I did a 350 mile round trip I my mini yesterday.
3 charging stops.
1st one, Shell, could not find the account linked to my card. I apped it to life first try and then called them while it charged. My card is on their system. They thought it must be a station glitch. NBD, I had a working phone.
2nd station. EA. Multiple plugshare reports of problems. One dead, 24kW reported on one, 47kW on the 350. We went there anyway as we wanted to get food there and 24kW wasn't a dealbreaker. The 350 was free when we got there so I plugged in and we went to eat. A MachE was sipping 24kW at another. My rate was probably up around my max of around 50 judging by the charge I managed to get. Came back 35 minutes later and I have enough charge for the next leg. There was an irritated guy with a Lightning only getting 24kW from the last working one.
Checked on Shell stop 3 while we were eating. It was reported down in plugshare, but not the shell app, so back to stop 1 for the home stretch. That took about 15minutes to get going. My bad for following the instructions. Trick was to start charge on app, then plug in. I've had to use that trick on an EA before.
No, this is just dismal. The reliability of charging in the USA is just not acceptable. Yes stuff breaks. My job is keeping a factory running. If we had stuff half this flaky, we would be giving it's supplier absolute hell until it wasn't. Sales gets really, really pissy if a machine is down for a week.
My passenger said the charging flakiness exactly why she doesn't want to drive an EV. I really don't blame her. You currently need to be something of a masochist to rely on CCS fast charging.
The chargers should last 10 years. I can see the odd screen or cable/plug issue happening, but they should not be too frequent or difficult to fix. My last roadtrip it was cold and wet. Lots of chargers had isolation failures. In English: They got damp. That is poor design, rain and humidity are not new phenomena.
I don't know how much is design issues and how much is a lack of resources or damns to fix any issues.
Something else I've seen. A new charging station taped off for painting. Shown as online in the app, still powered and ready. I'd used it the previous evening. I ducked my car under the tape and left tyre marks. No other charges in range...
If you are to take a station offline. You should show it unavailable a few hours before you actually shut it down. That way, people who are enroute can still grab electrons before getting screwed. Or show it scheduled for work on the app.
Station operators need some financial incentive to avoid excess downtime. It appears that there is a real lack of damns given.
Yes, 350kW chargers everywhere would be nice. But they need a a lot of electricity. 480V 500A, each.
Fine if you have 11kV nearby and the budget for a transformer. Good to put along major routes. First, though we need to deal with the lack of charging sites.
Those 50kW chargers can be used in a lot more places, where there isn't a heavy supply available.
A huge number of industrial buildings could spare the 480V 80A supply that they need. Some kind of incentive for sites outside major routes and cities? There are black holes I can't venture into as there are zero chargers. A 50kW beats nothing.
I mostly charge at home for commuting and running around locally. But I've found chargepoint to be the least reliable, EvGo to be the best. Many EvGo stations have plug and charge. So no messing around with apps, cards or calling them up. I do my best to avoid chargepoint, they are so bad. EA stations always seem to have at least one charger down and a few that do work. Good enough. Their app is crapp, though.
