Out-of-order signs, payment errors and connection issues: WSJ visited 30 non-Tesla EV charging stations in LA, 40% had issues

[Redline]

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[P.S.Mangelsdorf]

Here's the thing that frustrates me with stories like these: a lot of these broken charger issues are due to age of the equipment in the LA area, and they get way over covered because that's where so much of the automotive press is located.

Back in September, I took my EV conversion, with 60-70 miles of range and CHAdeMO fast charging, on a week long road trip throughout the southeast (SC, NC, TN). I drove over 1100 miles, stopped at dozens of DC fast chargers, and only had 1 charger that was an issue. Yes, I had to plan ahead and find chargers near the required route, but I charged at all sorts of places and only had 1 ancient station that refused to communicate with the car.

Near where I live, there was an Electrify America station that was down for months on end. One of the times I stopped to see if it was back up, I spoke to another guy there with an F-150 Lightning, and he had been told by a tech that this particular station was one of the oldest on the east coast, and that's why it was often down and taking forever to fix.

The non-Tesla networks need to do some serious work on improving repairs, uptime, and responsiveness, but for areas with newer equipment, it's not this charging hellscape that LA seems to have.

 

[WorldComposting]

Just watched the video and I agree with a lot of what was said. Hopefully as they install newer units this gets better.

 

[Redline]

Here's the thing that frustrates me with stories like these: a lot of these broken charger issues are due to age of the equipment in the LA area, and they get way over covered because that's where so much of the automotive press is located.

Back in September, I took my EV conversion, with 60-70 miles of range and CHAdeMO fast charging, on a week long road trip throughout the southeast (SC, NC, TN). I drove over 1100 miles, stopped at dozens of DC fast chargers, and only had 1 charger that was an issue. Yes, I had to plan ahead and find chargers near the required route, but I charged at all sorts of places and only had 1 ancient station that refused to communicate with the car.

Near where I live, there was an Electrify America station that was down for months on end. One of the times I stopped to see if it was back up, I spoke to another guy there with an F-150 Lightning, and he had been told by a tech that this particular station was one of the oldest on the east coast, and that's why it was often down and taking forever to fix.

The non-Tesla networks need to do some serious work on improving repairs, uptime, and responsiveness, but for areas with newer equipment, it's not this charging hellscape that LA seems to have.

They do touch on that in the video.

 

[Guy]

Here's the thing that frustrates me with stories like these: a lot of these broken charger issues are due to age of the equipment in the LA area, and they get way over covered because that's where so much of the automotive press is located.

Back in September, I took my EV conversion, with 60-70 miles of range and CHAdeMO fast charging, on a week long road trip throughout the southeast (SC, NC, TN). I drove over 1100 miles, stopped at dozens of DC fast chargers, and only had 1 charger that was an issue. Yes, I had to plan ahead and find chargers near the required route, but I charged at all sorts of places and only had 1 ancient station that refused to communicate with the car.

Near where I live, there was an Electrify America station that was down for months on end. One of the times I stopped to see if it was back up, I spoke to another guy there with an F-150 Lightning, and he had been told by a tech that this particular station was one of the oldest on the east coast, and that's why it was often down and taking forever to fix.

The non-Tesla networks need to do some serious work on improving repairs, uptime, and responsiveness, but for areas with newer equipment, it's not this charging hellscape that LA seems to have.

How old is the equipment. If being say five years old leads to multiple issues then that is a problem because infrastructure shouldn’t need to be changed that often.

 

[PBRAZ]

Here's the thing that frustrates me with stories like these: a lot of these broken charger issues are due to age of the equipment in the LA area, and they get way over covered because that's where so much of the automotive press is located.

Back in September, I took my EV conversion, with 60-70 miles of range and CHAdeMO fast charging, on a week long road trip throughout the southeast (SC, NC, TN). I drove over 1100 miles, stopped at dozens of DC fast chargers, and only had 1 charger that was an issue. Yes, I had to plan ahead and find chargers near the required route, but I charged at all sorts of places and only had 1 ancient station that refused to communicate with the car.

Near where I live, there was an Electrify America station that was down for months on end. One of the times I stopped to see if it was back up, I spoke to another guy there with an F-150 Lightning, and he had been told by a tech that this particular station was one of the oldest on the east coast, and that's why it was often down and taking forever to fix.

The non-Tesla networks need to do some serious work on improving repairs, uptime, and responsiveness, but for areas with newer equipment, it's not this charging hellscape that LA seems to have.

I agree, although I would add that the higher frequency of usage is another big reason LA - and other metropolitan area - chargers are down more than chargers located in remote locations.

 

[WorldComposting]

How old is the equipment. If being say five years old leads to multiple issues then that is a problem because infrastructure shouldn’t need to be changed that often.

While 5 years is not a long time you have to remember that was the infancy of the charging networks and the DCFC technology was just starting to be built. Then you have the changing plugs from the standard j1772 home plug which is still around to Chademo to CCS and future NACS.

The newer systems built with a better design and more thought should work a lot better and hopefully have more longevity. Also some better companies that will stand by their product seem to be involved.

At least this is what I'm hoping for in the future better stations that can run full throttle all day and night without issue with a CCS and NACS connector on each unit and all can push out at least 150-200v with 99% uptime including no derating from heat or cold.

 

[P.S.Mangelsdorf]

How old is the equipment. If being say five years old leads to multiple issues then that is a problem because infrastructure shouldn’t need to be changed that often.

From my experiences, it seems that stations I run into with issues have either deferred maintenance (i.e. none, unless it breaks), or older software.

The maintenance issue seems to come down to the networks not having enough technicians, or only deploying them for repairs, not for regular servicing and checkups. I once had an issue with the station refusing to unlock, and it was going to be at least 4 hours to get a tech to a very heavily populated, very EV heavy city.

The software issue seems to be, from what we in the EV conversion world have learned, that the charging standards have some leeway in interpretation, specifically around timing. The WSJ article did touch on this, but it's not just doing the handshake quickly, sometimes you're too fast, or the timing between individual steps isn't quite right, etc. It gets frustrating to sort out for conversions. It seems to me that the newer stations are a bit more accommodating of small variations in the timing of the communications. (we're talking in milliseconds here)

 

[Zoidz]

...
The software issue seems to be, from what we in the EV conversion world have learned, that the charging standards have some leeway in interpretation, specifically around timing. The WSJ article did touch on this, but it's not just doing the handshake quickly, sometimes you're too fast, or the timing between individual steps isn't quite right, etc. It gets frustrating to sort out for conversions. It seems to me that the newer stations are a bit more accommodating of small variations in the timing of the communications. (we're talking in milliseconds here)

Interesting to hear this, but also disappointing and there's really no excuse other than poor programming that does not adhere to standards, or possibly a vague standard, which I doubt. Digital serial signaling techniques have been around for over 60 years, even before RS232 was a standard. This handshake is not rocket science. One of my college programming projects was to write code like this to communicate between two PCs in assembly language, controlling the UART serial pins directly, not using RS232. We developed the signaling standard as a team, and each of us had to write our own Z80 code to implement it. It was relatively easy and straightforward.

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