I have a 2016 90D MS - I travel a lot and in the places I travel there are only ChargePoint level 2 chargers - I put it in my charge point app with my model and it takes out the Level 2. When I called chargepoint because there is no Tesla customer service to speak of, I was told it was because I don't have the correct adapter with my car. He said Telsla would not allow them to use their configuration (sorry I know everyone on this chat knows a lot more about Teslas and the lingo than I ) I looked on the chargePoint app and it says it needs "Combo CHAdeMO". The CharePoint rep also told me that I could only use the level 1 Chargepoint chargers. So my question is Does Tesla sell an adapter for this charging type/station? There are no Tesla chargers here except Level 1's, and my Battery will be pretty very low when I get here. Thanks anyone for any information. This car has become the biggest challenge I have encountered in my life. Mostly because of the lack of information/education on the front end and lack of support Tesla provides to its customers. Next EV not likely to be Tesla.
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Third Party Charging Stations - Specifically - Chargepoint
- Thread starter Stout55
- Start date
I believe when it says "Combo" and "Chademo" it means two different standards.
Chademo is an older one, DC only, typically mostly used by the Nissan Leaf. It's sort of on its way out--most brands that used to use it are switching to the other one we'll discuss. Tesla sells (or used to sell) an adapter for it. If you can't find it on the store, you can occasionally find it for markups on eBay. The adapter, and many stations, are limited to about 50 kW.
"Combo" typically means the SAE CCS1 DC, which combines the J1772 AC charge port (the round standard you should have an adapter for to use non-Tesla Level 2 chargers, which you can order from Tesla or from 3rd parties like Lectron) with two additional DC pins (hence, "Combo"). It's basically the new standard, in use by VW, BMW, GM, Ford, Kia, Hyundai, the Nissan Ariya and likely future cars, and so on. It's capable of up to 350 KW, though Teslas using it would be limited to ~200 kW. There is an adapter for it in South Korea (which also uses CCS1), and supposedly it will come to the US sometime. However, your car will need a retrofit to be able to use it as CCS is a separate protocol that the car doesn't "speak" - newer cars have a new chip on their charger board that lets them "speak" CCS to stations, so you need to wait not only for the adapter, but for the retrofit kits to be available to order and either install it yourself or get a service center to do it for you.
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I agree that Tesla does a pretty piss poor job of providing education for their customers. But the information is most certainly on the internet. Perhaps the trick is knowing the words to search for.
Something you might find useful, beyond the Tesla and ChargePoint maps, is the PlugShare - EV Charging Station Map - Find a place to charge crowdsourced database of charging locations. You can filter by the type of plugs you can use, and the types of amenities you would like near the chargers. I often set it to Tesla, J-1772 (I have the included adapter), and then refine it to Hotel/Lodging. This helps me find places that have EV charging options and I can select from an available hotel or bed and breakfast.
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I can't thank you enough for all that info... Clearly its above my knowledge level and maybe should have stayed with my ICE car, but trying to help the planet.I believe when it says "Combo" and "Chademo" it means two different standards.
Chademo is an older one, DC only, typically mostly used by the Nissan Leaf. It's sort of on its way out--most brands that used to use it are switching to the other one we'll discuss. Tesla sells (or used to sell) an adapter for it. If you can't find it on the store, you can occasionally find it for markups on eBay. The adapter, and many stations, are limited to about 50 kW.
"Combo" typically means the SAE CCS1 DC, which combines the J1772 AC charge port (the round standard you should have an adapter for to use non-Tesla Level 2 chargers, which you can order from Tesla or from 3rd parties like Lectron) with two additional DC pins (hence, "Combo"). It's basically the new standard, in use by VW, BMW, GM, Ford, Kia, Hyundai, the Nissan Ariya and likely future cars, and so on. It's capable of up to 350 KW, though Teslas using it would be limited to ~200 kW. There is an adapter for it in South Korea (which also uses CCS1), and supposedly it will come to the US sometime. However, your car will need a retrofit to be able to use it as CCS is a separate protocol that the car doesn't "speak" - newer cars have a new chip on their charger board that lets them "speak" CCS to stations, so you need to wait not only for the adapter, but for the retrofit kits to be available to order and either install it yourself or get a service center to do it for you.
