My trip from hell and why ICE will remain my choice for business drives.

[DevSecOps]

Preface:

As you all know I'm a straight shooter, I speak my mind and mostly defend the MME and have always tried to shoot down all the members here who pull sh*t out of thin air and preach it as gospel. I've had the car for 6 months now and I've used all of the 500 free KW from Ford at DCFC. I have 10k miles on the car and I've used P&C exclusively on EA stations and it's been great! I think I had one station in all my travels that was slow to initiate, so I moved to the one next to it, otherwise I have nothing bad to say about public charging or EA.

As a bit of a backstory, on Saturday I received a notification from one of our systems at a high security location which reported a unidentified person in an unauthorized area. This was unusual as the system uses ML (AI) to identify firstly a person, and secondly the identity of the person. When it can't identify someone it's normally not a good thing. So I pull up the data and saw that one of the cameras that uses lasers to identify people at up to 800 yards away was reporting power issues, which is why it didn't return a facial match. Therefore, myself and one of my employees had to go to this location yesterday and identify the problem.

For those of you who remember some of my past posts, I've said many times that I always take my ICE Audi on work trips because it's just too long in the MME. Well, it's warmed up a bit (70s) and since I had a day before my travels, I carefully planned a route to a client that shouldn't have added too much time to my trip ... and that's when all hell broke loose.

My Route:

191 Miles
ICE Time = 2 hrs 45 min
Estimated EV Time = 3 hrs 10 minutes
Actual EV Time = 4 hrs 15 minutes

So here was my plan. I decided I would go from Sacramento to Santa Nella (the bottom right corner before heading west). Getting to Santa Nella would require exactly 50% of my battery based on my estimations. My idea was to get to a brand new (went online a week ago) Greenlots station at this junction, charge to 80% and that would get me to my destination and then back to the same Greenlots for a top-off to get home. I estimated about 15 minutes each time.

In Santa Nella itself there's some Chargepoint chargers but they are all 50KW and the Greenlots that just opened was a 200/100KW. I even called Greenlots just to make sure that the charger was operational and was told it was. The closest EA station is in a city called Los Banos (yes that's "the bathrooms" in English) and it's going East from the same junction and would add 20 miles to my trip, so I didn't want to go that route.

Here's what happened:

So I get to the Greenlots station at 48% SOC, really close to my estimated 50%. Pull up the the charger and it's out of service. Move to the next one over and it's on, so I get out of the car and plug in. I figured that P&C would work and that was the first thing that failed. This was followed by the red ring of error. I then open the FordPass app, disconnect the charger, cancel the session, plug back in and told FordPass to start the charge. Red rings again, FordPass also tells me there's an error. Open the Greenlots app, first attempt failed, second finally started the charge.

Ok so now after 15 minutes messing with it I'm charging... I figure I'll go take a leak at the Shell gas station, get a snack and walk back. My guess was 15 minutes and that would be perfect. I look at the EV charger and I'm at 40KW being delivered, not the 200/100KW advertised. So I go anyway, come back and it says I'll be done in 40 minutes to 80% ... at this rate I'll never get there. So I decide, I'll unplug and hit the next DCFC on my route in Prunedale.

I make it to the station in Prunedale and there's 6 open stalls, none in use. I pick the middle one and pull up. It's an EVGO station and they like to give names to all their stations, well this one was named "Chucky". I guess that should have been my first clue to move to another stall, but that didn't cross my mind at the time. I get out my EVGO app (since I used EVGO almost exclusively with my last EV, but hadn't yet with the MME). I grabbed the charge cable, plugged it into the car, told the app to start charging and the screen said "Initiating Session". About 10 seconds later the "Charge Pack" (those white cages behind the charging station) exploded. If there's something that will make you sh*t your pants, trust me, that's it. It was the loudest explosion noise I've ever heard and I've been around firearms my whole life. It was so loud that people came out of the businesses in the area to see what happened. Immediately in the EVGO app all of the stations went out of service. The car didn't give me any error. So I just unplugged and went on my way.

The next and last DCFC was at a Walmart in Salinas and it was a EA station. I decided to go there. Low and behold I pull up and 4 stations have ICE vehicles in them, but there's 1 station, a 350KW, open, so I plug in, juice up a little and make it to my destination, over an hour longer than I expected.

