Have you found it easy or hard to charge on trips during Thanksgiving week, 2022? Most Tesla drivers have no problems charging due to the plethora of Superchargers near expressways, but are there Tesla drivers worried about charging because they're driving to grandma's house deep in the woods, away from those ribbons of Superchargers? I and my fellow non-Tesla EV drivers generally have less-satisfactory charging experiences. I was wondering about the charging experiences of EV drivers this 2022 Thanksgiving season. Then I saw @ke4d's "Charging Woes" post on Inside EVs' Bolt EV forum and decided to start this General EV Discussion thread based on that post (thanks, @ke4d!):
I have to wonder if ke4d tried lifting the handle trick on the Bolt to get it to charge at the EVgo stations. I guess if ke4d is a seasoned Bolt driver that trick would have be tried.
Being a MINI Cooper SE driver, I don't know about the Bolt handle trick. Is it a handle on the Bolt or on the EVSE and if it's on the EVSE does the trick only work with Bolts?
Our nearest EA (New Castle DE, near I-95) is shut down for the upgrade. It looks like there are other scattered charging locations around the country that are also down.
I believe some folks have had success by lifting the handle on the DC charger and waiting until a connection is made. https://enginepatrol.com/chevy-bolt-problems-solutions/
I've run into a couple of EA locations all fenced off and ripped up for "upgrades" recently too. I wish they'd do it in a more "staged" fashion, like only take half the site down at a time so there's at least *something* available, instead of leaving people potentially stranded if they didn't hop on the net and check before heading there. It seems like EVgo is having some issues too, when the older 50kW units break, nobody bothers fixing them if a site is slated to receive the newer 100kW [?] ones. But how long will it stay useless in between? _H*
Really what this past weekend has shown is the inadequacy of the sites with just 4 chargers. I have seen numerous reports on SM of long lines at certain sites. But Thanksgiving was always going to be a stress test for the whole system, and unfortunately it failed in many ways. The older 50kW units are kind of crappy - we have numerous CP 50kW units that were put in 5 years ago - all are down, and have been down for a year or so. When they only have 4, it probably limits their ability to do partial upgrades.
CP is kind of a special case, as it allows them and property owners to finger-point at each other and keep saying "not our problem". CP really needs to lean on site liaisons a lot more, because bum gear still makes CP look bad. I had a convo with their support yesterday, in fact, because the website is effed up and I can't log into my account. I also mentioned how the touchscreens on a lot of the newer units are completely failing, evidently related to sun exposure, and they have no particular plan in place to get them fixed. Meanwhile, their support is getting frantic calls from people who aren't able to stop a charge session early, and think they're trapped there because they can't unhook. _H*
