New EV owner here. We charge at home so I don’t need to use them, but stores nearby have chargers. I tried them to see how they work. They are often broken.
One store has a Volta charger (free!). It worked great the first time; the next time I went it was broken.
Walmart has an Electrify America fast charger. The first time I went, 1 of 3 was not working. The next time I went, 1 of 3 was not working, but it was a different one.
Was I unlucky, or are these charging networks unreliable? Has it been getting better or worse over time?
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You’re not unlucky, in the U.S. any charger that isn’t made by Tesla is unreliable. It’s been getting worse over time, and the only real hope is that every manufacturer is switching to Tesla’s charge port (now called NACS) and getting access to their Superchargers.
I had a non-Tesla EV and eventually got a Tesla because I need to road trip regularly and can’t handle chargers being down.
What are the options for adapters to let you charge an existing Bolt EV, at a Tesla station?
To date, I’ve only ever needed to charge at home, but am curious.
Do Bolts support DC fast charging? Because that’s how Tesla Superchargers operate.
If they do then you would need an adapter from NACS to CSS and you’d also need to set up a Tesla account. Superchargers are “automatic” in that they read the VIN of the car when plugged in and use that for billing. I believe Tesla is now supporting non-Tesla accounts but haven’t looked into it at all…
Supposedly in Spring 2024, Bolts will have their integration complete and you will be able to purchase a CCS2 to NACS adapter that will allow your Bolt to charge at a Tesla charger.
Right now it’s not good, but NACS was also just announced. Part of that announcement included adapters, which should start to become commonplace soon. They do exist, and it looks like they’re $200. Some supercharger locations also have one.
At the risk of sounding like Black Mirror, some chargers will have adapters, others will expect you to bring your own. I plan on getting one when they become reasonably available, probably next year.
But note that there are some additional minor wrinkles, such as battery chemistry, voltage, and adapter limits that we may have to deal with until everything standardizes.
It will get better though, and I think it’ll be pretty soon
It will get better but I think soon is 10 years away. We don’t even have common charge ports on phones and legislation is not going to give advantage to a single specific company yet.
10 years is a long time, almost the lifespan of most cars. By that time there will be very few exceptions. Almost every car and every charger will be NACS.
But “good enough” will happen much sooner, where most cars can use NACS (via adapter) and most stations will have adapters to J1772/CCS.
At 10 years, I expect most stations will stop having adapters, since few cars will need them.
The average age of cars is 12.5 years in the US. 10 years isn’t much for cars.
The Tesla chargers – do they live up to their reputation for being reliable? Or are they also unreliable, but Tesla puts so many chargers at each location that you can always find a working one?
Just watch any of the YouTube videos that compare road trip charging and you will see the difference. While you may have 1 or 2 Tesla chargers down sometimes, normally there are many more to choose from and the speeds are reliable. Ease of payment and different apps are also a pain. This will hopefully clear up a lot of your manufacturer has a deal with Tesla to use their superchargers soon. https://youtu.be/92w5doU68D8?feature=shared
The Tesla supercharger network is very reliable. My wife & I drove from Boston to South Carolina last year with no issues. I think we found one plug that was damaged & unusable but there were 8 or more others at that location that were working fine.
Were also approaching 2 years on our Tesla home charger and no issues at all with that.
As a Tesla owner of 5 years with a cross country road trip in the car, Teslas charging has never failed me. It’s rare to encounter a charging stall not working, but every location has multiple chargers and they repair stalls quickly.
Almost every location I’ve been to has at least 8 stalls if not more. The navigation in the car also keeps track of stalls in use, electricity prices, expected wait time and if any stalls are not working.
They are genuinely more reliable. Having more stalls does help for when there’s issues, but they have 99.96% uptime across the entire network. I’ve had to move stalls once in my almost 3 years of ownership.
They also have their own service people that travel to chargers to fix them, where Electrify America hires local electrical contractors that may not be experts on DC Fast Charging equipment.
Edit: ran some numbers and I’ve charged 109 times on Superchargers. One failed session. I live in the rural Midwest/South so it’s not like I’m in EV heaven either.
I installed one in my garage a bit over 5 years ago and have never had a problem with it. My parents also installed one in their garage several years before that. They did have an issue with it at first but I think they replaced it with a newer version of the charger (same version I have) and haven’t had any issues since then.
Unfortunately basically every charging company has decided reliability isn’t important. The exception, Tesla, has the most reliable charging locations by a large margin.
The good news is most cars will be able to work with Tesla chargers in the next year or so. Not sure what car you have, but look up when they are adding support for your vehicle. Until that happens, your experience is quite common and will continue.
It’s ironic that Tesla’s chargers are vastly more reliable than their actual cars.
I have yet to see any believable evidence that there is any excessive reliability problems with Tesla cars. And don’t try to cite consumer reports. They lost my business after they wouldn’t stop recommending Samsung products.
