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Best and Worst destination chargers

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Olle

Active Member
Jul 17, 2013
1,287
2,025
Orlando, FL
On my last two week road trip I got a painful reminder that not all destination chargers are created equal. Posting this in case destination charging hosts happen to check our club pages to see what EV users prefer.

Ranking with comments, based on my experience this year:
1. Tesla wall connector, hands down. Almost always works, zero time wasted.
2. Charge point. Works most of the time but only if you have cell phone reception, which sometimes is not the case in the garages. Has taken me a minute to start on average, the times that I have been able to charge. I know there are RFID cards and perhaps other shortcuts. I wonder if customers have time to deal with those unless it's their home or work charge point. I definitely don't.
3. Sema Connect. I have encountered three of those. The first two took 15 minutes to start and I gave up on the last one after 30 minutes of fiddling with the app and calling customer service that didn't know anything.

I have tried many others over my ten years of EV driving, but these three are the only ones that I have recent enough experience with.
Would be very interested to see what others think.
 
Last edited:
Tesla wall connector=best.
Charge point-I have the RFID card and has worked quickly every time.
I have a wallet in my glove compartment with ~6 RFID cards. It is a small hassle to order the cards but then at location it takes <10 seconds to start.
You can add a Charpoint RFID card to your apple phone wallet and the equivalent for an Android. I have used that in places where the Chargepoint isn't connecting due to the cell modem being on the shutdown 3G cell network.