My Return Trip:

Ok so I get there, we determine the issue and I'm driving back 2 hours later. This time I decided I would just stop in Los Banos, even though it's out of my way by 20 miles and charge at the trusty EA station and head home and ultimately that's what I did. On my way down, and after the explosion, my nerves were rattled, I was frustrated and I wasn't paying attention to the car much, but as I'm driving home I notice that my GPS is stuck on that charging station that exploded. I know people had been reporting GPS issues lately, but they were reporting minor issues (as if the govt adjusted the accuracy). Years back we didn't have the preciseness that we do now and in times of conflict we have always assumed they might make it slightly off. But this was different. I didn't have Bluecruise (because it assumed I was stopped at a charger) and I didn't have nav, which I didn't need to get home as I drive the route bi-weekly, but I want Waze to tell me where those pesky radar guns are. As you can see in the images below I had 0 GPS satellites locked after 3 hours of driving.

I don't know if my GPS issues were wide spread or because of the incident, but they were real. When I got home I did a battery pull and reset the car and the GPS returned to normal.

So what's my take:

I will not drive my MME to locations with sparse DCFC's and possibly not at all for business purposes. Not only did I add 2+ hours to my already 6 hour drive, but the overall experience, albeit extremely rare, just makes me think that I still can't trust the vehicle/charging infrastructure for mission critical applications.

I have a lot of patience and if I was traveling without a time crunch then I might have been more relaxed and had a "no biggie" attitude. There's a lot of members here who are retired and maybe for them it wouldn't be a big deal either.

I didn't buy an EV to save the world. I purchased one because it saves a lot of money when charging at home and the GTPE is a fun car. That being said, there's nothing that would make me want to take this trip with it again and honestly if there's anything long distance work related where time is money, I think I'll stick with ICE. Maybe one day things will be better in the EV realm for longer distance travels but my experience yesterday is exactly the reason that so many people are hesitant to purchase an EV, and I agree with that assessment. This isn't my first EV, won't be my last, but as someone who is honest, these cars aren't for everyone.

I think if we've learned anything on this forum it's that people with little patience (or technological patience) have the biggest issues with the MME. We have a ways to come before these vehicles will suite all purposes.

Another takeaway - If your GPS fails because of exploding charging stations then just do a battery pull.

Closing statement:

Yes I reported the EVGO issue to them. They were extremely concerned about it.

Actual starting and ending locations are not exact and this work was performed at a private business (non-governmental).

I do NOT permit the use of my story or content for publication outside of this forum.

 

[Mawby]

Preface:

As you all know I'm a straight shooter, I speak my mind and mostly defend the MME and have always tried to shoot down all the members here who pull sh*t out of thin air and preach it as gospel. I've had the car for 6 months now and I've used all of the 500 free KW from Ford at DCFC. I have 10k miles on the car and I've used P&C exclusively on EA stations and it's been great! I think I had one station in all my travels that was slow to initiate, so I moved to the one next to it, otherwise I have nothing bad to say about public charging or EA.

As a bit of a backstory, on Saturday I received a notification from one of our systems at a high security location which reported a unidentified person in an unauthorized area. This was unusual as the system uses ML (AI) to identify firstly a person, and secondly the identity of the person. When it can't identify someone it's normally not a good thing. So I pull up the data and saw that one of the cameras that uses lasers to identify people at up to 800 yards away was reporting power issues, which is why it didn't return a facial match. Therefore, myself and one of my employees had to go to this location yesterday and identify the problem.

For those of you who remember some of my past posts, I've said many times that I always take my ICE Audi on work trips because it's just too long in the MME. Well, it's warmed up a bit (70s) and since I had a day before my travels, I carefully planned a route to a client that shouldn't have added too much time to my trip ... and that's when all hell broke loose.

My Route:

191 Miles
ICE Time = 2 hrs 45 min
Estimated EV Time = 3 hrs 10 minutes
Actual EV Time = 4 hrs 15 minutes

View attachment 55983

So here was my plan. I decided I would go from Sacramento to Santa Nella (the bottom right corner before heading west). Getting to Santa Nella would require exactly 50% of my battery based on my estimations. My idea was to get to a brand new (went online a week ago) Greenlots station at this junction, charge to 80% and that would get me to my destination and then back to the same Greenlots for a top-off to get home. I estimated about 15 minutes each time.

