New EA Chargers Are Failing in the Cold - Fixed!!?

[Tahoe Man]

Great video idea!

Diversify your participants and your audience will diversify and expand with it.

Have a single person drive and charge via the CCS network. Same with a married couple, family, elderly couple. Ask for their honest opinions at the end without nudging them. Don't sugar coat anything. Have them go out on different weather events, rain, night time, cold, heat...Different areas, maybe even shady areas of town to charge at night, ask them open ended questions.

Last, the common theme is your participants should hardly have any knowledge about electric vehicles.

I think this would be very useful for upcoming folks who are interested and grow your audience at the same time.

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[Marchin_MTB]

It would be useful to know the temperature at which these new EA stations start working again… any thoughts on this @OutofSpecKyle ? Any plans to test near 10F or 20F? … perhaps they even require a thaw to occur.

 

[Rally1]

Having spent 20mins doing battle with an EVGo charger today, I can’t disagree that in general the state of charging networks is underwhelming.

on a similar note:

 

[atebit]

Car makers should be encourage to invest in their own charging network specific to their own brand of vehicles.

IMHO the long-term way forward for public charging should be to emulate the current gasoline filling station experience in terms of location, availability and dwell time. Each manufacturer having their own “brand” of electrons is tantamount to saying that Toyotas and Lexus can only fill up at Valero, GM vehicles at BP, Ford & Lincoln at Exxon/Mobil, etc. How would this scenario scale?

I think for many of us on this forum, we have the luxury of public charging not being a day-to-day necessity. But for all the virtuous gummn’t mandates about being 100% electric by some date, it will never happen unless reliable, scalable public charging infrastructure is in place first. THAT’S what gummn’t should be mandating to be in place by 20xx; to do otherwise is putting the cart before the horse.

Charging system incompatibilities are no different that the early implementation struggles associated with other tech standards like RS-232 and Ethernet. Manufacturers can work out those bugs, but they need an incentive to do so. Can anyone imagine for instance Dell stating today, “If you want to connect your Dell laptop to an Ethernet network, you must use a Dell switch.”?

 

[Tahoe Man]

IMHO the long-term way forward for public charging should be to emulate the current gasoline filling station experience in terms of location, availability and dwell time. Each manufacturer having their own “brand” of electrons is tantamount to saying that Toyotas and Lexus can only fill up at Valero, GM vehicles at BP, Ford & Lincoln at Exxon/Mobil, etc. How would this scenario scale?

I think for many of us on this forum, we have the luxury of public charging not being a day-to-day necessity. But for all the virtuous gummn’t mandates about being 100% electric by some date, it will never happen unless reliable, scalable public charging infrastructure is in place first. THAT’S what gummn’t should be mandating to be in place by 20xx; to do otherwise is putting the cart before the horse.

Charging system incompatibilities are no different that the early implementation struggles associated with other tech standards like RS-232 and Ethernet. Manufacturers can work out those bugs, but they need an incentive to do so. Can anyone imagine for instance Dell stating today, “If you want to connect your Dell laptop to an Ethernet network, you must use a Dell switch.”?

But that is like stating the following: You want someone to design and buildout a nationwide infrastructure of electrical charging stations that is compatible with every electrical maker and also maintain and operate them. The problem with that is, there is no money in it. Zero. EA was created just for that and it has flopped.

Gas stations survive and flourish because they have diverse incomes. You go broke selling electricity. In fact it's so bad that you can't even purchase dedicated land for it....You have to do it in parking lots. This shouldn't be the future of travel.

By having manufactures have their own standard, they can do whatever they want. I would expect some would form a consortium, others might farm it out to a 3rd party. They can generate income similar to Tesla, by upfronting the fees or doing a subscription or perhaps a hybrid or whatever.

The bottom line is the current CCS system is barely hanging on, the government is having to inject billions to keep it going. Once that funding is dried up, then what? Is it expected the CCS fast charging system will magically be self sustaining then??? How? By selling a commodity in a parking lot? That's like trying to get rich selling water, it's not going to happen.

The CCS fast charging is off to a bad start, frankly it's a joke. Are we expected to have to find them from some app when everyone travels any distance for the next 20 years? Is it expected everyone needs to jump on another app to see which chargers work? Will old ladies have to manhandle the cables in cold weather? Half the chargers are usually dead or so. Nothing has changed. In the end nobody to wait around for a hour in Walmart parking lots to charge for the rest of their travel years either.

Encouraging manufacturers take over this role is the way to deal with it. There's nothing wrong with having closed systems. Expecting the gas station model to flourish to sell electricity is a pipe dream.

