Charging Experience while traveling

[Dustus]

Maybe this video has been posted before on the forums as it is a year old now, but it gave me serious concerns about ever traveling with the Mach e any real distance from my house. My question, since this is a year old is has the system improved that you know of?

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[generaltso]

My question, since this is a year old is has the system improved that you know of?

Yes. And @OutofSpecKyle has said as much.

 

[Dustus]

Yes. And @OutofSpecKyle has said as much.

Good to hear. I searched his channel but haven't watched everything. Assuming it had improved since I hadn't heard of these issues recently.

 

[chuckles]

I use PlugShare charger ratings to avoid broken or problematic stations. I favor Electrify America stations, but anything under a score of 8 is suspect, and I look for recently-reported successes specifically with their CCS plug(s) (we don't care if the CHaDeMo plug works!)

A Better Route Planner and the built-in Ford Navigation both integrate PlugShare's information, but their data sometimes seems stale, and doesn't match the latest score in PlugShare, so I double-check.

 

[generaltso]

Good to hear. I searched his channel but haven't watched everything. Assuming it had improved since I hadn't heard of these issues recently.

Plug and Charge was a bit of a mess when the MME first launched, which was the source of most of the problems in that video. Kyle took a road trip after that with a CA Rte 1, and I remember him saying it was flawless. But I don't remember if he posted a video of it.

 

[chuckles]

Knock on wood, but Plug and Charge at Electrify America stations have been flawless for me for the past 10 months.

 

[RockwallRick]

Knock on wood, but Plug and Charge at Electrify America stations have been flawless for me for the past 10 months.

I wish I could say that but the last time I tried one 3 out of 4 stations were not in working condition!

 

[fdny37]

Hello, being a former Chevy Bolt owner for three plus years believe none of what you hear and half of what you see. I live in Las Vegas now and my wife and I took a trip to San Diego in September of 2018 with the Bolt. What a big mistake that was. One would think that a heavily traveled corridor like Vegas to Southern Cali would have a decent amount of chargers (not to be). What should be a 4 hour trip was now 8 hours. Then when you do find a charger that actually works there are two cars ahead of you each charging for an hour apiece, then add in your one hour charge and you have a three hour charging session. Now I realize this was three years ago but not all that much has changed. There are now more charging stations but not so much where they are needed (Walmart parking lots, really! How about along the freeways where they are needed.
I do have another vehicle which I use for long trips. If an electric car is all you have then all I can say is good luck with that.

 

[chuckles]

One would think that a heavily traveled corridor like Vegas to Southern Cali would have a decent amount of chargers (not to be).

Yup. It's a sad state of affairs, but it is getting better in many parts of the country.

Currently, any non-trivial trip really does require some quality time spent ahead of time with A Better Route Planner and PlugShare to verify that you'll have at least one good place to charge, and ideally an option that has free spots so you don't have to wait: EA's app has real-time charger in-use updates that can help, and ABRP's new real-time energy consumption (via an OBD BLE dongle) makes this a bit easier while on the road, too.

 

[zhackwyatt]

Knock on wood, but Plug and Charge at Electrify America stations have been flawless for me for the past 10 months.

For whatever it's worth, I've charged a total of 6 times at 4 different EA stations and Plug and Charge worked flawlessly.

 

[VegStang]

P&C has improved considerably over the last year, almost flawless on my last 2 road trips. There has been issues with broken chargers across the various providers, but even that has improved slightly from 12 months ago.

Just be sure to check the stations along the way before heading out- if network status is unavailable have a backup (here in Calif there generally are some.) The free CalTrans stations (50kwh) are a glaring exception, what was a great option is now ony 25% available.

 

[timbop]

There are 2 things being conflated in this thread: whether an EA charge works, and whether plug-n-charge works at that EA station. P&C has indeed been fixed by EA, although there might be some older chargers that don't have the update. As for how many stations are working, that too has gotten better but use plugshare to see which stations have reliable chargers and which don't.

As for @fdny37 's experience, I would not go by that. In terms of charging infrastructure that was a long time ago, and the bolt has much slower DCFC charging. As long as you do your homework ahead of time you should be fine.

 

[timbop]

There are lots of trip logs in the forum to look at for a more recent take, and here's one as a representative sample:
https://www.macheforum.com/site/threads/mach-e-gt-2-200-mile-road-trip.16528/

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