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EA decides to shut down chargers along nearly 500 miles of I-95 over long holiday weekend to perform upgrades

electruck

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trickflow

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THIS is why I am still skeptical about any car beside a Tesla. Superchargers that are down are shown on the screen on my Tesla. I sure hope that in a year or 2 the public infrastructure is better....
 

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Superchargers that are down are shown on the screen on my Tesla.
The EA sights were shown as being down on plug share. The issue isn't with them being shown as down, the issue is with them shutting down multiple chargers over a large stretch of highway at the same time.
 
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electruck

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If a single station is down and shows in an app then you can always alter your charging stops accordingly. When all chargers along a 500 mile stretch of highway are down (which, if you're reading this EA, should never ever happen) customers should be given weeks if not several months advance notice of this maintenance. A service outage of this magnitude will force many customers to either rent an ICE vehicle for their holiday road trip or buy a plane ticket and fly - both of which require advanced planning. Others will have to cancel holiday road trips and may need enough advance notice to cancel ancillary reservations for hotels, cabin rentals, boat charters, etc.

This kind of maintenance scenario is something that simply can not be allowed to happen under any circumstances.
 

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This kind of maintenance scenario is something that simply can not be allowed to happen under any circumstances.
100% agreed. This is ridiculous and inconsiderate on their part.
 

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The EA sights were shown as being down on plug share. The issue isn't with them being shown as down, the issue is with them shutting down multiple chargers over a large stretch of highway at the same time.
I hope that they will have EA integration on screen. When planning a trip on the tesla I do believe that it will not route you to down super chargers. However this:
This kind of maintenance scenario is something that simply can not be allowed to happen under any circumstances.
As said should NEVER be allowed to happen. Take down 1 at a time and give ample notice. This is just such a fail on the part of EA.
 

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Here is some info I found:
Electrify America will proactively identify planned upgrade actions in advance on the EA Mobile App + on PlugShare. EV drivers are asked to check the EA Mobile App or PlugShare to identify the status of the charging stations affected by these upgrade actions.
- You must be *logged into* the @ElectrifyAm app to get those station-status updates
- the app logs you out after a period of no use. So unless you know to log back in before checking status of a location, you won't get the alert.
 
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electruck

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Here is some info I found:
Electrify America will proactively identify planned upgrade actions in advance on the EA Mobile App + on PlugShare. EV drivers are asked to check the EA Mobile App or PlugShare to identify the status of the charging stations affected by these upgrade actions.
- You must be *logged into* the @ElectrifyAm app to get those station-status updates
- the app logs you out after a period of no use. So unless you know to log back in before checking status of a location, you won't get the alert.
Yes, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with communicating plans for mass outages. This is partly why maintenance should be staggered instead of performed en masse.

Charging networks should be treated as critical national infrastructure with requirements for high availability.
 

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I have the EA App, and look at that and at PlugShare, prior to any trip. Closed stations will show a wrench on the PlugShare App. But, even looking at those apps does not tell the whole story, many times the EA app shows station as available, but it still fails to initiate when you get there.

EA needs to provide the status of the chargers on their web site. That is much easier to navigate than to use the app on a phone. Today you can view each location on the web site, but nothing indicates which chargers are working and which ones are not. The App on the phone is extremely slow to navigate and view each individual charger status. I think their web site should have a trip planner, enter start and stop locations, then show status of every charger along the way, and any planned outages.
 

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EA needs to start treating this as an actual product and asset rather than simply DieselGate restitution.
 

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This is, of course, good news but the price is pretty steep. I think it is around twice what Tesla charges and is 7 times what a kWh costs me at home where, of course, i will do most of my charging. There would, at these prices, be no fuel savings in driving my R1T vs my Lexus SUV on a long trip. In fact it appears the R1T would cost me more in fuel. Now that doesn't really bother me as I don't do that many long trips but I think it is a potential problem for Rivian as it takes away one of the major arguments for a BEV. Hard to sell the fuel savings advantage of an adventure vehicle if one only gets those advantages at home. Thus I think Rivian will probably strike some sort of deal with EA (hasn't Lucid done this?) to give us a year or 3 free EA charging and, of course, a "plug and charge" setup would be nice too.
 
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electruck

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Someone double check my math but it appears that paying to charge a Rivian by the minute at EA's 350 kW price tier would be far, far cheaper than paying their per kWh price? I think EA's statement was that per kWh was more fair but the article leads off with a statement about lower prices - I guess that is relative to current per-minute prices? Is this really just a scheme to jack up prices overall? I agree per kWh is the way they should be charging but also agree with AJ that the current price is steep. It will be interesting to see what sort of discount the vehicle manufacturers are able to secure. Hopefully rates will drop further with increasing EV adoption.
 

ajdelange

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Keep in mind that you will not be able to charge your Rivian at 350 kW even though you are at a 350 kW capable charger. Those can charge 800 V vehicles at 350 kW but not 400V ones until their manufacturers implement a series/parallel capability like the one Rivian has patented or install DC/DC converters (unlikely IMO). I believe the most CCS allows for, or, rather, I believe the most the EA 350 kW charger connectors can handle, is 500 A which, for a 400 V battery means a maximum of 200 kW. In addition to that the car will taper the charge rate as the battery SoC gets higher so it takes longer to add 1 kWh at the end of charge than at the beginning. Be sure to take this into account when comparing the two schemes.

Per kWh charging is much fairer in the sense that one is not charged for power he can't take nor is he penalized for the peculiarities of his cars taper algorithm. What is not so fair is that people in states where electricity is much cheaper than average pay the same as states where it is more expensive.
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