DC Charger Experiences - new user

C

Clonbur

New Member
I don't get the opportunity to use public chargers much as I just bought my EV in late May and have had few long trips.

I've had easy access to Electrify America chargers. The APP seems to work well and communicates with the charger to quickly ID my car and fire up the juice.

My other experience is with Shell Recharge (Greenlots) and Chargepoint chargers. Every time I try to connect it takes up to half a dozen attempts for the APP to communicate with the charger. And the prompts on the charger screens are confusing. Eventually I get juice but several times I have had to call the 800 number to gain access. Never do they tell me what I did wrong or what the charger did wrong to cause this.

Anyone else have public charger problems like this?
 
Clonbur said:
I don't get the opportunity to use public chargers much as I just bought my EV in late May and have had few long trips.

I've had easy access to Electrify America chargers. The APP seems to work well and communicates with the charger to quickly ID my car and fire up the juice.

My other experience is with Shell Recharge (Greenlots) and Chargepoint chargers. Every time I try to connect it takes up to half a dozen attempts for the APP to communicate with the charger. And the prompts on the charger screens are confusing. Eventually I get juice but several times I have had to call the 800 number to gain access. Never do they tell me what I did wrong or what the charger did wrong to cause this.

Anyone else have public charger problems like this?
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Do you have the Chargepoint RFID card? One time I couldn't activate one of the two charging stations at the truck stop I visited, but that charging station might have been broken. Other than that one time, my Chargepoint card has always worked perfectly.
 
Thanks, I do have the card. I just forgot that I had it and just used the phone to connect. I'll give that a try.
 
I used a lot of different electrify America and EVGO chargers on long trips last year. I have used a few around my local area since then during times when it wasn’t convenient to charge otherwise. Most of the time they work, sometimes it takes a try or two. Maybe one in four times they don’t and I have to move to another charging station or call an 800 number for a remote activation.

My take is the systems are still new without adequate pre-deployment testing, and the vendors have little incentive to spend the extra money to make sure everything works perfectly all the time when there are enough available charging units that a customer does not get turned away or become extremely frustrated.
 
The few times I've visited an EA site in my area it's worked well. I get the sense EA's reliability issues may be regional, due to the contractors they use. Or maybe they have different generations of chargers and my area happens to be a newer/more reliable version?
 
I have a 900 mile trip in a couple weeks and hope to hit EA chargers mostly and use the balance of my Kona 250kW credit. I do have to use a ChargePoint in Escanaba and possibly a couple stops in the LP. I'll give my ChargePoint card a shot and see how that works for getting their chargers started.
 
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