My charging kit came with 2 adapters - the one I use to plug into a standard wall plug that looks like a dryer plug(I think this is a NEMA14-50?) (it works well, though very tight fitting and hard to pull apart) and I believe I have the J1772 adapter.
If I understand you above, I simply cannot use this ChargePoint charging station at this time because of 2 things
1. Need an adapter CCS1 or CCS2
2. Retrofit kit that is not currently available. Did I understand you correctly?
I am going to go down to the charging station and take a picture to see if I can make sense of this. Thanks for the above picture it does help a lot.
Getting a hold of Tesla is impossible. The info I did get was from ChargePoint Customer Service, I don't think Tesla even has a customer service department.
I do have the PlugShare app though I have not used it much and not exactly sure what to put in. If I entered only use 50Kw, there are no chargers in the area. So what is the Kw for level 2?
Bottom line for me is that level 1 chargers are worthless if you are on the move, proprietary plugs(TESLA) are just a problem, just like Apple and their lightening cable though they at least has a available solution adapter easily purchasable. The success of EV and Infrastructure is universal adaptability. We are very mobile.
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Yeah, I know there's a lot of stuff to learn in this terminology, and you do have the terms wrong, so that's going to be harder matching up your questions to the answers you get from people here if the names aren't synced. So here's what they are:
Level 1: 120V, like a really standard low power household outlet. They don't have those at the Chargepoint stations, so that's not even in this discussion.
Level 2: 240V. This is the J1772 plug at the charging stations. Your car does already come with this adapter, and you can always use these.
Level 3: Fast DC charging. There are two types of this--CHAdeMO and CCS. The CHAdeMO one, Tesla used to sell an adapter for it, but it's gone now. CCS is Combo Charging System, and Tesla does not sell an adapter for this yet, but probably will in the near future, like later this year or maybe next.
So everywhere you were saying "Level 1", I think you meant the Level 2--the J1772 plugs. And everywhere you were saying "Level 2", I think you meant the DC fast charging.
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Ah, good, so you're at least somewhat covered for L2 charging (as @Rocky_H mentions, this is the medium-speed AC charging option, 240V at ~32 amps for about 7 kW and about 25 miles of range per hour charging.
Sadly, likely true. You either need a Chademo adapter (no longer on sale as I understand it, and hard to get off eBay espeically given the low power it offers) or a retrofit and CCS1 adapter. That should be coming this year, hopefully, and should honestly have been prioritized 5 years ago, but Tesla...doesn't always value practical things like cross-platform charging standards over showy things like FSD. There's a third party CCS1 adapter which would be available from EVHub, except that @AlexUA's factory is in Kyiv, and they've been rather busy there the last month staying safe and dealing with war needs.
Good luck! If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to ask--note those images are the car side of the relevant standards, so the station side will be the inverse. If you search the web, you can find similar images of the plug-side of CCS and Chademo to compare to the station.
"Level 2" with 240V charging is typically about 240V at 32 amps: about 7 kW, or about 25 miles per hour spent charging.
Tesla's decision to keep supercharger proprietary and then not even to support CCS1 adaptors even as CCS1 became the standard for all other US cars (it is currently on 48.8% of all stations offering >70 kW charging and about 23% of all stalls offering >70 kW charging in the US, with that percentage likely to increase radically in the next few years) was a big factor in me falling out of love with the company.
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Thanks Rocky, I agree with you whole heartedly, wish I had known last summer what I have since learned I might have considered waiting a few more years for other companies to join the foray. I do love the car just not the company.
