Holiday Weekend(July 4th) EA Electrify America Experience

[Viet658]

Stopped at four EA chargers over the July 4th holiday weekend on a road trip from Pomona, CA to San Francisco. Most of the EA locations had less than half of the stalls working. One location Harris Ranch only had three out of ten plugs working. Even the biggest one we went to had two broken stalls out of 10. The worst part of the trip is that EA app continues to show stalls working when they aren’t working. Drivers cannot plan if the information reported by EA is incorrect. Was thinking of taking the lightning on this same road trip end of the month but my wife was terrified by this experience. Will probably rent a truck for the next trip. The saddest is part was seeing all the tesla chargers at Harris Ranch and kettleman totally empty. EA really needs to improve their quality. The one positive charging experience was at the tesla charger in Scott’s Valley. Tesla opening their network can’t come soon enough for me.

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[RickLightning]

Did you report the broken chargers in PlugShare?

 

[Viet658]

Did you report the broken chargers in PlugShare?

Reported at all the locations I visited.

 

[RustyMitchell]

Stopped at four EA chargers over the July 4th holiday weekend on a road trip from Pomona, CA to San Francisco. Most of the EA locations had less than half of the stalls working. One location Harris Ranch only had three out of ten plugs working. Even the biggest one we went to had two broken stalls out of 10. The worst part of the trip is that EA app continues to show stalls working when they aren’t working. Drivers cannot plan if the information reported by EA is incorrect. Was thinking of taking the lightning on this same road trip end of the month but my wife was terrified by this experience. Will probably rent a truck for the next trip. The saddest is part was seeing all the tesla chargers at Harris Ranch and kettleman totally empty. EA really needs to improve their quality. The one positive charging experience was at the tesla charger in Scott’s Valley. Tesla opening their network can’t come soon enough for me.

Brand new to the EV community Less than 100 miles on my Lightning What is EA?

 

[christian20]

Brand new to the EV community Less than 100 miles on my Lightning What is EA?

Electrify America

 

[hturnerfamily]

the third-party CCS charging networks are woefully behind the NACS Tesla network and experience - if Elon Musk allowed this to happen at Superchargers, you can BET that there would be a national Tesla Owner outcry that would be in the headline NEWS every night - we get nothing like that from our CCS counterparts... nobody really cares.

 

[Yellow Buddy]

Stopped at four EA chargers over the July 4th holiday weekend on a road trip from Pomona, CA to San Francisco. Most of the EA locations had less than half of the stalls working. One location Harris Ranch only had three out of ten plugs working. Even the biggest one we went to had two broken stalls out of 10. The worst part of the trip is that EA app continues to show stalls working when they aren’t working. Drivers cannot plan if the information reported by EA is incorrect. Was thinking of taking the lightning on this same road trip end of the month but my wife was terrified by this experience. Will probably rent a truck for the next trip. The saddest is part was seeing all the tesla chargers at Harris Ranch and kettleman totally empty. EA really needs to improve their quality. The one positive charging experience was at the tesla charger in Scott’s Valley. Tesla opening their network can’t come soon enough for me.

Im not sure how it is on the west coast, but on the east coast the solution is to only stop at chargers with a 6 stall minimum. I find 4 stalls are often more problematic.

Not a solution, but certainly gives more peace of mind. Just did 1100 miles over the weekend myself using exclusively EA. Even saw stations with cut cables out in the boonies.

 

[hturnerfamily]

two units every 20 miles feels a lot mo' better than only one option every 100 miles, even if it has 10 units... I want more charging LOCATIONS, not just more chargers at EACH location...

 

[Viet658]

Im not sure how it is on the west coast, but on the east coast the solution is to only stop at chargers with a 6 stall minimum. I find 4 stalls are often more problematic.

Not a solution, but certainly gives more peace of mind. Just did 1100 miles over the weekend myself using exclusively EA. Even saw stations with cut cables out in the boonies.

I tried to stop at four stall minimum locations and even then I ran into problems. Some stretches you don’t really have the option to try to get larger than 4 stall locations. Harris Ranch for example is a seven stall station with eleven plugs. Only three plugs worked at this location and the one I got was only charging half speed 75kw even though my battery was at 9%. That was after waiting for about 30-45 minutes for a plug to open up. It makes it near impossible to plan trips when the data EA reports is inaccurate.

