EA days are numbered for me

[Joules Burn]

I took trip from Sacramento to Long Beach and then San Diego an back. The Long Beach and San Diego were L2 hotel charging. The trip down I5 was seamless with RAN.

The Los Alamitos Fairfield Inn Marriott has seven L2 chargers for $10 a night. The Brew Kitchen Alehouse around the corner is a destination restaurant!

The Embassy Suites Hilton, San Diego, La Jolla has two two Tesla L2 chargers with perpetual Tesla parkers and one broken ChargePoint for $40 a night. I managed to work around it.

On the trip North, I stopped at an EA station in Long Beach and spent an hour with an ESL student trying to activate a charge between two chargers and three cables. I think they broke my activation access in my account. She said the problem must be my Rivian and I should get it serviced.

I moved on and went to a Tesla farm in Tejon Ranch at the base of the Grapevine. A good chance to test my A2Z adapter. 67 of 76 stalls open! It took couple whacks to set the new adapter base and away it went.

A half hour to visit the Tejon Subway and a short stay up the the road at a RAN to get me home.

My EA servitude is coming to an end!

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[RivianRunner]

I took trip from Sacramento to Long Beach and then San Diego an back. The Long Beach and San Diego were L2 hotel charging. The trip down I5 was seamless with RAN.

The Los Alamitos Fairfield Inn Marriott has seven L2 chargers for $10 a night. The Brew Kitchen Alehouse around the corner is a destination restaurant!

The Embassy Suites Hilton, San Diego, La Jolla has two two Tesla L2 chargers with perpetual Tesla parkers and one broken ChargePoint for $40 a night. I managed to work around it.

On the trip North, I stopped at an EA station in Long Beach and spent an hour with an ESL student trying to activate a charge between two chargers and three cables. I think they broke my activation access in my account. She said the problem must be my Rivian and I should get it serviced.

I moved on and went to a Tesla farm in Tejon Ranch at the base of the Grapevine. A good chance to test my A2Z adapter. 67 of 76 stalls open! It took couple whacks to set the new adapter base and away it went.

A half hour to visit the Tejon Subway and a short stay up the the road at a RAN to get me home.

My EA servitude is coming to an end!

Kudos!

I don't know how anyone puts up with EA. What is wrong with them? How can a private company be so inept at what they do? I gave up on them years ago. I generally run down to 5%-15% SOC for the fastest charging and need to know it's going to work when I arrive.

Supporting EA is the same as condoning their unacceptable level of service.

 

[sub]

Kudos!

I don't know how anyone puts up with EA...Supporting EA is the same as condoning their unacceptable level of service.

It was easy to put up with EA last year because they were the only company with CCS chargers faster than 50kw in a lot of places. And 50kw is not a realistic option on a road trip. The only realistic options were to use EA or sell the vehicle at a huge loss.

Now that there is a viable alternative, nope. I'll probably never use another EA station. I doubt EA will still be in business 5 years from now unless they turn things around.

 

[moondogg]

Kudos!

I don't know how anyone puts up with EA. What is wrong with them? How can a private company be so inept at what they do? I gave up on them years ago. I generally run down to 5%-15% SOC for the fastest charging and need to know it's going to work when I arrive.

Supporting EA is the same as condoning their unacceptable level of service.

EA was created as the end result of part of the punishment VW took for their emissions scandal. They aren't like a "real' company that went into this business to make money. What they are engaging in is called malicious compliance. They were required to spend X billions setting up charging stations across the country. They weren't required to run this "business" well. And that's why they are so bad.

 

[White Shadow]

EA was created as the end result of part of the punishment VW took for their emissions scandal. They aren't like a "real' company that went into this business to make money. What they are engaging in is called malicious compliance. They were required to spend X billions setting up charging stations across the country. They weren't required to run this "business" well. And that's why they are so bad.

That may be true, but there's a huge investment there and it doesn't make sense to have such a poor service/product even if they were "forced" to do it.

EA simply needs to get better.

 

[SANZC02]

My experience with EA is much different than most on here. They have worked well and by far what I have used most on trips.

I’m heading out on a ~7k mile trip in a couple of days, lots of my stops based on ABRP, will be EA stations, it will be interesting to see if this experience mirrors my past trips.

