Much easier would be for the utility to transmit the current price of power and have the car or charger charge the car when the price is below a certain threshold.

The problem is that the best time to charge a car is immediately after it has been used, so it is ready to go the next time. Who wants a half dead car sitting around?

Some cars have a lot of capacity, so in some cases that is like saying who wants a car with only half a tank of gas?

Unfortunately, until there's more infrastructure supporting electric cars, it's much easier to refill your car with gas if it runs low while you're out than recharge it.

The dominant share of vehicle miles are commuting to work. If you work 9-5 and there is a charging port at work, you plug into it when you get there and you're charging during daylight hours. Meanwhile the average commute is 16 miles each way against cars that now have a ~300 mile range, which is plenty of slack for the odd evening use while still not needing to charge outside of work on anything but rare occasions.

In the 300 mile range you start to get near the point where the average (mean and median, maybe not mode) commuter can charge once a week on an average work week at a fast charger at the local grocery store for merely an hour or two and still not worry about range. Work charging and home charging are nice to have slow and steady options that make EVs easier than gas, but it's about to the point where if you treat it like "gas" with a once a week fill-up that is increasingly an option if you relax your worries about "range" to the point that gas users are currently relaxed about in keeping their tanks full.

(Range anxiety for ICE will eventually make a huge comeback. Electricity is everywhere, imagine driving a car where you couldn't just plug in anywhere the electric grid is and had to go to "stations" of a scarce mostly single-purpose resource for power. Haha.)

How long does an electric car take to charge, though? That's the convenience factor of ICE vehicles that will be hard to beat, probably. I can fill up my ICE vehicle in a minute or two.

I included that information. A top level CCS or SuperCharger can often fill an electric car to 80% battery in about 30 minutes and to 100% generally somewhere between an hour and two (models will vary, as do the variety of chargers). People easily spend that much time on a grocery trip or a snack/meal (at least) once a week per my hypothetical scenario above. It's "good enough" already for a lot of people today, and again I was primarily arguing today's median/mean case.

I wish I had a charging station at work. My commute is short enough I don't need it fortunately

That's why I like having a hybrid. My daily commute is entirely electric

"Smart Grid" utilities can even "borrow" electricity from a sitting car's battery when demand/price is high and "repay it with interest" when demand/price is low. Some CCS chargers and car models already support this idea, but it may be a while to see it in practice.

You generally don't need a full charged car at all times of the day: if you and your car both know you'll be at work for the next 8 hours and most likely you only need the 20 miles to get home, and a couple after work errands (plus some range floor for emergencies), there's plenty of leeway in how and when it charges.

Utilities will need to formulate financial incentives to get this done. It should make sense, yet few utilities actually are doing it.

Correct. The capabilities have been added to the CCS car charging standard and some vehicle models support it, but so far as I'm aware no utility has actually yet figured out a plan to use it (much less how much it might potentially rebate/subsidize charging in cases where it would be used).

It's the usual sort of bootstrapping hurdle that a lot of the "user interface" of it probably can't be well developed until there's a general demand for it, and there won't be a general demand for it from the Utility side until there's maybe a larger installed base of vehicles with the capability.

But, the interesting part is still pointing out that plenty of people are already thinking about it, and it is a somewhat exciting part of the equation of how more electric vehicles potentially better balance the electric grid more so than "destabilize" it or hugely increase peak demand. (Because not only are they capable of smartly arranging their charge times to off-peak demand times, but also are giant roving batteries that can themselves act as temporary storage buffers for the grid.)

That feels like a different implementation of the same idea.

Me? I charge my car when I come home from work. Provided it's charged by morning I don't car when in that time it's charging