The executive summary is, after great struggle and effort, I have managed to get “plug and charge” working just now for a rental vehicle with an EV charging service provider. As it the past, EVGo did not cover itself in glory.
Here are the details.
What happens when a person returns a rental car. Any time that one rents a car, there is the mad scramble to somehow get the car refilled shortly before returning it to the rent-a-car company at the end of the rental. For an ICE car, the mad scramble involves finding a gas station as close as possible to the airport, so that the gas tank can be refilled with the gas gauge pointing to “F” at the time of return. For an EV, the mad scramble involves finding an EV charging station as close as possible to the airport, so that the battery can be refilled to perhaps 85%, so that at the time of return the state-of-charge will appear to be at least the required 80%.
A first part of the madness of this scramble is linked to the fact that EV charging is slow compared with the pumping of gasoline.
A second part of the madness of this scramble is linked to the fact that if the EV has a non-NACS charging port, then one is forced to visit a non-NACS (non-Tesla) charging station which might be broken. (The companies that operate non-NACS charging stations tend to be slow at repairing broken charging kiosks.) And if it is not broken, there are probably not very many charging plugs at the station, and they might all be in use. (While a Tesla charging station never has fewer than eight kiosks, it is commonplace for a non-Tesla charging station to have only four kiosks.)
Still another sad aspect of the world of charging (of non-Tesla EVs) in 2025 is that “plug and charge” is elusive. The way it ought to work is that you plug in your EV to charge it, and the charging starts automatically and quickly, so that you don’t have to fiddle around with “scanning your app” or locating an RFID fob, or fussing with a credit card, to try to authorize the charging. But most companies that operate EV chargers are failures so far as “plug and charge” is concerned. Indeed the only non-Tesla EV charging service provider that even tries to provide “plug and charge” across most makes and models of EVs is EVGo. And EVGo does not provide the service very smoothly or efficiently. See Trying to enroll in EVgo’s “plug and charge” system, March 10, 2024 and EVgo again fails to cover itself in glory, March 29, 2024.
Yet if there were ever a situation where one would hope an EV charging service provider could provide “plug and charge”, it would be during the mad scramble leading up to a return of a rental vehicle to the rent-a-car company.
Which leads to this blog article. As usual, the EV charging service provider EVGo failed to cover itself in glory. But it looks like the present rental car will have a “plug and charge” experience at the time of the car return (in a few days).
“Manager’s special” EV rental. The present car rental that is at the center of this blog article was reserved as a “manager’s special”, meaning that the rental agency offered a cheaper-than-usual rental rate in return for being able to surprise me at the time of car pickup with whatever make and model of EV happened to be available. It meant that I was not able to make plans in advance for how to charge the vehicle. As described in this blog article, the lack of predictability as to what kind of car the “manager” would serve up to me meant that I ended up having to bring along my own Tesla mobile charging connector, along with an adapter to adapt my NACS charging plug to serve as a J1772 charging plug. And indeed the adapter turned out to be needed for charging at an AirBnB.
And today’s blog article highlights that the lack of predictability as to what kind of car the “manager” would serve up to me meant that I was not able to plan in advance for “plug and charge” capability.
The tireless reader will recall (from the previous blog article) that the make and model of EV that the manager served up was a Polestar EV. No Polestar vehicles in May of 2025 have an NACS charging port. Instead they have a CCS1 charging port. (Fortunately they do not have a CHAdeMO charging port.)
Finding a suitable charging station. So the question is how to find an EV charging service provider that:
-
- can provide a CCS1 charging plug,
- at a fast charging speed (ideally 350 kW),
- that has the charging station located close by to San Francisco Airport,
- that hopefully has not just one or two charging kiosks but hopefully quite a few kiosks,
- that provides “plug and charge” as a general matter, and
- that will actually provide “plug and charge” for the particular rental car that the rent-a-car-company “manager” had provided to me.
Six requirements. Easy, right?
Given that we are talking about CCS1 charging, pretty much the only game in town for “plug and charge” is EVGo. So the start of the treasure hunt is to try to find an EVGo charging station close by to SFO. But not just any EVGo charging station! Many EVGo charging stations run at a mere 50 kW of charging power, which is not much better than a Level 2 home charger. So the treasure hunt calls for finding one of the EVGo stations with 350-kW kiosks. And preferably not just one or two 350-kW kiosks but more than just one or two.
City of Millbrae Public Library. For SFO, the answer turns out to be the City of Millbrae Public Library. I am not making this up! There are four 350-kW (fast charging) kiosks at a parking lot at this library, seen at right. The charging station is said to be located at “1 Library Avenue” in Millbrae. Given that the place we are talking about is a library, I guess it is fitting that the way to get to this library would be to navigate to “1 Library Avenue”. (More on that later.)
Regular patrons of EVGo already know that the EVGo company gives cute names to its kiosks. The four fast-charging kiosks at this library are named:
-
- Bernady,
- Cherish,
- Liberty, and
- Siddartha.
