This is why GM and Ford were so eager to jump on NACS. All the charger networks other than Tesla's Supercharger are a clown show. Why hitch your horse to them?
I hope that changes and there's competition, but right now I would never even consider trying a non-Tesla charger. I've literally never found one that works properly, and 100% of the times I've used a Supercharger it was effortless.
How much of supercharger reliability comes down to selecting the population of cars, though? I've wondered if deploying chargers that are meant to plug into various vehicles is somehow more difficult, or more likely to damage the charger. Aside from software flaws, by far the most common problem I see with non-Tesla chargers is some current module has taken itself offline due to internal fault detection, leaving the dispenser operating at half capacity or sometimes zero capacity. This has also made me curious as to whether Tesla simply lacks these fault-finding safety devices, or they do the better.
The CCS chargers have an emergency stop button. You can twist it (or whatever) to bring it back online.
From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen.
90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers.
Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate.
I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology.
Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
Here in Norway the charging companies almost all have their own solution. They try to pass it off as some kind of advantage that I need 45 accounts and apps.
Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz.
Hopefully they'll make that rule universal in a not too distant future.
But wouldn't adding a payment terminal to a tesla supercharger add another point where it could break? I think the future are chargers without any interface at all, as well as no apps, the car just negotiates payment when you plug it in.
I shouldn't need a Tesla account though in the same way I shouldn't need an EVgo account or an Electrify America account or a Chargepoint account or a Waygo account or a Sheetz account or an Exxon account or a Shell account or...
I don't need an account to go pump gas from whatever gas station nearby. I shouldn't need an account to get a charge from a Tesla charger, and it shouldn't be able to just deny service to my car because the CEO of Tesla doesn't want to play ball with some other manufacturer at the moment.
Exxon or Shell shouldn't be able to just refuse to pump gas into a Hyundai.
Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
I don't think it's a technical challenge. I just don't think any of the charging networks are content to only sell the electricity - they do everything they can to get users to download an app so they can aggregate and sell user data as another source of income.
From a user point-of-view, of course EV chargers that could work just like a gas pay-at-the-pump system would be preferable, but that hasn't been mandated, so that hasn't happened.
The credit card fees are also relatively high for small transactions (it's usually just about $1.20 for me to top up my PHEV battery at the chargers near my work). So the apps prefer to get you to "load" 10 or 20 bucks into the app at a time, and then debit your app account for each charge.
I've been seeing more and more credit card terminals on CCS chargers which don't require any kind of account. Swipe a card or tap NFC, plug it in, and it charges.
The CCS networks also fail to send out anyone to repair their stations.
It would be one thing to argue its a safety culture if they actually sent out staff to fix broken chargers and didn't let them sit in broken state for months on end.
A great deal comes to the tight integration of cars and chargers. There are a lot of factors, but the most obvious factor is that cars do not have a standardized charging port location. This means: (a) sometimes stations have multiple cables on different sides, increasing the number of parts and complexity; (b) sometimes when drivers try very hard to plug in amid weirdly shaped parking spaces and non-optimal placement of chargers, they stretch the cables way too much.
Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages.
Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.
I figured it was more software. In a filing with the state government of California, manufacturer ABB said that they repair 75% of charger faults remotely, which means their software must be garbage. If it was hardware, wouldn't they need to fix it in the field?
Yup.
I like to look in the ElectrifyAmerica app periodically at the ~5 stations nearby, and its just a sh*tshow at all times.
9 times out of 10 there are more stalls out of service than in use.
And it's always the same ones, because they aren't getting fixed.
And it's not just old hardware, because this includes stations that only went live in the last 6-9 months.
If US makers ever sold enough CCS cars, it would have been a huge problem. We are moving over to NACS instead..
If VW wanted to slow EV adoption in the US market, there's not much they would have done differently in their management of EA.
They've been "working on the reliability problems" for years.
First it was going to be the new hardware.
Then it turned out they were having new, possibly even more reliability problems with that hardware, lol.
Can't wait to get my car on NACS and never have to think of EA again.
Not really. ABB is good at hardware protection, which is why the faults don't usually result in failures. Tesla is ahead in terms of anticipating, avoiding, and automatically handling such issues. The variety of cars absolutely creates a challenge, but Tesla is better positioned to meet the challenge.
Comments
This is why GM and Ford were so eager to jump on NACS. All the charger networks other than Tesla's Supercharger are a clown show. Why hitch your horse to them?
I hope that changes and there's competition, but right now I would never even consider trying a non-Tesla charger. I've literally never found one that works properly, and 100% of the times I've used a Supercharger it was effortless.
