My first test of the CCS adapter in Ottawa.

[damonbrodie]

Just for my CCS combo adapter from SK and drove to my nearest CCS fast charger. Its only 50kw, but I just wanted to try it out. Both of the stations at the Shell "Recharge" station in Kanata were down. Rather disappointed, but not surprising with the resent storm.

 

[jabloomf1230]

Just for my CCS combo adapter from SK and drove to my nearest CCS fast charger. Its only 50kw, but I just wanted to try it out. Both of the stations at the Shell "Recharge" station in Kanata were down. Rather disappointed, but not surprising with the resent storm.

LOL. I just did the same thing with a local EVGo 50kw and it said that I had an invalid account when I tried to use my phone. Then I tried my credit card and the reader generated an error. The CCS NA network seems to be equivalent to a corporate.motor pool. The stations are abused and if they don't work, nobody bothers to report an issue.

 

[damonbrodie]

First things first - right after I reported the Kanata Shell as not working on Plugshare I almost immediately received an email from the Shell Recharge people with a phone number to call them for help. Quite impressive that feedback loop is in place. Unfortunately, I was already in my car and driving when it came in, it was late, and I didn't feel like trying it again.

Fast forward to today - I decided to try my shiny new CCS adapter again back at the same Shell Recharge Station. I pulled in and there are two LCD screens showing ads and two credit card pinpads. Both pinpads show different error messages (just like the last time) - station unavailable and the other said "SIM Card Inactive".

This is quite off-putting. Based on just this information it seems as though the stations are not working. The contrast to a Tesla Supercharger where there are no screens is quite interesting. You just assume they are going to work because the almost always do. Here I've got a negative mindset since this is the second time here, with the same messages displayed, so why should I expect anything different. A lesson for the manufacturers of charging stations. Clean up your software. Don't show spurious error message.

So Station 1 says it isn't working, so I press on and connect to station 2:

Opened the Shell Recharge App and chose station 2. I note it still says it is a 150kw station in the app, even though it has the same pricing as the other station, and the local sign indicates it is only 50kw. I reported that as an issue previously, but no updates yet in the app.

Surprisingly, the station came to life and started charging my car (Model Y LR). The station reported that I was getting 46kw:

However, the car reports I'm only getting 38kw:

I did pre-condition the battery but my SoC was at 51%, so not a completely ideal high speed charging scenario.

Conclusion:

- So in the end I was able to charge at a reasonable speed. Even at 38kw, this is 4x faster than what I can do at home with my WC. The station is very close to my house, so its a great alternative if my home charger is down due to a power outage. Nice piece of mind.
- The charging experience wasn't very smooth. The station is only half operational, and it purports to be having issues as well. Needs work from Shell or their charge OEM to improve the software, clean up the mistakes, and to keep the station working at full capacity.

 

[damonbrodie]

After testing the Shell (see previous post) I decided to try charging at the fastest CCS charging location in the Ottawa area. Plugshare tells me this is at a Petro Canada in nearby Gatineau and is rated for 350kw. Both plugshare and the Petro-Canada EV app did not report any issues, so I took the 45 minute drive over to try it out.

I didn't take any pictures, but both stations had caution take wrapped around them, and the charge handles had "Out of Order" hoods over them. The screen clearly indicated that the stations were unavailable and required maintenance.

The comparison to Tesla is again interesting. The Tesla app or the navigation in the car would both have indicated that the location is down (not to mention if they were occupied or not).

Contrast this with the Petro-Canada app that indicated they were not occupied (that's good!) but they didn't indicate they were completely out of order. This is a real problem when charging stations are not very common (as compared to gas stations). If you're low on charge, you really don't want to have these negative surprises.

Conclusion:

Another day and another terrible experience for non-Tesla charging. This really an acceptable level of service for a vital piece of infrastructure. It is extremely important that these stations be better maintained, have better integration with their paired smartphone apps. There simply isn't any excuse that the charging infrastructure be any less available as gas pumps.

 

[kylinblue]

The discrepancy (46/38kw) there is because your precondition isn't complete. My Y takes 50kw at 80% given a sufficiently conditioned pack. That 8kw is consumed for heating up the battery. Open up your app next time when you charge and you will see the number on there matches what the dispenser says. You will also notice the heating icon right next to the battery.