If you click around to read customer reviews of this charging station, you find that apparently these four kiosks are not broken very often. (It is commonplace for the companies that offer non-Tesla charging stations to fail to repair them promptly when they break, which is itself commonplace.) The customer review say that when you show up at this particular charging station, fairly often there will be at least one available kiosk.
Another thing that you learn from the customer reviews is that it is not true that the charging station at the library is located at “1 Library Avenue”. If you navigate to 1 Library Avenue, you will find yourself in a large parking lot in front of the City of Millbrae Public Library, but you will not be able to see any EV charging station anywhere. It turns out that you have to somehow already know that the actual location of the EV charging station is out of sight on a far side of the library, in a different parking lot that cannot be reached from Library Avenue. Instead, you need to somehow already know to go to a “Poplar Avenue” and find that other parking lot.
Still another thing to worry about is that some EV charging stations are in locations that are not available at all hours of the day, or that are sometimes closed due to holidays or other business closures. Fortunately this charging station at the City of Millbrae Public Library is said to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (Public bathrooms at this charging station are, unfortunately, unavailable whenever the library is closed.)
So far so good. The next thing is, of course, to somehow get “plug and charge” working for this particular rental car.
Some EVs simply cannot do “plug and charge”. A first challenge is that the communications protocol that EVGo uses for “plug and charge” is a protocol that not every EV is able to do. To say this another way, if you are unlucky, it might turn out that your EV is made by a manufacturer that has not provided the needed circuitry to support “plug and charge” in the particular vehicle of interest. But I am lucky just now — the company that makes Polestar (namely Volvo) has provided such circuitry in this particular vehicle. How did I know this? I went to the EVGo app and clicked to “add a vehicle” to the “Autocharge plus” section of the app, and entered the VIN of my rental car, and the app cheerfully reported that yes, EVGo will be able to provide “plug and charge” service for this particular vehicle.
But “plug and charge” would only work for the previous renter of this particular vehicle. Except of course not. Yes, the app did cheerfully report that the Polestar EV will able able to communicate with the EVGo kiosk to do “plug and charge”. But it seems that some previous renter of this particular vehicle had already set up EVGo for “plug and charge”, and had never gotten around to turning off the “plug and charge” for this vehicle. At right you can see what the app said.
Yes, if I had taken this Polestar EV to any EVGo charging station, and if I had plugged it in for charging, the charging would apparently have commenced automatically. But the bill for the electricity would have been charged to the credit card of that previous rental customer.
And eventually that customer might have disputed the charge, and eventually EVGo might have tried to send the bill to the rent-a-car company, and maybe eventually the rent-a-car company would have tried to bill me, months after the fact, for the charging session.
Or maybe that customer’s credit card would have happened to expire just now, and then I could find myself at the City of Millbrae Public Library in the mad scramble, with a failed charging session.
So it was clear I would have no choice but to try to get EVGo to straighten this out. Which I tried to do, reaching a chat session with an EVGo “charging crew member” at about 1:13 AM yesterday. The charging crew member said that she would “open a ticket” and escalate this problem to some higher level, and that I would be hearing back by email Real Soon Now.
Real Soon Now turned out to be about 20 hours later, at 9:47 PM yesterday. The charging crew member wrote:
Thank you for patiently waiting as we resolve your issue.
We have successfully removed [the VIN] under the previous autocharge enrollment. You should be able to add it to your account by now.
Enrolling in Autocharge plus. So I then returned to the EVGo app and again tried to enroll this rental car for “Autocharge plus“. One of the smart things about this part of the EVGo app is that it asked me if the to-be-enrolled EV happened to be a rental vehicle. And because I answered “yes”, the app then asked “when did I plan to return the vehicle?” And I indicated the expected date and time for the return of the rental vehicle. And you can see the result at right. Yes, in an automatic way, this vehicle will be “unenrolled” in Autocharge plus when I return this rental vehicle. It will be easy for the next renter of this particular vehicle to set things up in EVGo for Autocharge plus.
Yes, my Tesla vehicle has a status of “enrolled in Autocharge plus“. But the rental vehicle has a lesser status, namely merely “eligible for Autocharge plus”.
Nope, still not enrolled in Autocharge plus. Yes, it turns out that there is more work to do now, in preparation for the mad scramble a few days from now at the time of the car return. I need to take the rental car in person to some other EVGo charging station, and plug in the rental car, and do a moment or two of actual charging. This will actually “enroll” the rental car in the “Autocharge plus” system.
As it turns out, the place where I am located right now does not have any EVGo charging stations nearby. So I drove to the next town over, to a “factory stores” shopping strip that has a small EVGo charging station. I arrived, and my goal was to plug in the Polestar and confirm that it had become “enrolled” in the “Autocharge plus” system.
This EVGo charging station has two kiosks. A first kiosk has a J1722 plug (a mere “level 2” charger said to operate at a mere 7 kW) which has been broken for several weeks and continued to be broken for the entire time that I was at this charging station. The second kiosk, named “Sasha”, runs at a mere 50 kW. Anyone seeking to charge up an EV would be disappointed at the mere 50 kW of charging speed, but of course I was not really there to charge up an EV. I was merely there to “enroll” my rental car in “Autocharge plus“.