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My wife and I recently were making decisions about replacing a car. We have a 2014 Tesla Model S, and we have our last gas car, a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid. We decided with the Honda Civic being 17 years old and already having to replace the hybrid battery at 9 years, that might be a good idea to sell while it's still running well. So my wife (who is not the Tesla fan) agreed that we could replace it with another car, and it could be electric. Knowing that she doesn't really like our Model S, I said we can certainly get an EV from some other company, like Ford or Kia or Hyundai or whoever. She instantly turned that down flat because of the unreliable nightmare that charging infrastructure is outside of Tesla's Supercharger network. So she said those were a no-go, and we went and looked at the Tesla 3 and Y and she preferred the Y, so we ordered it.
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I think the "unreliability" of chargers outside Tesla is...exaggerated. It's not bad, and it's a heck of a lot better than it was even a few years ago. I've only once or twice had serious issues getting a charge in three years of owning my Kia and the gaps in the network get smaller every year.
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It is pretty bad, and it's compounded because of another factor--reliance on only one single plug at a lot of stations. So if it is out of order, you are in a mess. I have been bitten by this really badly from the only station in Redmond, OR being out of order and making for a very difficult crossing of Oregon on U.S. 26, where there were no other DC fast charging options along the way, so I had to set my cruise control at 45 mph for several hours' drive to make it from Sisters to Baker City. And then just this past September of 2021, I was having to rely on the CHAdeMO in McDermitt, NV, and I was getting into a panic as it was taking 6 or 7 attempts trying to get it working. The credit card reader was broken and giving errors, and the mobile app kept alternating between no connection and giving errors. It was freaking me out how many times it was failing to activate before I finally got it going. So there is way too much hit or miss for my comfort.
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Well, CHAdeMO is definitely not a viable option, and it unfortunately gave EVs a bad image for a huge portion of the population. Do not consider any new or even used CHAdeMO based vehicles as a future purchase, or even CHAdeMO as an option for charging Teslas. That technology is effectively dead.
But CCS is a different critter. Using PlugShare we can view only CCS with a minimum charge speed of 120kW. It's hard to find sites with less than 4 CCS charging stalls. Coverage looks better than the Supercharger network from when your 2014 Model S was made. And CCS is being built out about as fast as the Supercharger network.
If my wife and I buy another car I'd like it to be a non-Tesla EV. It would be good to have that experience first hand and learn more of what Tesla could be doing differently/better. And what they've done absolutely the best. I think it will mostly be that the range is the best and the charging infrastructure is the best, but the interior controls are obnoxious.
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No, it is not. I think you missed the fact that all of the problems I mentioned were the inability of the station to activate/communicate and failures of the credit card reader and billing system. That's a failure of the basic station function. It has nothing to do with which cord was being used. This is the basic problem with the unreliability of these networks, regardless of CHAdeMO or CCS.
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But you specifically said you were using CHAdeMO and that there was one single plug at a lot of stations.
Electrify America typically have four charging pedestals. If the credit card reader or whatever is used to start the session is dead on the CHAdeMO pedestal, that doesn't mean it's broken on the other three where CCS is available. Even Tesla have problems with one or two stalls being down but the others working fine. I've had that experience probably a dozen times.
Four entirely separate stalls - only one CHAdeMO plug. Sure the CCS on that stall likely would also not work if the communication was broken, but the other three likely would work fine.
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I am trying to keep my anger in check, but you are really insistent on missing the point. Jeez, you are so STUCK on Electrify America and how THEIR infrastructure is chosen and laid out! These were not Electrify America stations! None of those things you are describing are accurate or relevant to the places I have described and the stations I needed to use that were failing. These were nothing like the EA locations where there was 1 CHAdeMO on one station and then rows and rows of many CCS plugs to give other choices. Here is what is at the places I was having to use, where the stations couldn't turn on:
West Coast Electric Highway (Formerly Aerovironment, now Webasto) in Redmond, OR:
CCS plugs: 0
CHAdeMO: 1
Huh. Guess trying to use the nonexistent CCS wouldn't have helped me much, now would it?
Greenlots in McDermitt, NV:
Two stations, both dual cable CCS and CHAdeMO. Activating the station (if you could ever do it) will let you use either cord, so choosing one or the other makes no difference.
And whaddaya know? This station that kept failing has been marked as down for repair for a few months now on Plugshare.