In Santa Nella itself there's some Chargepoint chargers but they are all 50KW and the Greenlots that just opened was a 200/100KW. I even called Greenlots just to make sure that the charger was operational and was told it was. The closest EA station is in a city called Los Banos (yes that's "the bathrooms" in English) and it's going East from the same junction and would add 20 miles to my trip, so I didn't want to go that route.

Here's what happened:

So I get to the Greenlots station at 48% SOC, really close to my estimated 50%. Pull up the the charger and it's out of service. Move to the next one over and it's on, so I get out of the car and plug in. I figured that P&C would work and that was the first thing that failed. This was followed by the red ring of error. I then open the FordPass app, disconnect the charger, cancel the session, plug back in and told FordPass to start the charge. Red rings again, FordPass also tells me there's an error. Open the Greenlots app, first attempt failed, second finally started the charge.

Ok so now after 15 minutes messing with it I'm charging... I figure I'll go take a leak at the Shell gas station, get a snack and walk back. My guess was 15 minutes and that would be perfect. I look at the EV charger and I'm at 40KW being delivered, not the 200/100KW advertised. So I go anyway, come back and it says I'll be done in 40 minutes to 80% ... at this rate I'll never get there. So I decide, I'll unplug and hit the next DCFC on my route in Prunedale.

I make it to the station in Prunedale and there's 6 open stalls, none in use. I pick the middle one and pull up. It's an EVGO station and they like to give names to all their stations, well this one was named "Chucky". I guess that should have been my first clue to move to another stall, but that didn't cross my mind at the time. I get out my EVGO app (since I used EVGO almost exclusively with my last EV, but hadn't yet with the MME). I grabbed the charge cable, plugged it into the car, told the app to start charging and the screen said "Initiating Session". About 10 seconds later the "Charge Pack" (those white cages behind the charging station) exploded. If there's something that will make you sh*t your pants, trust me, that's it. It was the loudest explosion noise I've ever heard and I've been around firearms my whole life. It was so loud that people came out of the businesses in the area to see what happened. Immediately in the EVGO app all of the stations went out of service. The car didn't give me any error. So I just unplugged and went on my way.

The next and last DCFC was at a Walmart in Salinas and it was a EA station. I decided to go there. Low and behold I pull up and 4 stations have ICE vehicles in them, but there's 1 station, a 350KW, open, so I plug in, juice up a little and make it to my destination, over an hour longer than I expected.

My Return Trip:

Ok so I get there, we determine the issue and I'm driving back 2 hours later. This time I decided I would just stop in Los Banos, even though it's out of my way by 20 miles and charge at the trusty EA station and head home and ultimately that's what I did. On my way down, and after the explosion, my nerves were rattled, I was frustrated and I wasn't paying attention to the car much, but as I'm driving home I notice that my GPS is stuck on that charging station that exploded. I know people had been reporting GPS issues lately, but they were reporting minor issues (as if the govt adjusted the accuracy). Years back we didn't have the preciseness that we do now and in times of conflict we have always assumed they might make it slightly off. But this was different. I didn't have Bluecruise (because it assumed I was stopped at a charger) and I didn't have nav, which I didn't need to get home as I drive the route bi-weekly, but I want Waze to tell me where those pesky radar guns are. As you can see in the images below I had 0 GPS satellites locked after 3 hours of driving.

I don't know if my GPS issues were wide spread or because of the incident, but they were real. When I got home I did a battery pull and reset the car and the GPS returned to normal.

So what's my take:

I will not drive my MME to locations with sparse DCFC's and possibly not at all for business purposes. Not only did I add 2+ hours to my already 6 hour drive, but the overall experience, albeit extremely rare, just makes me think that I still can't trust the vehicle/charging infrastructure for mission critical applications.

I have a lot of patience and if I was traveling without a time crunch then I might have been more relaxed and had a "no biggie" attitude. There's a lot of members here who are retired and maybe for them it wouldn't be a big deal either.