The exhausted reader will at this point wonder how it could be that this out-of-town trip was even necessary. The previous day, I had entered the VIN of this rental car into my EVGo app, and had been reassured that yes, this make and model of vehicle had the necessary communications skills to identify itself to an EVGo kiosk for billing purposes. Surely this was enough for the “plug and charge” to happen? But the answer is “no, this is not enough”. The designers of the EVGo “enrollment” process had long ago decided that the driver of the to-be-enrolled EV would be forced to travel to some place where an EVGo kiosk could be found, and would need to plug the EVGo charging plug into the rental-car’s charging port, and this would complete the enrollment process.
So there I was at this slow-as-molasses EVGo charging station in this factory stores shopping strip. It would be as easy as easy can be — plug the plug into the charging port, tap on a button in the EVGo app to “enroll”, pump a few electrons into the battery of the EV, and Bob’s your uncle.
Impossible to enroll in Autocharge plus. Except not, of course. As mentioned above, EVGo seems to go out of its way to avoid covering itself in glory. See Trying to enroll in EVgo’s “plug and charge” system, March 10, 2024 and EVgo again fails to cover itself in glory, March 29, 2024.
I plugged the EVGo plug into the charging port of my rental vehicle. Watched messages on the screen of the kiosk, and on the app, indicating that some charging was taking place. Noted that apparently I was going to be charged a $2.99 “session fee” for this charging session, in which I purchased around ten cents’ worth of electricity. Figured that I could just suck it up and pay the $2.99 session fee as part of the cost of “enrolling” this car in “Autocharge plus“. About two minutes later, I unplugged it. And looked in the app to see the happy news that the rental car is now “enrolled” instead of merely “eligible to enroll”.
Nope. No joy. After being charged a bit more than three dollars to purchase ten cents’ worth of electricity, I was still merely “eligible to charge”, and I was not “enrolled”.
So I picked up the phone and dialed the number for EVGo tech support, reaching somebody named Jesus whose first language was not English. Jesus wanted to know the telephone number on my EVGo account, which I gave to him. He said he could not find that telephone number in his system, and asked that I look up my EVGo account number, which I provided to him. Jesus found my account in his system, and I asked him what telephone number was on his screen. I asked if this was the same telephone number I had given him a moment earlier, and he said yes it was the same telephone number. Why had it not been good enough when I gave him the telephone number, I asked? He said something but I was not able to understand what he said.
Jesus then announced that I must already have succeeded in the enrollment process, because he could see an enrolled vehicle (my Tesla car) in his system. I tried to remind him that I was trying to enroll a Polestar car. He said he could not see any second vehicle on my account. He put me on hold for a moment and came back with the news that it is only possible to enroll one vehicle in Autocharge plus, not two. I said “that’s crazy” and Jesus concurred. After another brief time on hold, Jesus returned and said that it should after all be possible to enroll more than one EV in Autocharge plus.
He asked if I had previously entered the VIN of this Polestar in the app, and I reminded him that I had already told him just that. Jesus then asked me to try again with plugging the EVGo charging plug into my to-be-enrolled EV, and I did as he asked. This time the system proposed to charge a 99-cent “session fee”. I proceeded as instructed. The screen eventually said I had been charged a little over one dollar, to purchase about ten cents’ worth of electricity. Jesus asked me to click around in the EVGo app to confirm that now, the Polestar is “enrolled”. I sadly informed him that even after this, the Polestar was merely “eligible to be enrolled”.
Jesus placed me on hold a third time, and returned, and cheerfully explained that he now knew what to do to get my rental car “enrolled”. The answer is that he was going to “create a ticket”. Someone from EVGo would be getting back to me within (I am not making this up) 48 to 72 hours.
I asked Jesus if he would refund the charges for the two previous charging sessions, given that they did not achieve the “enrollment”. He said he would look into it but was not sure if he could do that. I reminded Jesus that I had been forced to drive from one town to another to do this enrollment process, and that it was not reasonable for him to ask me to wait 48 to 72 hours and then drive again from one town to another to try it again. He put me on hold again.
Successful enrollment in Autocharge plus! During the extended third hold time with Jesus, I made a third try. I clicked around in the app, plugged the EVGo plug into the Polestar, and watched while another 99-cent session fee got charged. And this charging session did “enroll” the Polestar in Autocharge plus. Shortly after this event, there was a click on the phone and somehow my phone call with Jesus had dropped.
Two and a half hours later, an email showed up from Edwin, an EVGo Customer Operations Senior Specialist. He was going to help me accomplish the enrollment of my second vehicle into Autocharge plus, but he said he could see that now I have two vehicles enrolled in Autocharge plus. He thus explained that he was closing my ticket.
So yes, it took almost three days of struggle with the EVGo company, but now my rental car is enrolled in Autocharge plus. In a few days when the time comes to return the rental car, I will hopefully be able to drop by the City of Millbrae Public Library and do a mad-scramble charging session to get the charge up to a bit more than 80%.