Electricfy America charging tips

[PNWTaycan4S]

yup this is EA in a nutshell, they just look like a charging network, they don’t function as one. Same here in MD/NoVA/DC area. I have never had one 350 kw charger of theirs work, brand new station had all 3 350 KW chargers at fault it fault in charging, not one was fixed two weeks after reporting them. Seriously they are a joke.

ill keep saying it, if you are in US call Porsche customer service and tell the,. Fast charging at 350 USA MAJOR feature of an expensive car and EA is the Porsche provided network. And EA is owned by VW group.

Here’s the status of a key charging point for the West coast in the U.S. Not confidence inspiring for a long trip.

Sponsored

 

[flickroll]

EA is a byproduct of Dieselgate. Maybe the thing to do is contact the EPA and say the EA system is out to lunch. Perhaps that would help, who knows until that avenue is tried.

 

[bushmg]

For those of you who live in Fort Worth, only one of the four available 350Kw stations is working as of 10-Jul. I reported all three stations that are not working to EA. Sad thing is that Charger 100146-02 has been down for at least three weeks. Ditto port 2 on charger 100146-03. Port 1 works just fine (I’m sitting here charging up right now!).
Just letting my fellow Taycan owners here in Fort Worth know.
Happy charging!!
Toby

I'm not surprised, Toby. I've called about that EA station on two different occasions. The nice lady always says they'll send a technician out, but they never seem to be working. I suspect that EA looked at the usage (which I'll bet is pretty low), and decided it isn't worth it to have more than one station working. Just my $0.02 from a Fort Worth Taycan owner!

 

[daveo4EV]

I did battle with EA today - OMG - they are sooooo bad

visited 5 stations - 150 kW

Blossom Hill, San Jose - 3 stations not a single one would work - all timed out trying to talk to the car to initiate the session

drove 2 miles to Oakridge mall

2 stations - first station worked for 10 minutes, then mysteriously stopped - and could not restart claiming a communication problem
2nd station worked for 10 minutes - same problem - could never get them restarted

Visited a near by EVGo station (50 kW) plugged in and it worked for over 30 minutes NO ISSUES - ran in a small problem attempting to unplug - but eventually the CCS connector came free…

40 minutes on the phone with EA - multiple station reboots, no idea what they are doing or how to run a charging network - compared to Tesla this is simply awful and 100% unreliable - which means nearly useless

also the ergonomics of CCS plug are horrendous - hard to plug in - hard to unplug - heavy and just simply a terrible design with virtually no thought given to how people actually use it...

attempting to insert a CCS plug, launch the EA app, and find the charger number, and get the app to actually start the session before the station things you're never starting a session in 98F heat in the sun where the screen is hard to read…OMG I've rarely done something so difficult...

vs. Tesla Super charger - pull up - plug in - charging session starts and the plug can actually be handled by a human…

I love the Taycan as a car, but the charging network gets a D- grade…it is simply awful and barely functional - you'd almost thing these gas car manufactures were not serious about EV's and really don't care to make this EV stuff actually work…

 

[Genau]

I did battle with EA today - OMG - they are sooooo bad

Did you find that PlugShare correctly reported the status of those EA chargers? Or are there not enough users posting EA charger status to PlugShare?

 

[PanameraFrank]

I have to wonder how much EA actually cares about the chargers. Obviously VW group was forced to create EA & this charging "network" due to dieselgate, but it's pretty obvious that they're putting the bare minimum effort in right now.

I really believe they're waiting for more EVs to sell before they fully support the system that is necessary for EVs to sell. It's a silly game and harshly punishes early adopters. It did take Tesla a while to create a reliable network but they were also more directly invested in it.

While I don't really blame Porsche for VW & EAs failures, I am still very disappointed that this whole "multiple 350kWh chargers at every Porsche dealership" thing turned out to be bullshit. This was one of the earliest promises and would alleviate a lot of concerns. If you could always just find the nearest Porsche dealership to stop at, charge reliably & free while they treat you to coffee/whatever, that would be a huge help and cover up a lot of the current EA network's flaws. Even if they were just 150 chargers I'd be fine with it, assuming the dealerships were trained to treat people very well while they were charging.

Even in Seattle, one of the tech centers of the US with a ton of electric cars, the Bellevue dealership has one supercharger that is almost always occupied by a dealership car and Tacoma currently has ZERO.

The first step Porsche should take is making right on that and installing a minimum of 2 GUEST ONLY 350kWh chargers (with separate chargers for dealer cars or cars being serviced) at every dealership. That alone would help tremendously.

 

[Skier]

I have to wonder how much EA actually cares about the chargers. Obviously VW group was forced to create EA & this charging "network" due to dieselgate, but it's pretty obvious that they're putting the bare minimum effort in right now.

I really believe they're waiting for more EVs to sell before they fully support the system that is necessary for EVs to sell. It's a silly game and harshly punishes early adopters. It did take Tesla a while to create a reliable network but they were also more directly invested in it.

