A litany of FAIL up the east coast

I got home from a long haul up from FL yesterday, and the trip certainly had its Moments. Particularly
with chargers and their support, notably Electrify America. I'm debating making this into a longer writeup
and putting it in my DCFC or maybe a "roadtrips" section on techno-fandom, but for now...

To their credit, EA has been doing a lot better overall. Since fixing the CCS "threshold" rate problem and
moving to kWh-based billing in states where they can, pricing has been more reasonable, and especially
when contrasted to what people have been paying for gas recently. Their stuff works for the most part,
and failing units usually have a "backup" at the 4-station or larger deployments. A frequent problem is
that the credit-card readers go offline, and they still refuse to realize that it is quite possible to have a
device that is *not* tied to Google or Apple and thus unable to download their stupid app. They really
should engage in a roaming agreement with Chargepoint or EVgo or whatever and enable the RFID readers
that all of their ABB heads look like they have already.

But this time, a *lot* of units were just plain down. At one site, one out of 4 was working at all, and some
guy was going to be on it for a good hour. Some of which I spent first waiting for EA support to answer,
because their callcenters are getting slammed and they haven't hired enough people, and then explaining
how the credit-reader on a second unit was dead even though the charger *looked* like it was ready to
work after getting rebooted, and I couldn't use their app, etc etc. The rep was *finally* able to start a free
charge remotely [because the department who could accept payment card details over the phone was
out to lunch or something] and then it was only delivering 30 kW or so. I sat there seething about this and
trying to convince them that they needed to roll repair YESTERDAY on thjs critical right-off-the-interstate
site, pulled in enough to get me up the road to the next option, and fled.

As much as CCS buildout has been proceeding, it may be likely that EV sales are already outstripping the
new infrastructure to properly support them.

In a conversation the next day while reporting another observed problem, one rep gave me a plausible
explanation for why EA is so hosed up recently: heat. Apparently they've been losing a lot of units in the
recent heat waves, often in ways that need backordered parts to fix. So maybe there are some unanticipated
design issues in these things, especially in the older deployments. And they're getting more cars that can
accept higher power now, so that might be another factor.

On the bright side, on this trip I spotted not one but TWO Rivians, on two different days! Chatted with the
owners, they're really pleased so far. Not so much on efficiency, though; one of them said he gets maybe
2.6 miles/kWh on a good day... contrast to me, healthily north of 4.0 in the Kona all the way up, at normal
highway speeds either side of ~70.

_H*

 

Most dealers that do EVs seem to have a level2 or two on premises, at least... but I stopped
at a Hyundai dealership in Harrisburg PA a month ago, which had two 62kW Chargepoints right
out front, which they leave available 24x7! Some dealerships have wheezy 25 kW Bosch units,
often mounted in some back corner of the service building and either ICEd in and/or powered
off or inaccessible at night. Bob, that's a nice idea, but currently very rare to find one with
enough clue to make it happen.

I think I remember reading that Tesla had a lot of Supercharger congestion a while back in
California especially, near some of the major metro areas. Did they build out more? At least
the EV market is not *wholly* dependent on CCS, since a lot of people "gas up" at home and
stay mostly local. So the demand volume dynamics are still going to be a little different than
with petrol stations.

_H*

 

Huh, that press release from EA seems to carry a date near the bottom of "8/23/2002", but references dates in
2021. Can they not even get *that* much right?

_H*

 

Just because it's fun, here's a shot of how I found one charger at a Duke Energy / Greenlots deployment
near Wildwood FL. Not EA related, but still kind of a fail.



The latch rod actuator was in the "closed" position and locked, so there was no way to simply close and
button up the cabinet to push in the safety sense switch at the top. I was already on the other charger
of the pair, or it might have been tempting to see if I could make this work with a little fiddling ... instead,
I called it in, and relayed the fact that I received from a guy who pulled his Bolt in *just* then, that this door
had been flapping for several days already.

_H*

 

Blink seems well-named, given the reports I see in Plugshare.

_H*