We have lemon laws for a reason. Because lots of cars are lemons. You are just only hearing about it because every car fire or trim problem or excessive repair needs on a Tesla is a news story that you recall. There are many similar phenomena that are at play here. Start with the availability hueristic if you’re interested.
I’ve seen lots of lemons in my life. My parents car blew a transmission right away. So many car fires on the side of the road, and I bet you don’t even know that Hyundai and Kia owners are being advised to park outside because there’s a high risk of fire. That’s really bad. If your ice catches fire when it’s parked and off, that’s a serious design flaw.
You have made an impossible request. Consumer Reports, while highly flawed, is the only one without an obvious conflict of interest. Every other source, such as JD Power mentioned below, is for-profit and sells advertising. As such, they really can’t be trusted.
There is literally no other source that could even potentially provide that data (note: data, not anecdotes), assuming these aren’t safety-related issues. I have no particular knowledge of Tesla’s overall reliability, only about the sources one would use to try to find out.
Btw, fires are more common across the industry than you’d think. Chevy had a similar warning about the Bolt (and issued a recall, which is why Consumer Reports lists them as highly unreliable). Ford also issued a warning last year to owners of multiple ICE SUV models to park them outside for exactly that same reason.
I’m thinking you are agreeing with me on every thing I said, and I have made no such impossible request. I’ve already linked to the nhtsa which is charged with this, and I’m sure that there is something similar in the eu.
Jd is bad. Maybe you don’t agree that CR is, but that’s minor.
Tesla’s reliability is the topic at hand. That was my introductory statement.
Per the fires, that’s exactly what I meant. I’ve seen enough burning cars and had my other calls recalled. That’s just not news. It’s news when an EV does that.
I’m not disagreeing on most, but I am pointing out that no good, independent sources of data exist. If we were to reframe it as how to get accurate data on make/model reliability, such as trying to quantify their reliability in an unbiased way, we quickly discount most sources. Or, ask the reverse question- how could we show that Tesla is reliable? Again, no good sources.
NHTSA tracks safety concerns, or at least certain types of them. They don’t track things like how often ignition coils fail, or the radio, or the water pump, or the plastic trim breaking. All of these are part of reliability, and what CR at least attempts to do.
CR isn’t biased, but they are bad in other ways due to (sometimes highly) flawed methodology. They also only offer very broad info on failure data, and what they consider. I recently learned that they listed the Bolt as having excessive numbers of failures in the battery, because they counted every single recalled vehicle as a failure point. Not biased, but still bad (or at least, not very useful) data.
How about J.D. Power? https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-initial-quality-study-iqs
A legacy industry funded advertising group is criticizing the disruptive novel EV companies. All of them, lucid, rivian, and polestar plus tesla.
I’m shocked.
I’m coming up on 2 years of owning an EV, I have charged at two public chargers in that time.
Unless you’re actively road tripping, or don’t have a home charger, the state of the charger network doesn’t really matter.
People don’t understand this at all!!
They balk at the range but when I ask how often they drive a full tank in a day they kind of give a blank star
Don’t get an EV if you can’t home charge. Don’t get an EV if you drive 400 miles a day. Don’t get an EV if you take cross country road trips 5x a year.
Other than those scenarios, you’re going to come out ahead.
Don’t get an EV if you take cross country road trips 5x a year.
I’m an EV owner that takes at least that many 5000+ mile road trips a year with very very little issues. I’ve never once been stranded due to charging problems. I also however used my brain and bought the right car for the job, and right now that is a Tesla. Hopefully in a couple years once NACS becomes more mainstream I can move to another option.
It’s absolutely doable, however, some (most? IDK) people aren’t down for making so many 30-60 minute stops.
I’ve done it in mine as well because I don’t mind… but it’s definitely not for everyone.
What car do you drive where charging stops are that long? My average Supercharging session in my base Model 3 is 9 minutes. That’s barely enough time to go pee and walk my dog.
I strongly prefer road-tripping my EV because the natural breaks mean I arrive more refreshed and less sore.
30-60 minute stops
I literally just drove 2,077.37 miles from Central CA to Chicago over the last 3 days for another one of those trips, and the longest stop out of any of them according to TeslaFi was 26 minutes and that was only once, for a really long stretch in Wyoming that doesn’t have any chargers on it yet. Every other one was under 20 minutes, with most of them being around 10-15. The entire trip took 23 supercharging stops and added 4 hours and 23 minutes to the overall trip. That was with me running balls-out with autopilot set to 85 for as much of the trip as I could possibly do (e.g. slowing down for construction, etc), so my efficiency was only 65.66% which is pretty bad for my car.
I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re absolutely doing it wrong if you’re spending 30 to 60 minutes to charge every time.