 

[emoore]

Unfortunately I have to agree. I used EA exclusively last year on my long road trip and they worked fine. This year on the same road trip they were terrible. The difference was they previously had 150kw chargers and I would get up to 175kw on them. Now they have replaced most of those with their 350kw chargers Avs those are garbage. They almost always derate to 40kw meaning the cable cooling isn’t working. They need to do something about that or they will be hurting for business.

 

[emoore]

My experience with EA is much different than most on here. They have worked well and by far what I have used most on trips.

I’m heading out on a ~7k mile trip in a couple of days, lots of my stops based on ABRP, will be EA stations, it will be interesting to see if this experience mirrors my past trips.

I would be curious how the 350kw chargers work for you. They rarely worked for me on my 2500 mile trip.

 

[RedRaiderRivian]

My experience with EA is much different than most on here. They have worked well and by far what I have used most on trips.

I’m heading out on a ~7k mile trip in a couple of days, lots of my stops based on ABRP, will be EA stations, it will be interesting to see if this experience mirrors my past trips.

I have had a similar experience with EA stations in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. Before anyone jumps on EA too much, make sure to hard reset your Rivian if your FIRST attempt at EA, EVGO, TESLA, and EvConnect dont work. There appears to be a communication issue on the handshake with our R1s that cause issues.

 

[SANZC02]

I would be curious how the 350kw chargers work for you. They rarely worked for me on my 2500 mile trip.

I’ll post back in this thread. I typically use the 150s when they are available but will mix them up. I have an A2Z adapter as well which is a nice backup, we will see if it stays a backup or becomes the primary.

 

[emoore]

I’ll post back in this thread. I typically use the 150s when they are available but will mix them up. I have an A2Z adapter as well which is a nice backup, we will see if it stays a backup or becomes the primary.

The 150s work great for me and I typically try to use those but they have been replacing them with their new 350s and most of those locations are 350s only. Hopefully they work better for you.

 

[Riviot]

It was easy to put up with EA last year because they were the only company with CCS chargers faster than 50kw in a lot of places. And 50kw is not a realistic option on a road trip.

EA is both terrible and in high demand at Ellensburg, WA, so we used to use a 50kW and spend an hour+ walking the pup and getting beers. Now with all the SC options, we skip right past it.

 

[jjswan33]

I would be curious how the 350kw chargers work for you. They rarely worked for me on my 2500 mile trip.

I think it depends on where you are and what 350s you are using. The newer style stations that only come in 350s work great in my experience. The older stations are hit and miss in my experience in both the 150 and 350 variety.

 

[RivianRunner]

EA was created as the end result of part of the punishment VW took for their emissions scandal. They aren't like a "real' company that went into this business to make money. What they are engaging in is called malicious compliance. They were required to spend X billions setting up charging stations across the country. They weren't required to run this "business" well. And that's why they are so bad.

That's true, and I agree with you. But it's only half the story. Because they are a for profit company. Even when forced to do something, a rational company still wants it to cost as little as possible (or how about the novel concept of actually making a profit?).

VW could either make EA a crappy charging network and lose even more money than they were required to spend, or they could turn it into a profit opportunity. I think it's pretty hard to deny that they decided it would be more valuable to make a horrendous EV experience (while still complying with the court order) in order to keep EVs from becoming popular. They still wanted to sell millions of ICE cars for as many years as possible.

In other words, VW is actively trying to slow EV adoption down.

 

[TexasBob]

My EA servitude is coming to an end!

The day my A2Z arrived, EA was dead to me. I figure they have another 12 months with a decent sized captive audience and then they will have to start dramatically undercutting Tesla on price to entice people to stop in to their stations.

Meanwhile, I was in Arkansas a couple weeks ago (near Walmart HQ) and noticed that Walmart is now putting in new Walmart branded stations with its own payment system (worked great first time using the Walmart shopping app I already had on my phone). The station was 350kw, pull-through, easily accessible for any time of vehicle, and reasonably priced (okay, it was free, but free is very reasonable IMO). So, it appears to me that EA is losing its access to its primary partner as they DIY charging.

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