DCFC in America - it’s falling apart

[Logal727]

It has been awhile since I have DC charged at EA. Is it really getting as bad as suggested in the video?

I haven’t had any issues recently.

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[Logal727]

Every day a new BEV is sold, it gets worse. Especially when the stupid car companies are offering free EA charging. Because of that, people who travel are competing with locals who just want their free stuff.

Free is only good if there is too much supply. Maybe two years ago you could say some areas had too much supply of DCFC capacity. Not anymore.

And here they come, like locusts looking for free food.

Someone on Reddit tried to make the case that free charging is actually a good thing cause it helps test the network, of course it was an Ioniq 5 owner who gets 2 free years of charging.

 

[Logal727]

When I bought my GTPE from an out-of-state dealer, the free EA charging helped pay for most of my trip home. It's like getting several free tanks of gas when purchasing an ICE car.

For most people who don't DCFC often, I suspect it takes them many months to exhaust their 250 kWH of free charging.

I don’t think the sample free charging is a bad thing, people need a little bit to practice charging and get familiar. The unlimited free charging is a big issue though.

 

[SnBGC]

This. If you don't report it is broken, you don't get to complain.

Disagree. The moment your customers become your quality control department then you have already failed.

 

[jbooth]

Disagree. The moment your customers become your quality control department then you have already failed.

Both can be simultaneously true.

Without some possibly scary surveillance, a company can't always know about failed charging attempts. Also, I'd rather they spend money on chargers, not cameras in most cases.

 

[timbop]

Both can be simultaneously true.

Without some possibly scary surveillance, a company can't always know about failed charging attempts. Also, I'd rather they spend money on chargers, not cameras in most cases.

Most of how they find out a session has failed or is successful is through the network communication between the charger and their servers. That tells them if sessions fault, there is an internal error like the thermal sensors not responding, etc. What it doesn't tell them is things lie the charger wouldn't even communicate with the car (as @SnBGC mentioned earlier) or that the screen is broken.

 

[timbop]

Disagree. The moment your customers become your quality control department then you have already failed.

But I don't think that's what's happening; there's a significant difference between controlled tests and what happens "in the real world". There is simply no way to test what happens over 10 million charging sessions with 40 different makes of car in wildly different climates.

This isn't an attempt at an excuse, but the point Kyle makes about these chargers being early generations is absolutely spot on. It is clear that there is still a major issue with the design of many stations with respect to either failing thermal sensors or flawed heat management, which is why the chargers often drop down to low power levels. Up until 2020 there really weren't that many CCS cars on the roads in the US, and certainly none that drew more then 70kw. Now that there really are cars drawing 200 or more kw with shorter durations in between charging sessions we're seeing that the station designs simply are not good enough at managing heat. When all you had were some 50kw bolts on the road with a station being used once a day the stress was virtually nonexistent. Now that Taycans and EV6's are charging shortly after one another things are much different.

As Kyle alluded to in the video EA turned a bunch of stations along the I-95 off on labor day in 2020 in order to completely replace all the chargers at once. It turned into a fiasco for travelers and they since haven't repeated the mistake of taking a whole route out of service at once, but the bigger picture is more concerning. How many stations are going to have to be thrown out and replaced in order to get some modicum of reliability?

 

[DevSecOps]

The problem with free charging, as I've said many times before, is that locals end up at DCFC stations to charge because, well, it's free! Go figure right?

So, anyone who actually needs those chargers, the few that are actually operational, can't get to them because someone is there sucking down free juice instead of paying for it at home. I've even seen physical fights break out over these stations by locals.

Anyone who argues that free charging is a good thing probably doesn't commute in their MME. When you do and you're waiting for hours at a station because some greedy, selfish local is charging their car for free, your opinions may change. There's no need to give someone something for free so that they can try it out, when they need juice they'll get it to work, free or not. All these handouts need to stop.

 

[AZBill]

It has been awhile since I have DC charged at EA. Is it really getting as bad as suggested in the video?

I did a recent trip with 4 charging stops, and at three of those stops all 4 chargers were in use simultaneously. There was one site on my route that I intentionally avoided, because only one of the four was working. That site is now reported as completely broken.

 

[buzznwood]

I don’t think the sample free charging is a bad thing, people need a little bit to practice charging and get familiar. The unlimited free charging is a big issue though.