As a tesla owner for several years, I find this hard to believe. 15 minutes at a 250 kw charger doesn’t even get you 50%. Even if what you say is accurate, stopping 23 times is extremely annoying. When I dive like that I much prefer to just go straight through with minimal stops rather than have to pull over every hour
As a tesla owner for several years, I find this hard to believe. 15 minutes at a 250 kw charger doesn’t even get you 50%.
I can go buy a surgery robot but that doesn’t mean I know how to use it. Just because you own a Tesla doesn’t mean you know how to road trip it effectively, or have one that can do what I literally just did. For example, an early Model S or X can only charge at 120KW no matter what charger you plug it into, ergo no, it can’t do this. But any long range or performance model 3 or Y certainly can.
Part of the reason there’s so many stops (which I prefer and so do my wife and daughter, for that matter), is that if you keep the battery’s charge level between 10 and 50% from hop to hop, you end up spending much less time at chargers in general because you’re always charging at peak or very close to it. Sitting at a charger waiting for that last 10% at like 75kw from 70% - 80% is MUCH slower than hopping on down the road and charging at near peak at the next charger.
It works, I know for a fact it works, and I brought the receipts! Here’s a few examples from my trip:
Ok yeah if you only charge to 50%. But that would kill me. I hate stopping. And I do have a long range Y
Anything used by the public will be treated like trash and will get broken. I’d be curious to know if the stores would be compensating if their suppled charges damage electrical components etc…
From what I’ve heard that’s not true of Tesla though. My car will be able to use their superchargers starting next year. I hope they remain reliable.
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Things are slowly improving, but public chargers do kinda suck right now. There’s an app called PlugShare that you can download which lets you see reviews for all chargers in your area. It’s saved some headaches a few times cause I can just avoid chargers with bad ratings.
Aging Wheels did a nice bit on chargers. Even the ones which are not fully broken may well not charge at the rate they’re supposed to.
I’m from Canada so this is only applicable to Canada (Ontario specifically). We’ve tried different ev chargers and to date non has been broken yet. We’ve tried them at different malls, events, etc.
Tesla almost always works. Electrify America is like 90% operable every time I’ve used one. Charge Point is a literal 50/50 (last station I visited 2/3 were broken) I’ve never even seen a Blink charger.
The charger at my house has been working great for 7 years, and it’s installed outside and gets weather, but it’s California weather, so it never long-term extremes. It also where I charge 99% of the time.
The one that came with the car was a 120 volt, and I think I’ve used it once, but it was too slow.
When I had an electric car my charger broke after two years
A literal answer to the title question. I like it. What charger did you have and was it covered under warranty?
I had the 110v wall charger for a Chevy Volt that came with the car. To be fair, I bought the car certified pre-owned, so I guess it was about 5 years old when it broke. I left it outside in inclement weather 24/7. I’m not sure if it was covered under warranty. What broke were the connections inside of the plug handle. I took it apart and soldered it back together. That lasted another six months, and then it broke again. I traded the car in after that, so I never tried to file a warranty claim or anything, but I don’t think it was covered. I didn’t trade the car in because of the charger though. I just happened to find the exact used truck I wanted, in the exact color I wanted, right about when the charger broke, so it worked out.
Edit: I just wanted to add that I loved that car! It was a great car. Literally the only thing I didn’t like about it is that there was no knob to change the AC temp. You had to hold your finger on the touch button and wait like 30 seconds while it slowly adjusted. Everything else about the car was great. One of my favorite features was the little button on the end of the blinker indicator that gave 3 quick polite little horn beeps. I used that all the time to alert people that they were in my way, where a full-fledged horn honk would seem rude.
You beep people that are in your way? (Kind of joking)
Are you British?
In many places in America we give a quick honk to let someone know the light is green after 5 seconds or so (or a 5 second blast after 1 second if you’re in Chicago for example… partly joking) generally they are looking at their phone or otherwise distracted.
It’s a polite “hey bud, you’re holding up traffic”
Oh I thought maybe you meant someone walking on the road. Ya I might quickly beep but pretty rare. Someone looking at their phone I would beep.
I’ve found the Electrify America chargers to be the best bet. They’re almost always at Walmarts so they’re plentiful and easy to find. All the ones I’ve seen have been operating well so far
I think my experience is skewed by not having a dcfc capable car. I charge exclusively j1772. And use plugshare to find the chargers. In 5 years of ownership I’ve charged not at home probably 150 times. Of those times I would say I couldn’t get the charger to work maybe 20 times. And of those 20 probably half didn’t have any other option at the same location that I was able to get working.
Again this is skewed by filtering through plug share and not even attempting locations that have comments claiming they’re broken.
Iirc, the 1 in 3 number holds nationwide. Someone I know did a research project on this, but I’m pretty sure he said it’s around 30ish% that don’t work.
