First longish trip in a while, and I decided to pop into a relatively new Electrify America deployment right off Rt. 3 on the way back from the Cape. I still don't have EA's app because they still haven't learned the concept of fairness in software distribution, but they do take chip-cards. At this point the price for a "guest" is the same via either method, and in MA it's still time-based because the legislature/PUC hasn't gotten off its *** and blessed per-kWh billing. I didn't need a whole lot, this was more experiment than "enable me to get home". They were all 350 kW rated chargers, according to the signage. My charge ramped up to a little over 100 amps DC, or 41 kW, and didn't get any higher than that for a while. Battery temp was around 45 - 50F when I started, and rose to 62 and then topped out around 71 over the course of all this -- temps that should have been just fine for charging at a higher rate. At one point right around 50% indicated, it bumped up to about 54 kW, for maybe 5 minutes, and then back down to 41 or 42 and stayed, running 108 amps into the battery. It was still another opportunity to look for high/low cells under heavy loads, so I stuck with it. Out of curiosity I called EA's support to ask if they could get any additional information out of that charger in realtime, i.e. what was the limiting factor, was it the charger or the car? Of course the front-enders can't tell me such things, so I have no idea which side was offering the lower number. It would be lovely if they put such figures on their screens. Then about 35 minutes into it, the charger halted on a "protocol error". I still had the rep on the phone, who swore up and down she hadn't done anything, and all I'd been doing was sitting in the car to be out of the wind and traffic noise and saw the charger screen change out the window. So that was another line of questioning, and I was promised that some tech types would "look at" this charger to see if there were any issues. A suggestion was made to try different stations, to which I replied that I'd be happy to experiment *IF* each new connection didn't carry an extra session charge. Duh. I felt it was pretty disingenuous of a rep to suggest racking up multiple sessions on MY dime just to help debug THEIR hardware. Typical EA arrogance. Are there any OBD2 queries that might return specifically what the car is asking for during CCS charging? It's not "available charge power", which was still reading its usual 170 kW like it does over most of the SOC range. It would be nice to know the full offer/acceptance negotiation, without having to try and sniff and make sense of CCS packets. _H*
As far as I know there is no way to see why a session doesn't get up to speed or interrupts. I've had the same issues when I was using EA regularly on my long commute. The only observation I made was that typically the 150kW units were faster than the 350kW units. Why? I have no idea.
I'd bet the charging rates you got were mostly attributable to the cold weather. And that reduction shortly after 50% SOC might have been the first charging curve step-down. EA doesn't currently charge session fees, even for guests, so there's no harm in plugging into another unit.
