It will be recalled (see blog article) that today was the day for a mad scramble to charge up a rental EV, and then to head toward the car rental location to return the rental EV. As usual, the service provider EVGo yet again failed to cover itself in glory.
It will be recalled that I selected a particular EV charging station (the City of Millbrae Library) as the place to charge up my EV before returning the EV to the rental car location. I selected this charging station because:
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- it is nearby to the airport where I planned to return the EV;
- the service provider (EVGo) is a provider that supposedly provides “plug and charge” service for some EVs;
- the service provider (EVGo) is a provider that supposedly provides “plug and charge” service for the make and model of the EV that I am driving;
- the service provider (EVGo) is a provider that has supposedly “enrolled” my particular EV in its “plug and charge” program;
- this station has not one, not two, not three, but four kiosks, so that hopefully even if one kiosk were broken, the others might still be functioning;
- historically, this station has often had at least one kiosk available (in other words, not all four kiosks are always occupied);
- the kiosks offer fast charging (350 kW);
- during business hours, the location has bathrooms available.
It will also be recalled that if you drive your EV to the published address for this charging station, you will find yourself in a big parking lot that has no EV chargers. It turns out that you need to somehow already know that the actual location of the charging station is somewhere else, on the far side of the library.
The alert reader will guess what is coming next. Maybe the EV charging service provider fell short.
A first bit of good luck is that our approach to the charging station happened to be from a direction that permitted us to find the (not well publicized) actual location of the charging station.
A second bit of good luck was that, as expected, one of the four charging kiosks was be unoccupied. I cheerfully pulled into the parking spot for this unoccupied kiosk. then realized that the charging cable would not reach. So I pulled back out from the parking spot, all the while trying to signal with the vehicular equivalent of “body language” that I was merely reversing the car in the parking spot. (There were by now other EVs stacked up, eagerly waiting for a chance to do some charging.) I then backed into the spot and plugged the CCS1 charging plug into the CCS1 charging port on the EV.
And then I took it easy. From her going forward, things were going to be easy. The “plug and charge” would work as expected, I would spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes doing some super-fast 350-kW charging, and then I could head over to the airport to return the EV.
Except not. I sat and watched the dashboard of the EV, looking at the place where it said something like “getting ready to charge”. And several minutes passed with no actual charging taking place. Eventually I got the idea to click around at the kiosk to see what might be wrong, and the kiosk explained that (a) it has two charging plugs, one for CHAdeMO and another for CCS1, and (b) the CCS1 plug was broken.
So 25% of the kiosks at this location were broken.
So now the question was, how to gain access to one of the other three kiosks. The further point being, they were all in use.
Eventually one of the three functioning kiosks had some driver activity suggesting that the driver was maybe planning to depart. The problem being that the instant such a driver were to depart, one of the other stacked-up EVs would want to grab the kiosk.
So I managed to hop out and sort of stand around, using body language to signal to the other waiting EVs that I felt I was entitled to first dibs on the soon-to-be-available kiosk.
Eventually I managed to grab the next available kiosk. And I plugged in. And yes the “plug and charge” did actually work. And I went to use the bathroom, except that the library was not open. So no bathroom.
And I did my ten minutes of charging. And yes, the “plug and charge” did actually work.
And then I went to the airport and I returned the rental car without incident.
But no, the EVGo company yet again failed to provide good service.
At some charging stations, there are visual cues when a kiosk is broken. At a Tesla station, the red Louboutin strip (blog article) is unlit if the kiosk is broken. (Except that as a general matter, it almost never happens that a Tesla kiosk is broken, and if it is broken, it almost never happens that the kiosk remains unrepaired for very long.) At a Chargepoint station, a colored strip uses the color “red” to indicate that the kiosk is broken. But no, at an EVGo station, the way that the would-be customer learns that a kiosk is broken is by plugging in and finding that things don’t work even after several minutes.
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- The EVGo kiosk ought not to have been broken.
- If the kiosk was broken, it ought to have been repaired promptly by EVGo.
- If the kiosk had not been repaired promptly, what ought to have happened is some prominent signal (perhaps a colored indicator) that the EVGo kiosk was broken.