How much of supercharger reliability comes down to selecting the population of cars, though? I've wondered if deploying chargers that are meant to plug into various vehicles is somehow more difficult, or more likely to damage the charger. Aside from software flaws, by far the most common problem I see with non-Tesla chargers is some current module has taken itself offline due to internal fault detection, leaving the dispenser operating at half capacity or sometimes zero capacity. This has also made me curious as to whether Tesla simply lacks these fault-finding safety devices, or they do the better.
The CCS chargers have an emergency stop button. You can twist it (or whatever) to bring it back online.
From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen.
90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers.
Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate.
I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology.
Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
Here in Norway the charging companies almost all have their own solution. They try to pass it off as some kind of advantage that I need 45 accounts and apps.
Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz.
Hopefully they'll make that rule universal in a not too distant future.
But wouldn't adding a payment terminal to a tesla supercharger add another point where it could break? I think the future are chargers without any interface at all, as well as no apps, the car just negotiates payment when you plug it in.
Hasn't been an issue with the regular gas pumps, which have had card terminals for decades.
And they're only requiring to accept card. The chargers could still offer charging via app or sms like now.
I would prefer Tesla style, where it is negotiated via a protocol over the power plug rather than app, SMS, or POS.
Sure, but that won't happen without gov't intervention. Card is easy enough, just blip and you're done.
Norway leads the way yet again!
You keep a credit card on file in your Tesla account. The supercharger recognizes your car and it automatically charges your card.
I shouldn't need a Tesla account though in the same way I shouldn't need an EVgo account or an Electrify America account or a Chargepoint account or a Waygo account or a Sheetz account or an Exxon account or a Shell account or...
I don't need an account to go pump gas from whatever gas station nearby. I shouldn't need an account to get a charge from a Tesla charger, and it shouldn't be able to just deny service to my car because the CEO of Tesla doesn't want to play ball with some other manufacturer at the moment.
Exxon or Shell shouldn't be able to just refuse to pump gas into a Hyundai.
I don't think it's a technical challenge. I just don't think any of the charging networks are content to only sell the electricity - they do everything they can to get users to download an app so they can aggregate and sell user data as another source of income.
From a user point-of-view, of course EV chargers that could work just like a gas pay-at-the-pump system would be preferable, but that hasn't been mandated, so that hasn't happened.
The credit card fees are also relatively high for small transactions (it's usually just about $1.20 for me to top up my PHEV battery at the chargers near my work). So the apps prefer to get you to "load" 10 or 20 bucks into the app at a time, and then debit your app account for each charge.
I've been seeing more and more credit card terminals on CCS chargers which don't require any kind of account. Swipe a card or tap NFC, plug it in, and it charges.
The CCS networks also fail to send out anyone to repair their stations. It would be one thing to argue its a safety culture if they actually sent out staff to fix broken chargers and didn't let them sit in broken state for months on end.
A great deal comes to the tight integration of cars and chargers. There are a lot of factors, but the most obvious factor is that cars do not have a standardized charging port location. This means: (a) sometimes stations have multiple cables on different sides, increasing the number of parts and complexity; (b) sometimes when drivers try very hard to plug in amid weirdly shaped parking spaces and non-optimal placement of chargers, they stretch the cables way too much.
Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages.
Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.
It's a hardware reliability problem, and Tesla simply has the most advanced capability to tackle the problem in this product market.
I figured it was more software. In a filing with the state government of California, manufacturer ABB said that they repair 75% of charger faults remotely, which means their software must be garbage. If it was hardware, wouldn't they need to fix it in the field?
Yup. I like to look in the ElectrifyAmerica app periodically at the ~5 stations nearby, and its just a sh*tshow at all times.
9 times out of 10 there are more stalls out of service than in use. And it's always the same ones, because they aren't getting fixed. And it's not just old hardware, because this includes stations that only went live in the last 6-9 months.
If US makers ever sold enough CCS cars, it would have been a huge problem. We are moving over to NACS instead..
If VW wanted to slow EV adoption in the US market, there's not much they would have done differently in their management of EA.
EA is actually working on the reliability problems now, but they're a few years behind.
They've been "working on the reliability problems" for years. First it was going to be the new hardware. Then it turned out they were having new, possibly even more reliability problems with that hardware, lol.
Can't wait to get my car on NACS and never have to think of EA again.
Like I said, they're behind. Don't hold your breath for them to catch up.
I fully expect them to go out of business before they manage to operate their business well.
Lost opportunity.
Not really. ABB is good at hardware protection, which is why the faults don't usually result in failures. Tesla is ahead in terms of anticipating, avoiding, and automatically handling such issues. The variety of cars absolutely creates a challenge, but Tesla is better positioned to meet the challenge.
Right, pretty horrendous. This reads like "75% of our charge issues are because we need to reboot our garbage software stack".