While I don't really blame Porsche for VW & EAs failures, I am still very disappointed that this whole "multiple 350kWh chargers at every Porsche dealership" thing turned out to be bullshit. This was one of the earliest promises and would alleviate a lot of concerns. If you could always just find the nearest Porsche dealership to stop at, charge reliably & free while they treat you to coffee/whatever, that would be a huge help and cover up a lot of the current EA network's flaws. Even if they were just 150 chargers I'd be fine with it, assuming the dealerships were trained to treat people very well while they were charging.

Even in Seattle, one of the tech centers of the US with a ton of electric cars, the Bellevue dealership has one supercharger that is almost always occupied by a dealership car and Tacoma currently has ZERO.

The first step Porsche should take is making right on that and installing a minimum of 2 GUEST ONLY 350kWh chargers (with separate chargers for dealer cars or cars being serviced) at every dealership. That alone would help tremendously.

Could not agree more !!!

 

[Scandinavian]

I completely agree that Porsche should put much more efforts into this. It is not acceptable to just put all the onus on EA or Ionity. Porsche really do not seem to have the feeling for communicating with their customers of the new cars. Many promises made initially but very few carried through. Here in France I have a lot of issues and wanted some senior Porsche France person to address the issues. response : “ They are all working from home due to the Corona Virus and not really reachable” . Never heard of mobile phones Porsche?

I guess the other issue is that a lot of the Porsche dealers are all franchises and do not want to make that investment to install HPChargers. Such a wasted opportunity from Porsche to make sure they have positive ambassadors out there.

 

[Pjjameso]

I did battle with EA today - OMG - they are sooooo bad

visited 5 stations - 150 kW

Blossom Hill, San Jose - 3 stations not a single one would work - all timed out trying to talk to the car to initiate the session

drove 2 miles to Oakridge mall

2 stations - first station worked for 10 minutes, then mysteriously stopped - and could not restart claiming a communication problem
2nd station worked for 10 minutes - same problem - could never get them restarted

Visited a near by EVGo station (50 kW) plugged in and it worked for over 30 minutes NO ISSUES - ran in a small problem attempting to unplug - but eventually the CCS connector came free…

40 minutes on the phone with EA - multiple station reboots, no idea what they are doing or how to run a charging network - compared to Tesla this is simply awful and 100% unreliable - which means nearly useless

also the ergonomics of CCS plug are horrendous - hard to plug in - hard to unplug - heavy and just simply a terrible design with virtually no thought given to how people actually use it...

attempting to insert a CCS plug, launch the EA app, and find the charger number, and get the app to actually start the session before the station things you're never starting a session in 98F heat in the sun where the screen is hard to read…OMG I've rarely done something so difficult...

vs. Tesla Super charger - pull up - plug in - charging session starts and the plug can actually be handled by a human…

I love the Taycan as a car, but the charging network gets a D- grade…it is simply awful and barely functional - you'd almost thing these gas car manufactures were not serious about EV's and really don't care to make this EV stuff actually work…

Completely agree

 

[daveo4EV]

Did you find that PlugShare correctly reported the status of those EA chargers? Or are there not enough users posting EA charger status to PlugShare?

I don’t think there is enough usage to crowd source reliablity data...but I’ll update my check-ins

 

[r553]

I believe there was a debacle with the Porsche dealer's high power chargers which are being devloped in Germany and then supplied to the dealers ( NOT). I know my local dealer doesn't have it yet. They are charging their demo cars at 9.6 KW.

 

[PanameraFrank]

I don’t think there is enough usage to crowd source reliablity data...but I’ll update my check-ins

Yeah, the one big problem with Plugshare and other apps is that the rating is shared between all chargers at a location. So you'll see lots of check ins and ratings based on the slower chargers from Volt/Leaf/etc.. owners, which I've found to be more reliable, that are of no use to us.

I did send Plugshare a message asking if they could possibly filter out the ratings of lower kWh chargers when you apply the filter, so we'd only get ratings/check ins based on 150+kWh chargers when we search for them. But I'm not a software guy and have a feeling that's not an easy thing to do.

 

[Miwa]

Once the ID.4 starts shipping in volume, I expect EA will have to invest more in operations. Until then they probably are not as focused on spending operational capital.

Audi and VW will be the volume sales when the MEB vehicles start shipping here.

 

[PNWTaycan4S]

Once the ID.4 starts shipping in volume, I expect EA will have to invest more in operations. Until then they probably are not as focused on spending operational capital.

Audi and VW will be the volume sales when the MEB vehicles start shipping here.

Klaus Zellmer, President and CEO of PCNA, might want to be paying attention to what his new Taycan owners are experiencing. The early adopters can influence his bread and butter electric Macan sales in the future. Just imagine lining up for the one unbroken Electrify America charger with a zillion Macans, next door to a working Tesla supercharger with a dozen working stations...

 

[Cpoarchy]

So I let my car go down to 7 percent and went to charge, ran it in sport mode and only got 116kw charge rate, I really think it must be the chargers, or a software update was done, I know I got faster than that before