I didn't buy an EV to save the world. I purchased one because it saves a lot of money when charging at home and the GTPE is a fun car. That being said, there's nothing that would make me want to take this trip with it again and honestly if there's anything long distance work related where time is money, I think I'll stick with ICE. Maybe one day things will be better in the EV realm for longer distance travels but my experience yesterday is exactly the reason that so many people are hesitant to purchase an EV, and I agree with that assessment. This isn't my first EV, won't be my last, but as someone who is honest, these cars aren't for everyone.

I think if we've learned anything on this forum it's that people with little patience (or technological patience) have the biggest issues with the MME. We have a ways to come before these vehicles will suite all purposes.

Another takeaway - If your GPS fails because of exploding charging stations then just do a battery pull.

Closing statement:

Yes I reported the EVGO issue to them. They were extremely concerned about it.

I do NOT permit the use of my story or content for publication outside of this forum.

Thanks for sharing. That explosion needs an explanation. That is shocking.

 

[KevinS]

Wow. Helluva story. Thanks for sharing.

 

[ebeponyan]

That is shocking.

Thankfully not literally.

 

[Budman]

The EV purists won't like this but the plug-in hybrid design solution like the Chevy Volt makes a ton of sense. Use the battery for your short range, day-to-day driving and have the ICE for your long range road trips. I have a 2018 Volt and it's been a great car. Less cost for the big battery pack that you don't really tap into often.

 

[AKgrampy]

That sounds like a crazy trip! It would be interesting to find out what failed at the charging station.

 

[Logal727]

Crazy story, thankfully things should picking up in terms of infrastructure.

 

[heisnuts]

Your story points out the limitations of having an EV on a road trip. We experienced delays and frustrations on our road trip back from the selling dealer (since it was over 250 miles away from home). Like you said, it is usually not a problem if you have the time and the patience for it, but for longer trips where you want to reduce the possibility of delays and frustrations with fill-ups I still think it is better to stick with an ICE vehicle for the present time.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the MME and now drive it daily because it is just so much better than an ICE vehicle for around town, but when it comes to the occasional long road trip I think we will be sticking with our ICE vehicles for right now.

 

[0t60-3.5]

Great insights. I concur on most fronts.

And in cold climates, the range loss can bite as well as winter approaches in sparse infrastructure. The range loss heightens the infrastructure issues (lack of stations, problems).

We saw a VW ID.4 being delivered by a tow truck on Thanksgiving day. It was heading from Chicago west to somewhere in Iowa on I-80 - a major nationwide thoroughfare. He fell about 8 miles short of the EA station at a Casey's convenience store in Geneseo, IL. The headwind and lowering range in the cold temps bit him.

There is no DCFC from Chicagoland S/W suburbs (EA in Joliet, IL) until Geneseo, IL (EA) on I-80, about 113 miles. That's not good with headwind and cold temps causing loss of range.

 

[Jimrpa]

Preface:

As you all know I'm a straight shooter, I speak my mind and mostly defend the MME and have always tried to shoot down all the members here who pull sh*t out of thin air and preach it as gospel. I've had the car for 6 months now and I've used all of the 500 free KW from Ford at DCFC. I have 10k miles on the car and I've used P&C exclusively on EA stations and it's been great! I think I had one station in all my travels that was slow to initiate, so I moved to the one next to it, otherwise I have nothing bad to say about public charging or EA.

As a bit of a backstory, on Saturday I received a notification from one of our systems at a high security location which reported a unidentified person in an unauthorized area. This was unusual as the system uses ML (AI) to identify firstly a person, and secondly the identity of the person. When it can't identify someone it's normally not a good thing. So I pull up the data and saw that one of the cameras that uses lasers to identify people at up to 800 yards away was reporting power issues, which is why it didn't return a facial match. Therefore, myself and one of my employees had to go to this location yesterday and identify the problem.

For those of you who remember some of my past posts, I've said many times that I always take my ICE Audi on work trips because it's just too long in the MME. Well, it's warmed up a bit (70s) and since I had a day before my travels, I carefully planned a route to a client that shouldn't have added too much time to my trip ... and that's when all hell broke loose.

My Route:

191 Miles
ICE Time = 2 hrs 45 min
Estimated EV Time = 3 hrs 10 minutes
Actual EV Time = 4 hrs 15 minutes

View attachment 55983

So here was my plan. I decided I would go from Sacramento to Santa Nella (the bottom right corner before heading west). Getting to Santa Nella would require exactly 50% of my battery based on my estimations. My idea was to get to a brand new (went online a week ago) Greenlots station at this junction, charge to 80% and that would get me to my destination and then back to the same Greenlots for a top-off to get home. I estimated about 15 minutes each time.

