by Levenkay (Posted Wed, 10 Jul 2013 19:05:23 GMT)
With a monumental sigh of exasperation:
Why, in Babbage's name, do the stations have to be limited to a single pricing policy?
Blink's charging stations are computerized. They read an individual user's RFID card to initiate charging. If Blink doesn't want to offer a menu of different pricing options at the beginning of all sessions (at the same time that one selects the desired "percent of charge") they could/should at least access the individual pricing preference associated with the scanned card. That is, after all, what Blink's three different grades of subscription were supposed to do.
But I agree that the pricing should encourage brief, partial charging while an errand is run, rather than encouraging folks to stay plugged in for an hour just to ensure that they've gotten their flat fee's worth of energy.
Actually, it might work pretty slick to just have the various selectable "charge percentage" goals labeled by the computed fee for dispensing that much energy. So if you pull up at a 40% state of charge, you might see choices of "50% : $0.6 + $0.1/minute from completion to disconnect",
"60% : $1.2 + $0.1/minute from completion to disconnect",
.. and so on.
With a monumental sigh of exasperation:
Why, in Babbage's name, do the stations have to be limited to a single pricing policy?
Blink's charging stations are computerized. They read an individual user's RFID card to initiate charging. If Blink doesn't want to offer a menu of different pricing options at the beginning of all sessions (at the same time that one selects the desired "percent of charge") they could/should at least access the individual pricing preference associated with the scanned card. That is, after all, what Blink's three different grades of subscription were supposed to do.
But I agree that the pricing should encourage brief, partial charging while an errand is run, rather than encouraging folks to stay plugged in for an hour just to ensure that they've gotten their flat fee's worth of energy.
Actually, it might work pretty slick to just have the various selectable "charge percentage" goals labeled by the computed fee for dispensing that much energy. So if you pull up at a 40% state of charge, you might see choices of "50% : $0.6 + $0.1/minute from completion to disconnect",
"60% : $1.2 + $0.1/minute from completion to disconnect",
.. and so on.