Bad/no DC fast charge on road trip. Ideas?

[toodamnbroke]

Hello all,
I've had my SE AWD Ionic 5 since Feb 2022. So over a year. It's been great for daily driving and trips of about 80 miles each way on the weekends. Yesterday my family took the first road trip in it from Houston to Austin. It is about 160 miles each way. Long story short, I drove to Austin on 1 charge after leaving my house at 100%. After my niece's 3 year birthday party, I found some 350kw chargers just north of Austin in Round Rock TX at an outlet mall. We decided to hit that so we could shop while charging. Here is where things went bad. I tried 3 different chargers and kept getting an error when it tried to communicate with my car. I spend 90 minutes with a very nice person from EA on the phone and tried all the chargers by the end of it and saw a handful of other cars come, charge and leave at the same chargers I tried or would eventually try. Feeling very defeated with 17% battery on the car and now 15% on my phone, the nice lady said there was an EVgo station on the other side of the mall. So I drove there and and tried it to no avail. It gave a communications error. At this point it was 5pm on a Saturday so I called roadside assistance. They were basically no help. Luckily my in laws (on their way back to Houston) turned around to get some of us. There was a dealership about 5 minutes away so we drove there and they let us use the very slow but 220v charger they had and it worked fine. My in laws took my family back to Houston and I stayed with the car till 230am when it had enough charge to get me home.

So any ideas on what could be the issue? I tried 6 EA stations using my hyundai pass, an EA account with a CC, and just swiping my CC, then at the EVgo both my CC and through their app with my account. I tried holding the handle to the CCS plug to the car tight, loose, tight and "up", and every other way possible.

Obviously I'll be going to my dealership to see what they say, but any opinions are helpful.

Lastly, the Round Rock dealership was fantastic!!!! They were super helpful (of course the service dept was closed at the time), one rep drove me to a local pizza place AND bought my dinner, and they let me stay till 230am to let me charge. I'll be buying my next hyundai from them!!!!

Thanks
Justin

 

[ScubaSteve]

Hi Justin, it appears to be a communication error in order to setup the charge. You can try holding the cable in place until the charge actually starts. It's worked for me.

 

[toodamnbroke]

Hi Justin, it appears to be a communication error in order to setup the charge. You can try holding the cable in place until the charge actually starts. It's worked for me.

Hi Steve. Thanks for the reply. I did try that (many times) over the course of the evening. I tried shoving, holding up, holding down, gently pressing etc.... basically I tried holding it at every angle (within the wiggle room) possible. Nothing seemed to work.

 

[hobbit]

If it was one of the older 50kW EVgo units, they're basically not being maintained anymore pending
the newer units that EVgo is starting to put in here and there. But in the meantime the wheezy 50 kW
boxes can sit broken and unloved for months, until EVgo finally gets around to ripping them out.

If they were committed to even an approximation of customer service, they would KEEP FIXING those
older units which still work fine with a little TLC, so the cutover downtime doesn't screw people. But
they really just don't GAF if someone's stranded. Helping those people is not part of their business model.

_H*

 

[toodamnbroke]

I'm not totally sure if it was a new or old EVgo, it is the only one I've ever used.
!!Update!! The car had been fine since getting home for the past 2 weeks charging at home. However, one evening on the way to grab my daughter from school I stopped into the EA station near my house, and the car immediately started accepting the charge from that station. So I stopped, and pulled into the stall next to it, and same thing, it started charging right away...