In Santa Nella itself there's some Chargepoint chargers but they are all 50KW and the Greenlots that just opened was a 200/100KW. I even called Greenlots just to make sure that the charger was operational and was told it was. The closest EA station is in a city called Los Banos (yes that's "the bathrooms" in English) and it's going East from the same junction and would add 20 miles to my trip, so I didn't want to go that route.

Here's what happened:

So I get to the Greenlots station at 48% SOC, really close to my estimated 50%. Pull up the the charger and it's out of service. Move to the next one over and it's on, so I get out of the car and plug in. I figured that P&C would work and that was the first thing that failed. This was followed by the red ring of error. I then open the FordPass app, disconnect the charger, cancel the session, plug back in and told FordPass to start the charge. Red rings again, FordPass also tells me there's an error. Open the Greenlots app, first attempt failed, second finally started the charge.

Ok so now after 15 minutes messing with it I'm charging... I figure I'll go take a leak at the Shell gas station, get a snack and walk back. My guess was 15 minutes and that would be perfect. I look at the EV charger and I'm at 40KW being delivered, not the 200/100KW advertised. So I go anyway, come back and it says I'll be done in 40 minutes to 80% ... at this rate I'll never get there. So I decide, I'll unplug and hit the next DCFC on my route in Prunedale.

I make it to the station in Prunedale and there's 6 open stalls, none in use. I pick the middle one and pull up. It's an EVGO station and they like to give names to all their stations, well this one was named "Chucky". I guess that should have been my first clue to move to another stall, but that didn't cross my mind at the time. I get out my EVGO app (since I used EVGO almost exclusively with my last EV, but hadn't yet with the MME). I grabbed the charge cable, plugged it into the car, told the app to start charging and the screen said "Initiating Session". About 10 seconds later the "Charge Pack" (those white cages behind the charging station) exploded. If there's something that will make you sh*t your pants, trust me, that's it. It was the loudest explosion noise I've ever heard and I've been around firearms my whole life. It was so loud that people came out of the businesses in the area to see what happened. Immediately in the EVGO app all of the stations went out of service. The car didn't give me any error. So I just unplugged and went on my way.

The next and last DCFC was at a Walmart in Salinas and it was a EA station. I decided to go there. Low and behold I pull up and 4 stations have ICE vehicles in them, but there's 1 station, a 350KW, open, so I plug in, juice up a little and make it to my destination, over an hour longer than I expected.

My Return Trip:

Ok so I get there, we determine the issue and I'm driving back 2 hours later. This time I decided I would just stop in Los Banos, even though it's out of my way by 20 miles and charge at the trusty EA station and head home and ultimately that's what I did. On my way down, and after the explosion, my nerves were rattled, I was frustrated and I wasn't paying attention to the car much, but as I'm driving home I notice that my GPS is stuck on that charging station that exploded. I know people had been reporting GPS issues lately, but they were reporting minor issues (as if the govt adjusted the accuracy). Years back we didn't have the preciseness that we do now and in times of conflict we have always assumed they might make it slightly off. But this was different. I didn't have Bluecruise (because it assumed I was stopped at a charger) and I didn't have nav, which I didn't need to get home as I drive the route bi-weekly, but I want Waze to tell me where those pesky radar guns are. As you can see in the images below I had 0 GPS satellites locked after 3 hours of driving.

I don't know if my GPS issues were wide spread or because of the incident, but they were real. When I got home I did a battery pull and reset the car and the GPS returned to normal.

So what's my take:

I will not drive my MME to locations with sparse DCFC's and possibly not at all for business purposes. Not only did I add 2+ hours to my already 6 hour drive, but the overall experience, albeit extremely rare, just makes me think that I still can't trust the vehicle/charging infrastructure for mission critical applications.

I have a lot of patience and if I was traveling without a time crunch then I might have been more relaxed and had a "no biggie" attitude. There's a lot of members here who are retired and maybe for them it wouldn't be a big deal either.