 

[Bills R Electric]

Stopped at four EA chargers over the July 4th holiday weekend on a road trip from Pomona, CA to San Francisco. Most of the EA locations had less than half of the stalls working. One location Harris Ranch only had three out of ten plugs working. Even the biggest one we went to had two broken stalls out of 10. The worst part of the trip is that EA app continues to show stalls working when they aren’t working. Drivers cannot plan if the information reported by EA is incorrect. Was thinking of taking the lightning on this same road trip end of the month but my wife was terrified by this experience. Will probably rent a truck for the next trip. The saddest is part was seeing all the tesla chargers at Harris Ranch and kettleman totally empty. EA really needs to improve their quality. The one positive charging experience was at the tesla charger in Scott’s Valley. Tesla opening their network can’t come soon enough for me.

"EA really needs to improve their quality."

Not really. They don't really care. They are a subsidiary of Volkswagen of America and only exist because the US Courts punished VW for DieselGate and one of the punishments was forcing VW to start putting charging stations out in the US. VW called those Electrify America stations. Never said they had to work well.

There is a solution. VW / Electrify America has to STOP buying their charging stations and software from their current supplier(s). Obviously they suck. Instead they need to ask Tesla to build and sell them Charging Stations under a private label / white label. Problem solved. They can look however EA wants them to look, with EAs name splashed all over them. But under the hood they would be Tesla software.

 

[RickLightning]

"EA really needs to improve their quality."

Not really. They don't really care. They are a subsidiary of Volkswagen of America and only exist because the US Courts punished VW for DieselGate and one of the punishments was forcing VW to start putting charging stations out in the US. VW called those Electrify America stations. Never said they had to work well.

There is a solution. VW / Electrify America has to STOP buying their charging stations and software from their current supplier(s). Obviously they suck. Instead they need to ask Tesla to build and sell them Charging Stations under a private label / white label. Problem solved. They can look however EA wants them to look, with EAs name splashed all over them. But under the hood they would be Tesla software.

Have you read the consent decree?

 

[jdmackes]

I did my first dc fast charging at BWI airport in the cell phone lot this weekend. Those are EVgo chargers and I didn't have a great experience with them either; first charger I tried wouldn't start charging and would error out, second one maxed out at 40kw and then dropped to 30kw after a few minutes. Third one worked perfectly though, but it still sucked cause I had to park almost sideways to get the cable to reach. If it was about a foot longer it would have been fine.

 

[Bills R Electric]

Have you read the consent decree?

".....As required by the October 2016 2.0-Liter Partial Consent Decree, VW must invest $800 million over ten years to support the increased adoption of ZEV technology....."

Yet, anyone that is forced to do something is NEVER going to be as good as someone that WANTS to be successful at an endeavor.

Electrify America stations, based on my own experience using them, work at least 60% of the time. But I avoid them whenever possible. The court needs to let EA sell before the 10 years are up to a company that WANTS to be in the business, and that new company needs to purchase better PODs (including software). It is that simple.

 

[RickLightning]

".....As required by the October 2016 2.0-Liter Partial Consent Decree, VW must invest $800 million over ten years to support the increased adoption of ZEV technology....."

Yet, anyone that is forced to do something is NEVER going to be as good as someone that WANTS to be successful at an endeavor.

Electrify America stations, based on my own experience using them, work at least 60% of the time. But I avoid them whenever possible. The court needs to let EA sell before the 10 years are up to a company that WANTS to be in the business, and that new company needs to purchase better PODs (including software). It is that simple.

Totally missed my point. There isn't anything in the consent degree requiring maintenance of the network? I'd find that hard to believe.

 

[Bills R Electric]

Totally missed my point. There isn't anything in the consent degree requiring maintenance of the network? I'd find that hard to believe.

With regards to Electrify America and Volkswagen, I don't know why consumers are unaware that just because the name "Electrify America" is splashed across the Charging Pods that doesn't mean they care....or will do anything to improve their network.

Volkswagen isn't going to bust their butt to improve their charging station's quality. Why? The court isn't making them check in with their parole officer once a week and oh yeah, bring in your reports showing up time.

As a country we need to move past using Volkswagen's charging stations and network. Right now the Federal Gov't is allocating money to the various states to in turn pay Charging Station companies to install more stations. Hopefully there are companies willing to take on that challenge, and can build Pods and software that works as well as what Tesla created. Or, award the bids to Tesla as often as possible. Ideally Volkswagen aka EA is out of business in 3 years.

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