Electrify America Challenges

[Riviaenz]

1 for 1 that a gas Q6 I think. My friends E-tron the caught fire just came back from the dealer that installed a new rear motor and maybe made a bo bo....

Yeah it was a new Q7 - looks like it started at the engine. I was surprised the fire department left it there after they punched holes through it and extinguished it. I guess they didn’t want to deal with getting it out of the garage.

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[emoore]

Sorry I thought you wanted to start a game called the EA Challenge where you have go from A to B and only using EA chargers!!! No one will finish…. However I do have a friend who had an Audi e-tron catch fire at EA.

Guess I win. 1200 miles and back with EA.

 

[RivianRunner]

I've never had a good experience at any EA ever, and default to anything else if possible. I'd rather not play Rivian Roulette with multiple pedestals and cables, or whether it will even charge at all, or stop at random.

Emotional stages of a Rivian charging stop

Denial...there's simply no way that these companies can make chargers that are so incredibly unreliable. How can this whole station be dead?

Anger...they've let me down again!

Bargaining...the third time you reconnect, and hold your arms in a certain way, to let the charger know that you mean business. Fourth time you start praying to your deity of choice that you will stop drinking, eating junk food, and searching Google for...well, you know.

Depression...how am I supposed to get where I'm going now? What will I do for the next hour? What have I done???

Acceptance...well, I can walk. There's Uber and Lyft. And tow trucks. I probably won't die.

Hope...Oh look, EA just announced (AGAIN) that they are retrofitting chargers to be more reliable! YAY!

That would be hilarious if it had not dramatically slowed the adoption of clean transportation.

But has anyone considered how Electrify America and the third-party charging solutions could be so incredibly poor in terms of reliability, pricing and locations?

Global oil demand per day is slightly over 100 million barrels in 2023. With each barrel worth around $70, that's $7 billion dollars per day (and that is simply the value of the unrefined product).

$7 billion dollars per day! The entire enterprise value of Electrify America is worth less than half of the daily crude oil sales! I would guess that the total value of all non-Tesla fast charging networks is probably not much more than global crude oil sales for three or four days. And that's ignoring all the value added downstream via refining and transport.

If your industry, the one that was responsible for your wealth and power, was threatened to be gradually eroded by the rapid adoption of EVs, do you think it might be worthwhile to try to slow that threat down? In order that maybe your profits would be eroded more gradually over your remaining years? How much would that be worth?

Do you think people might be reluctant to switch to EVs if they remained more inconvenient to travel long distances in? How could that best be accomplished, without being too obvious about it? Maybe hit them with inconvenient/impractical over-the-road charging?

Hmmmmm.

 

[SwampNut]

But has anyone considered how Electrify America and the third-party charging solutions could be so incredibly poor in terms of reliability, pricing and locations?

Yes, for one, EA was born as a penance for VW and their diesel scandal. They were forced to do it, and didn't want to. Pretty simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/13/electrify-america-ev-charger-broken/

 

[Brian-MS90D]

The disappointment that is EA has been well documented by reliable sources such as Kyle Conner. I avoid them like the plague. They are also usually in less than desirable locations.

While nobody is perfect, Tesla Superchargers are the best available right now (if you don't want to spend time researching which non-Tesla might be worthwhile).

And, IMO no network is good by my personal standards if it's not instantly plug and charge. We have EV's!! We want our experience to be better than buying gas, not the same or worse.

 

[HaveBlue]

There was a Rivian that caught fire last year at EA, a Kia that spent a week welded to a connector (not 100% if that was ea) and a Mach e that also caught fire. Hard to say how many times this has happened and not made it into some sort of news. Point is that it is happening to various brands.
https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/...chmond-va-offline-after-r1s-fire.28865/unread
Why rivian and Tesla say you can't use a third party nacs adapter but it is fine to use EA is a bit odd.

 

[RivianRunner]

Yes, for one, EA was born as a penance for VW and their diesel scandal. They were forced to do it, and didn't want to. Pretty simple.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/13/electrify-america-ev-charger-broken/

I know. So, VW's heart wasn't in it, eh? And they hired people whose heart wasn't in it? And they just wrote the billion dollar investment off, rather than running it like a capitalistic business, turning lemons into lemonade? The penance was that they had to make the investments, not that they couldn't be successful at it.

