Poll: Electrify America Failure Rate

[riburn3]

It has taken Tesla 8.5 years to get where they are now. That is when the first supercharger went live

Maybe it is unrealistic to think VW or EA is going to get there in 1 year.

I've owned my Model S since late 2013 and the charging experience has been nearly flawless from the get go. Tesla's early problem wasn't with the functional part of getting your car charged, it was simply just building more chargers. It has always been show up, plug it in, get energy. No apps or phone calls to make sure the energy is comped. It has just worked.

EA has the opposite problem. They have done an amazing job of getting chargers up and running in a very short amount of time, even better than Tesla in terms of nationwide coverage. It's the experience when you actually are there that sucks, which Tesla nailed on day 1.

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[ThumbsUp]

It does seem that all their cables need to be about 2’ longer and not at dead end stalls. I had to wrestle the cable like an alligator, get it between my legs to get it straight, in order to plug in today. Would be easy if I wanted to block all the stalls and connect sideways.

I’ve charged at EA twice since getting my car a week ago. The first time was on the 5 hour drive back home after picking up the car. I had to call EA for help, but it turned out to be first-time user error.

The second time was just for kicks at the only EA here in Indianapolis, and it went well. 350 both times and for about 20 minutes.

Yes, the cables need to be longer. I was the only car at both places and thus parked at a diagonal to make connection a bit easier.

 

[Reg]

The grass is not always greener, btw. From Reddit yesterday

Just completed 4000 mile trip. About 30% of the superchargers had at least one broken charger. Only 2 or 3 had more than one broken but of course those were high usage.

My home supercharger (Temecula) had three broken.

I call, "wow, thanks, we didn't notice, well have someone out there".

Can I please just click a button on the car or app? Then you never need to waste call center time on outages, you get patterns and reinforcement, and you can even decide if I'm trustworthy!

This is such a no-brainer.

Yeah, I know that they're selling chargers to other companies. At the end of the day, it's Teslas reputation. It will pis people off.

Heck, it screwed me out of $90 because one broken in a 4-charger location kicked me into idle fees overnight.

Grrrr.

Interesting that they claim they didn't notice. I would have thought with all their silicon valley systems or whatever they would have noticed an outage before the customer did. LOL.

And yes, I know someone is going to be compelled to post "but that isn't my experience", so whatever.

 

[daveo4EV]

I am now at the following charging attempt count:

Attempted charging sessions: 16
Successful Sessions: 3 - battery received some power
Flawless session count (no Hick-ups): 1 (out of the 3 successful attempts)

success rate: 18%
flawless success rate: 6%

it should also be noted there are broken superchargers sometimes, but normally not the entire site, and when you have 12, 16, 20, 24 and 48 stall sites (which is common for supercharger sites) this stastistic isn't quite as bad as it seems…and normally it's not for long

EA has smaller sites, so 2 or 3 chargers "down" means 75% capacity offline - and they normally take weeks or months to address the issue...

contextually the supercharger network is still dramatically superior to alternatives even though they are not perfect.

 

[Chuck J]

I use a local EA station and don't have any trouble. I just took a road trip from Goshen, AR to Ft. Worth and charged using EV Gateway on the way down and EA exclusively (2) on the way back
EA- No failures, but I had an app failure in Denton where I plugged it in and got a message that it had failed on the app but before I could unplug it the machine started working and it charged the car without incident.

EV Gateway worked well in Roland, OK and Durant, TX but all six chargers failed to iniatiate in McAlester. Fortunately I had enough to go to Durant, charge to 97% and made it to Denton. They worked fine there, but the charger layout was designed by a squirl which made it almost impossible to charge without being hit by cars running up and down the parking isle.

The EV Gateway chargers I used to use were 200 KW chargers, but they all have new covers and they now charge at 45K. Between that and the EA charger in Denton the normal 6.5 hour trip with an ICE car took 11 hours. About three hours of that was traffic in Denton and Ft. Worth on 35 and a little over an hour was charging at Durant.

Chuck J

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