The _-____ (I cannot repeat the name in polite company) looks ugly according to some pictures, but the manufacturer's link redirects me to look at ICE vehicles instead. I will have to remind myself that other manufactuerers are more serious about making EV's than the one in question.
WOW This is crappy for future VW/Audi/Porsche EV buyers....really unfortunate. I'll 2nd the notion of Tesla selling CCS & CHAdeMO adapters. Undercut EA rates AND use the revenue to build out more charger and bring back free supercharging for new Teslas. Would be a win/win PR campaign!
Will VW cars get special rates, such as many Chademo and CCS cars in the past have that could sign up to deeply discounted rates for the first x months of ownership? Furthermore, is VW going to offer better rates for people who use their stations frequently, such as EVgo did with a monthly discount plan (in which I paid half the regular EVgo price, making it competitive with my home charging depending on conditions)? (EVgo has since changed their rates.)
The only thing I don't like is the $1 connection fee. Like what happens if you connect, then some error happens, and you end up getting charged another connection fee? That seems very draconian
I'd never pay for that; I'd spend the 45 minutes on the phone with their Customer Support necessary to refund the $1 fee, because of their charger error, and encourage others to do the same in the same situation with post-it-notes on the pedestals and posts on forums. That way, the company would see it as a loss, and nix the $1 fee for errors. It might take them 6 months to realize it, but it would happen. But then, I'm not using their network, so who knows if anyone else will go through the trouble to stick it to them. The alternative is that they see it as a profit center and rack up an additional $500/year of reconnect fees per frequent user and waste days of those users' time reconnecting, and even doubling the DC charge battery disablement counter inside Teslas.
There are plenty of expensive networks that don't fix their *sugar*. SemaConnect is crazy expensive, but most of the ones at Walgreen's locations are broken. EVgo is expensive, and they're somewhat reliable but left me stranded before. Blink is massively expensive and horribly unreliable.
I had the same experience. I almost bricked my car on the first weekend I owned it due to EVgo not working. I since learned never to put myself in that situation again (always have a backup). I also since learned that retrying to connect with EVGO up to about 40 to 60 times can be the difference between failure and success. (EVgo monthly account, Chademo adapter, Tesla Model S.) Also, calling in every single charger that didn't work helped get them to repair them more often; I did this pretty religiously, and I saw pretty obvious results that they did get the ones I reported repaired better than the ones I did not report (although I measured across months; making notes on Plugshare was extremely helpful whenever I did this for record keeping). Also, calling them up when I couldn't figure out how to get it working did help, since they could explain more details of the connection, and help me with the restarts. But calling EVgo customer service required herculean amounts of patience; sometimes hold times were very excessive, and the slow scripts you had to endure with them were present. After all this, I got good at planning for EVgo stations, and my success rate went up high enough that I rarely ran into trouble. But I was always just one station failure away from having to turn back to the prior EVgo or a SuperCharger in the wrong direction after which having to then further detour to a second SuperCharger, which did happen about twice in the six months I was using Chademo. Since then, Tesla has expanded their SuperCharger network to the point where I would not need to use Chademo any more if I still had a Tesla.