I wonder if it threatened anyone more than it excited VW? Maybe it threatened VW itself?

My point is, the third-party charging networks are too FU'ed to be explained by straightforward, above-the-table capitalism.

 

[RivianRunner]

There was a Rivian that caught fire last year at EA, a Kia that spent a week welded to a connector (not 100% if that was ea) and a Mach e that also caught fire. Hard to say how many times this has happened and not made it into some sort of news. Point is that it is happening to various brands.
https://www.rivianforums.com/forum/...chmond-va-offline-after-r1s-fire.28865/unread
Why rivian and Tesla say you can't use a third party nacs adapter but it is fine to use EA is a bit odd.

Because when you use EA, and the charger screws up, that's on EA. They have lawyers for that. But third-party charge adapters are often made by fly-by-night outfits with no money, no lawyers, and no electrical engineers. Even if they are not fly-by-night outfits to begin with, they will turn into one when someone dies.

 

[HaveBlue]

From my experience, large corporations are much better at defending themselves and can paperwork people into bankruptcy during a lawsuit but you make good points.

 

[TheWoo]

This seems to be a bash EA thread. In the midwest we have had pretty good success with EA other than one or two broken chargers out of 4 to eight to pick from.. They are the fastest around for charging. I live in a rural area with plenty of 50kw "fast" chargers so EA actually is pretty good for us. Also some of them charge by the minute instead of KW which is really cheap. earlier this week i traveled thru WI and used a couple EA stations which worked well and were only about $9 to $11 to charge.

Ditto. Nothing but good EA experiences here.

In fact, the worst charging experience I've had in the last six months was a derating Tesla Supercharger that wouldn't deliver over 300 amps just a minute into the session.

 

[RedCanyon]

I definitely didn't intend to start a bash EA thread... I have used them often and without issue. But this info was more than a random source. Trying to protect the confidentiality here but the person was relaying an internal BMW directive based on 4 specific cases... all of which were with BMW's. I couldn't find any public info to corroborate so I thought I would ask here. I am going to write it off for now, but as others have said here it is important to check reviews of chargers before use. In my experience EA's have been some of the newest and most consistent... thus I wanted to know if I was missing something. Keep Calm and Carry On.

 

[DiveSherpa]

Ditto. Nothing but good EA experiences here.

In fact, the worst charging experience I've had in the last six months was a derating Tesla Supercharger that wouldn't deliver over 300 amps just a minute into the session.

I saw a split experience in my Phoenix to Dallas run (via OK City.) EA was good until Oklahoma then I had to hop chargers till I knew my speeds would be bad, so I moved on to EVgo in those cases. The Flying J were the nicest EVgo, but they were also some of the more expensive. Apparently Flying J sets the rates, not EVgo. There were people at those EA charge locations who were not well versed in ABRP and Plug Share and just looked hopeless.

So, I guess I would fail the challenge, because I could not have done the trip just on EA.

 

[Hillbilly]

I'm here to pile on. EA sucks because of it's unreliability. I don't care if it works well 90% if the time. It's that 10% that screws really screws up travel plans.

 

[TheWoo]

I saw a split experience in my Phoenix to Dallas run (via OK City.) EA was good until Oklahoma then I had to hop chargers till I knew my speeds would be bad, so I moved on to EVgo in those cases. The Flying J were the nicest EVgo, but they were also some of the more expensive. Apparently Flying J sets the rates, not EVgo. There were people at those EA charge locations who were not well versed in ABRP and Plug Share and just looked hopeless.

So, I guess I would fail the challenge, because I could not have done the trip just on EA.

Yeah, not saying you won't occasionally find them down or not working well - and that's unacceptable. I just believe that EA has made reliability progress in the last year+ and, at least here in the middle of the country, seem to now be as reliable as most everyone else.

What we need to continue to do is get to the point where we're never reliant on any one DCFC location. Occasionally stuff is going to happen, and a charger/location is going to be offline, so being able to hop a few miles down the road to the next one is important.

 

[Coj]

Sorry I thought you wanted to start a game called the EA Challenge where you have go from A to B and only using EA chargers!!! No one will finish…. However I do have a friend who had an Audi e-tron catch fire at EA.

Was it due to the charger or the car?!

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