> Sensors installed in electric bays can be used to detect the presence of a vehicle and whether it is being used to recharge the car battery.
Just think about it: Technically it would be no big problem to enforce speed limits widely. The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex, you could mass-produce them and deploy them basically in every street. I'm not aware of any country doing that.
I lived in Qatar for 7 years, drove a car. All speed cameras are not visible. Some are marked with sign boards, but many are hidden permanently on a lamp post, or in a palm tree, or in anything. There are even mobile cameras, which an operator puts on a heavy tripod, & goes away, & camera takes photos of offenders & send back to data centre. Cameras are on highways, on streets, on intersections. Every traffic signal has built in camera. Fines go up progressively with each offense & over the limit. Owner of car gets a mobile notification as soon as his car speeds in front of camera. All fines are payable fully at yearly registration. If paid in some x days, there is a discount.On Holy Month of Ramadan also sometimes there is a discount.
The biggest is, there is no need of a man standing behind camera. Two photos taken apart a second or such are the proof. Owner can only contest it if he has gps recordings. Speed limit is speed limit. No +5 or +10.
But then, fine amount stings only if they are enough. For an expat like me, a fine of $200 is a lot. For a local Qatari 20ish year boy, thats nothing. Some of my photography club members had fines in tunes of $2500 a year, & totally normal.
Speed cameras are not the go-to tech. Nearly every car on the road has a GPS, either organic to the vehicle or inside the driver's phone. If we wanted to actually enforce speed limits it would be a trivial matter to have google forward the relevant information.
This was done by a few rental car companies many moons ago (circa 2001). Speeding laws don't know how to account for such data. Should someone speeding continuously over many miles be fined more or less than someone who speeds twice, each time only for a short distance? Traffic laws are premised on the systems by which people are caught (cops, traffic cameras etc). They are not adapted to the perfect knowledge that modern tech can provide.
https://www.drivers.com/article/428/
Of course, if we really care, it would be trivial to limit all cars to a particular speed while on public roads. Japanese motorcycles are already limited by industry agreement, iirc 300kph (see the Hyabusa fiasco). Merc/BMW cars are limited to 250kph. Those limit could be lowered via a simple software patch.
None of that is insurmountable of course, and the easiest fix seems like just having the automated system only ticket you at some threshold above the limit while grandfathering in tighter speedometer tolerances. Aggression from driving the speed limit would probably decrease rapidly as tickets started arriving in the mail.
More than you suggest.
> The technology for speeding cameras isn't exceptionally complex
But speed cameras are just one piece of enforcement. With those and automatic license plate reading you get a piece of evidence that a car violated the limit at a particular time and place, but even if the law is that a set limit is a hard limit (which is not the case in much of the US, where posted limits are often prima facie but not dispositive limits), that's not all you need for enforcement. You also need legal process to weigh potential counterevidence, to deal with contested identity of actual drivers, etc. This isn't technically complex, but it adds a lot of overhead, which is why even places which legally allow this mechanism deploy it selectively, not comprehensively.
The thing with speeding cameras is that they could easily be adjusted to allow for 20% (say at most 20kph) margin (which would be perfectly fine for me even on the German Autobahn), but drivers would learn that fact and adjust perfectly to just 1kph below that limit. This would then enrage puritans that would DEMAND that these MURDERES be PUNISHED. Sadly for some reason traffic law is an area of zero tolerance for some.
The few times I've tried to charge an EV at a public non-tesla charging point, it has been a real hassle. The multitude of protocols mean that sometimes it just doesn't work. I'd be very not happy if that meant I would then have to find another spot.
Perhaps there is a market for a defeat device, a plug that simulates an electric car, like those HDMI/VGA simulators used to trick motherboards into thinking they are attached to a screen. It probably wouldn't need much of a resistor to simulate minimal charging rates.
Don't park next to a gas pump if you're not putting gas in the car, even if it has an internal combustion engine.
Resistor wouldn't be a huge problem. A heat sink might be - the chargers typically support 5-50kW¹ charging rates. I'm not sure they would consider 100W or so "charging", so you might end up with something bulky.
¹ a guesstimate
EV parking isn't that premium or common where this would be valuable. Also, this kind of anti-social behavior is a good way to get your car keyed when someone rolls up and needs 10 miles of power to get home and sees a jerk in a non EV in the only charging spot.
And also, the mobility+ app (no affiliation) has dealt fine with multiple brands of charger.
This is a good question, we know that total cost of ownership of the charging network for cars is massively lower than that of petroleum infrastructure. So the problem is not shortage of money, but alighning incentives and investment. I believe this needs to be done through a large-scale national program, where central govermnet provides granta for modernising cities for efficiench: that includes charge points, insulation and enegy efficiency, etc. All those measures result in long-term savings, and we have record low interest rates
In the medium term, if this becomes a real problem, properties will be devalued and owners can decide whether it’s worth contributing to the cost of installing the infrastructure.
In the long term, most people won’t have private vehicles, so there won’t be any need to store and charge them on public roads.
If people want to charge their electric cars and live in a place where it's difficult to do so, that is their problem.
Most places with super dense housing like you describe are probably in fairly dense urban areas where other forms of transportation are probably better regardless.
In case you wonder why we had them they were for car engine preheaters. Handy when it is -20C and snowing.
In general I'm against any system that automatically fines people.
I also think that for safety reasons you cannot just unplug a charging EV car without stopping th charge first (i.e. a child cannot just walk up and knock the plug out etc).
If there is a fault in the charger, then I expect a "smart" parking spot to deal with that.
To be honest, the better approach in my mind is to put the electric charging bays further away from the entrance to the store or whatever. Quite often EV charging spaces are some of the "best" (i.e. closest) spaces available. Selfish pricks who want to park right by the door don't care if it is a disabled space, an EV space, or not even an official parking space at all - they'll just park where they want. Move the EV charging spaces further away from the store and you'll solve 99% of ICE'ings I reckon.
Also you absolutely can remove a charger while its going and I've had it happen multiple times on my M3 when charging at a L2. I do get a notification but like.
But yes, spot on just put the chargers where no one wants to park. They keep installing them right at the front of stores and wondering why people ICE them.
Seems like the right behaviour to discourage, just like littering, etc