So now. Please stop being so dismissive and rejecting people's actual experiences and telling them that what you experience is what they must have been going through. It is terrible gaslighting; stop it.
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Someone telling me the problems aren't there, when it is all too frequently what I run into. Yes, I'm going to disagree with that. While these problems continue to be there and continue to cause me problems and mess up my traveling on these lesser routes, then they are there. When they aren't there anymore, then we can agree that they aren't there. I guess I should have said "It is pretty bad for me." But I am not going to let you continue to point fingers at me with this arrogant attitude you're using, saying that what I've been experiencing wasn't real, and I should have just done [NON USEFUL THING].
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I apologize if I made you feel like I was dismissing your issues. For my part, I just routinely avoid single-stall CCS stations when road tripping for reasons like that, so I don't tend to have those issues (feasible in my normal areas due to the number of multi-stall EA and newer EVGo stations), and I see a lot of people treating issues like the one you had, or issues with the one Chademo plug at EA stations or whatever as a sign the entire CCS network is garbage. There's definitely room for improvement still, especially having more multi-stall CCS stations in more places, especially on secondary or tertiary routes like the one you had trouble with. I hope the new infrastructure funding brings at lot of that. However, I often feel the need to push back that in the areas where the network is being built out with multi-stall high-power CCS stations, their reliability tends to be pretty decent, the issue is that the coverage is still spotty (though, fortunately, growing and on track to grow more).
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I didn't say the problems aren't there. I said that CCS is different than CHAdeMO - this includes availability and reliability. I started by agreeing with you about CHAdeMO, but apparently that is irrelevant. Your negative experiences with CHAdeMO have obviously left you with an extremely bad opinion of all non-Tesla technology. There are people who had similar experiences with the Tesla Supercharger network and make the same claims about it that you make about other EV charging options.
I never said your experiences didn't happen. I'm saying that a CCS based vehicle today would be better than your CHAdeMO experience.
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I already covered that, so it should be very apparent now. It really was irrelevant to the problems I keep running into. There was not any more availability or reliability for CCS. They were dual cable stations or CHAdeMO only, so being able to use CCS would have not been any better in the one case and even worse in the other, which didn't have CCS. These were simply about stations failing to function, not related to what plug type it had.
More gaslighting. You are still dismissing the fact that I have been having to reiterate: THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT BEING CHAdeMO. This is about bad choices in buildout and reliability of these more broad bad infrastructure issues: single point failure, stations failing to activate, bad status reporting, faulty communication, inoperable credit card readers, etc.
And those are wise choices. A lot of people are fortunate to have not run into these kinds of problems because of the places they go and the types of stations they use. So they don't encounter these issues much and have a pretty good experience and impression of it. You are not going into the level of risk of these other single stations, where there's no redundancy and the likelihood of problems is higher.
It does reveal a difference in philosophy that makes real world impact. When a route gets a Supercharger location on it, you can count on it. There is a lot of redundancy, and they prioritize repair quickly. If it's got some other thing from Blink or Semacharge or EVGo or Greenlots or Chargepoint, they have this bad tendency to put in a single station at a lot of places, which is risky, and to let stations sit broken for months (but sometimes not reported broken). So with those two factors, it's tough to count on it, and you wonder if it's going to work when you get there. Again, I fully acknowledge that Electrify America does huge installations with a lot of redundancy and seems to have a really good record of repair and keeping their stuff running well, so EA is not what I'm talking about. It's a lot of this other scattered stuff from other companies that is hard to rely on.
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EVGo, at least, seems to finally be pivoting their model: most of their new high-power installs are at least 4 stalls, though they still only have 120 sites like that open nationwide, none currently in your neck of the woods, and their maintenance could still stand to learn a bit from EA, not to even mention Tesla. The average EA station Plugscore is 8.7, coming up to 9.0 if you ignore stations which have no rating at all due to being new or infrequently used. For EVGo's >70kW stations, the equivalent values are 6.3 and 7.67. Definitely something which needs to be fixed.
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