My experience with the new chargers is that they have many of the same issues as the old ones. I have had them output low power (32kw), stop after 30 seconds, and on one it ramped up to 218kw for a few minutes, then decided to only output 44kw. Had another one oscillate between 200kw and 44kw continuously. I have seen black screens on some of them also.
Your EA charging success "I have been to dozens and have been able to charge at all of them" certainly doesn't seem to be even close to the norm. There are literally thousands of posts here about failed EA charge attempts.
I do road trip quite often and always use Plugshare to manually map out my stops. Skip the sites with issues, as much as possible. Then in the truck I manually insert the next charging stop into the nav. If it tries to re-route me, I then just wait until I am about 30 miles out to insert the charger to get pre-conditioning.
Some what?
Some EA stations where all charger were inoperable. I'm not trying to say that EA is great or even good right now but they are serviceable to be able to travel long distances. And hopefully they get better or sell to another EV charger company that will prioritize charger up time. But Tesla won't be able to service all the EVs on the road today let alone 10 years from now. Sure they will build more chargers but won't keep up with the increase in EVs.
Does anyone have any hard evidence that pre-conditioning saves a meaningful amount of time? I just set nav to a location near the chargers to avoid BMS working harder than it needs to. Seems like the amount of energy you lose pre-conditioning would cancel out the time benefit it saves getting a better charging curve. I'm no expert, serious question...
I agree with everything you say above..
I agree, they need to fix their crap and make sure chargers are working. I'm hoping the new ones are more reliable and the seemed to simplify them by having one cord instead of two and only installing 350kw stations. Guess time will tell.
My comment wasn't directed to you. However, you've been on here a long time and know all the tools for successful EV travels. Instead you made the same mistake 4x and never learned and decided to start a thread to whine.
I'm hoping that when everyone can use the SC Network that EA will see such a dramatic drop in revenue they will be forced to finally get their act together. We all agree that we need more charging stations and station operators not less.
In summer months it will not make a difference, but in the winter it will make a big difference. The colder the battery, the less power it can take. And when below freezing, it will not charge at all.
You're not getting the message. Not here to whine. Here to educate and help others to avoid the same issues. While EA at this location is horrible, I owned up to my own mistake. Easy to do. My post was 100% purely to warn other Rivian owners to avoid this location. You apparently didn't read the rest of my post where I commented about HELPING others. All I was trying do here. I'm not part of the cancel culture environment. I believe in saying what you mean and not having to make excuses for it. If others want to manufacture false intentions from a good-willed statement or post, that's on them. I look for the positives first, not the other way around.