I didn't buy an EV to save the world. I purchased one because it saves a lot of money when charging at home and the GTPE is a fun car. That being said, there's nothing that would make me want to take this trip with it again and honestly if there's anything long distance work related where time is money, I think I'll stick with ICE. Maybe one day things will be better in the EV realm for longer distance travels but my experience yesterday is exactly the reason that so many people are hesitant to purchase an EV, and I agree with that assessment. This isn't my first EV, won't be my last, but as someone who is honest, these cars aren't for everyone.

I think if we've learned anything on this forum it's that people with little patience (or technological patience) have the biggest issues with the MME. We have a ways to come before these vehicles will suite all purposes.

Another takeaway - If your GPS fails because of exploding charging stations then just do a battery pull.

Closing statement:

Yes I reported the EVGO issue to them. They were extremely concerned about it.

I do NOT permit the use of my story or content for publication outside of this forum.

Thanks for sharing your experience!
It highlights a couple of things in my mind:

• Our charging infrastructure in this country is not yet pervasive (I should use a better word) enough to make using BEVs a “no thought” choice
• The underlying technology, no matter how cool, just isn’t mature enough to make BEVs a “no thought” choice. It feels like we are in the early years of USB, which was touted as “plug and play”, but which, in reality was “plug and pray”

My thinking is that BEVs are just now moving from the exotic “hand cranked” vehicles of the early 1900s that were curiosities and used by knowledgeable people or only for shorter trips, to the “tin lizzy “ era. We aren’t at the “tin lizzy” era yet, but I think we are getting close. In the meantime, people like yourself are still going to have to keep a horse in the barn just a while longer when you need dependable transportation to get you somewhere.

 

[mccdeuce]

In another thread there is a reference to charging stations not taking payment. Multiple on the same trip, and the question of how many times does one come across a gas station that wont accept payment? What has caused all these poor charging stations? The parts that are often failing is the payment side - which shouldnt be that difficult.

Imagine an explosion at a gas pump. Explosion of an electrical transformer can still be quite dangerous - under EVGo was extremely concerned but did they do anything about it?

 

[TGIF]

The EV purists won't like this but the plug-in hybrid design solution like the Chevy Volt makes a ton of sense. Use the battery for your short range, day-to-day driving and have the ICE for your long range road trips. I have a 2018 Volt and it's been a great car. Less cost for the big battery pack that you don't really tap into often.

DD has a Volt and loves it. She will try to use public chargers when available and is in an area with a lot of chargers so she can maximize her use of battery power. We have a Pacifica PHEV and it will be our ”ICE” back up car when we get our MME. It is also what convinced us to go for a BEV for our new primary vehicle.

 

[mikeinet]

any pics of the exploded charging station?? did it cause a fire?

 

[DevSecOps]

any pics of the exploded charging station?? did it cause a fire?

I have dashcam video of the charging stall, which just shows it going from "initiating charging" to a set of wrenches with an error message. Due to state laws I don't have audio enabled on my dashcam.

There was no fire, just a very loud pop noise followed by a loud sound of something striking metal. Something inside that charging pack caused it, but honestly I have no idea what goes on in those things.

That sounds like a crazy trip! It would be interesting to find out what failed at the charging station.

Later in the day when I stopped at the EA, there was a repair guy working on that station and I asked him what would cause it and he said he had no idea. But he wanted to tell his supervisor so he got my info. He said, it could be a number of things but he hasn't heard of that happening yet.

EVGo was extremely concerned but did they do anything about it?

I have no idea. I assume they'll do something. The guy who took my call was like, "wait a second, what happened?"

 

[Billyk24]

Your story points out the limitations of having an EV on a road trip. We experienced delays and frustrations on our road trip back from the selling dealer (since it was over 250 miles away from home). Like you said, it is usually not a problem if you have the time and the patience for it, but for longer trips where you want to reduce the possibility of delays and frustrations with fill-ups I still think it is better to stick with an ICE vehicle for the present time.

Don't get me wrong, I still love the MME and now drive it daily because it is just so much better than an ICE vehicle for around town, but when it comes to the occasional long road trip I think we will be sticking with our ICE vehicles for right now.

Those of us in the middle of the country and where real winter weather exists struggle with road tripping an ev. Insufficient number of dcfc chargers and as found in Michigan, New ones bring installed are 50 and 62.5kW chargers.

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