 

[Acoustic71]

I tried the EA that he visits second this afternoon, 3 new units still not working, about -3F. Didn't try the older model since I didn't actually need a charge.

Called EA just to let them know and they were not all that interested, they just wanted me to try the reset process for the individual station; I was just trying to let them know that 3/4 of the plugs were down.

Ugh. I was excited about these new units coming to some of the Colorado locations.

Actually, they seem to put a lot of effort into fatally sucking.

 

[Iwannarivian]

So EA continues it's perfect record of simply sucking.

EA in St Charles, MO sucked while I was there…I too didn’t think cold wx would be a factor…but, it is EA.

 

[s4wrxttcs]

IMHO the long-term way forward for public charging should be to emulate the current gasoline filling station experience in terms of location, availability and dwell time. Each manufacturer having their own “brand” of electrons is tantamount to saying that Toyotas and Lexus can only fill up at Valero, GM vehicles at BP, Ford & Lincoln at Exxon/Mobil, etc. How would this scenario scale?

I think for many of us on this forum, we have the luxury of public charging not being a day-to-day necessity. But for all the virtuous gummn’t mandates about being 100% electric by some date, it will never happen unless reliable, scalable public charging infrastructure is in place first. THAT’S what gummn’t should be mandating to be in place by 20xx; to do otherwise is putting the cart before the horse.

Charging system incompatibilities are no different that the early implementation struggles associated with other tech standards like RS-232 and Ethernet. Manufacturers can work out those bugs, but they need an incentive to do so. Can anyone imagine for instance Dell stating today, “If you want to connect your Dell laptop to an Ethernet network, you must use a Dell switch.”?

In my 8 years of experience with charging EV's on road trips I'd say the best solution is to tie them to 24/7 cafés with a good variety of food.

Where the café is designed to get people their food quickly so they can comfortable eat during the 15-40 minutes that they're charging.

Sure the café will need some automation, and a passcode door lock for afterhours use. Maybe something similar to an Amazon Go mixed with a Tesla lounge kind of setup.

They don't all need to be that way, but would be nice if there was a good amount of them mixed in with the chargers+fredmeyer type chargers.

The money to support the charging infrastructure itself would come from the charging, and the food would pay for the café and bathrooms. The federal money would help pay for the initial rollout.

 

[RoverZac]

This sucks. They finally started placing them in usable configurations.

 

[Dark-Fx]

Encouraging manufacturers take over this role is the way to deal with it. There's nothing wrong with having closed systems

Horribly bad idea. If Ford goes out of business you have no-where to charge your Ford and it becomes a brick immediately. Electricity is electricity, there should not be anything proprietary involved in fueling an electric car, period.

 

[chopsui]

Horribly bad idea. If Ford goes out of business you have no-where to charge your Ford and it becomes a brick immediately. Electricity is electricity, there should not be anything proprietary involved in fueling an electric car, period.

Not saying I agree with the idea (frankly, I'm not sure why that guy is even here) but the way to do it would be to ensure that there is a common connection standard, but the software will be proprietary, so that if some company goes out of business, their charging infrastructure can be bought by a competitor and enabled via software update.

 

[Tahoe Man]

Horribly bad idea. If Ford goes out of business you have no-where to charge your Ford and it becomes a brick immediately. Electricity is electricity, there should not be anything proprietary involved in fueling an electric car, period.

You mean as if Ford filed for Chapter 7 under Federal bankruptcy as in total liquidation? If there is a bankruptcy the parts and pieces of their assets would be reorganized, sold off, etc. Personally I could see that asset being valuable after total liquidation.

 

[Underwhirled]

We need more people placing charging stations like this. It’s a great start! They appear to be building at least one other station.

Franklin’s Charging Station

It may not be the cheapest, but if it is dependable it will be a big hit!

 

[brancky3]

We need more people placing charging stations like this. It’s a great start! They appear to be building at least one other station.

Franklin’s Charging Station

It may not be the cheapest, but if it is dependable it will be a big hit!

I think that major stations (Loves, Pilot, TA, etc) should get some subsidies to install chargers. Those are the only places I stopped with our ICE vehicles on a road trip and I ALWAYS went inside to buy something.

 

[Underwhirled]

I think that major stations (Loves, Pilot, TA, etc) should get some subsidies to install chargers. Those are the only places I stopped with our ICE vehicles on a road trip and I ALWAYS went inside to buy something.

I like that option too (and the Audi has stopped at a bunch of them), but having a dedicated charging stop that is a bit unique and cool would make my list of stops. Heck, at this point I have a trip tomorrow and welcome any working chargers on the way.

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