The sample and free charging in reality was for when DCFC would typically be used and that is road tripping which for a lot of people stepping into the world of EVs from ICE was going to be one of those things people would have concerns so but offering some amount of free charging it was a way for manufactures to seal the deal.

I have no problems with them doing that the problem for me is that the current location of most DCFC chargers are in the worst place possible, place them along interstates at useful distances in-between towns and you pretty much guarantee that it will just be people traveling that are using them.

Instead we have a large number in placed in walmart / shopping mall car parks, so anybody traveling is fighting to use them with all the locals that will be foolish not to take advantage of the free charging while going shopping. Even if you removed the free charging I doubt things would get much better as you only have look at the state of a costco / sams club gas station packed with cars all overflowing into the car park as everybody decides to fill up when doing the weekly shop.

Rows of L2 destination chargers are far better suited for car parks where locals and people staying in town visiting can top up if needed not a token number of DCFC and until more DCFC appears in useful locations then things will get worse before they get better.

 

[ElectrifyCLT]

Both can be simultaneously true.

Without some possibly scary surveillance, a company can't always know about failed charging attempts. Also, I'd rather they spend money on chargers, not cameras in most cases.

Eh, not necessarily so long as the charger still has accessory power. You should be able to track cord connections, failed payments, screen taps, etc just through the software of a unit

 

[ElectrifyCLT]

I have no problems with them doing that the problem for me is that the current location of most DCFC chargers are in the worst place possible, place them along interstates at useful distances in-between towns and you pretty much guarantee that it will just be people traveling that are using them.

Instead we have a large number in placed in walmart / shopping mall car parks, so anybody traveling is fighting to use them with all the locals that will be foolish not to take advantage of the free charging while going shopping. Even if you removed the free charging I doubt things would get much better as you only have look at the state of a costco / sams club gas station packed with cars all overflowing into the car park as everybody decides to fill up when doing the weekly shop.

The problem with that is the infrastructure to deliver power to the DCFC locations. Big box retailers have massive refrigerators and chillers so it’s almost always guaranteed that those parking lots have the requisite three phase power nearby, thus reducing the cost of installation because you’re not having to invest in simply getting the power to the charging location.

 

[Addos]

Not to derail, but I would have preferred that all the money being poured into these new EV tax credits would have been poured into more fortification of the national electrical grid and national charging infrastructure in a very high-profile way.

I'm sitting on my hands to see a glut of EVs hit the market because people are so underwhelmed with their experience because they didn't do their homework regarding charging.

Yeah, with the push towards EVs, they are literally pushing the buggy before the horse. We need the infrastructure BEFORE the masses start buying and straining the brittle sparse public charging we already have.

 

[Logal727]

The sample and free charging in reality was for when DCFC would typically be used and that is road tripping which for a lot of people stepping into the world of EVs from ICE was going to be one of those things people would have concerns so but offering some amount of free charging it was a way for manufactures to seal the deal.

I have no problems with them doing that the problem for me is that the current location of most DCFC chargers are in the worst place possible, place them along interstates at useful distances in-between towns and you pretty much guarantee that it will just be people traveling that are using them.

Instead we have a large number in placed in walmart / shopping mall car parks, so anybody traveling is fighting to use them with all the locals that will be foolish not to take advantage of the free charging while going shopping. Even if you removed the free charging I doubt things would get much better as you only have look at the state of a costco / sams club gas station packed with cars all overflowing into the car park as everybody decides to fill up when doing the weekly shop.

Rows of L2 destination chargers are far better suited for car parks where locals and people staying in town visiting can top up if needed not a token number of DCFC and until more DCFC appears in useful locations then things will get worse before they get better.

I think you underestimate the amount of locals who own a Ioniq5 or and EV6 who use EA stations as their ONLY source of charging. Look at the Gainesville location every afternoon, it’s full constantly, big college town with very little fast chargers and people with new cars.

 

[phil]

Yes, it's getting bad. I just completed a 1,750-mile trip across six Western states in my GTPE. Two of those states had no fast chargers at all. The others were adequately served by EA charging stations. But at every station, at least one or two of the units were out of service.

Still, I managed to get a charge at all the EA stations I visited. But sometimes people were waiting to use the only units that happened to be in service at the time...

Long EV trips sure don't seem worth the hassle. Road trips are why God made gasoline.

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