same price as a box-full of labubu or something.
