Won’t be going back to EVgo for a while…

[kman42]

…if ever. I’m not usually an absolutist, but my first ever experience with a fast charger was at EVgo last night and it was a disaster. My wife needed the MY (only a few months old so we’ve only charged it at home) so I took the Leaf. We usually just run errands in it or commute to work and charge at home, so in five years, I’ve never had to use a fast charger with it. I had to do just enough driving that I was going to have to charge it once so I figured I would do it at the new EVgo station in the grocery store parking lot while I grabbed some dinner. First off, I had to enter my credit card info multiple times before the app ‘captured’ it. But then the cables and the handles, OMG, they are enormous and heavy. They were tangled and unwieldy. I can’t imagine someone with mobility or strength issues trying to deal them. I plugged in and started it and headed across the street for a bite. A few minutes later I was notified that the charging session was done at 86% charge (the car only gets 65 miles per charge, so I needed everything I could get). I tried starting it again to no avail. When I returned to the car, I tried removing the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Two other people tried with no luck. I called EVgo and, to their credit, they did answer quickly. They told me to lock/unlock the car three time then unlock three times from the FOB. Nothing. Push, wiggle, pull? Nope. Then we were disconnected. The next operator told me to press unlock on the FOB ten times, so they don’t even seem to have an SOP. Nothing. She did a soft reset of the charger then a hard reset, neither of which helped. She then said a technician would be out in 2-4 hours! Meanwhile, I’m stuck without a car and somewhere important to be. I hung up and played with it for another 15 minutes with the other two guys and eventually it just came out, but I’m not really sure what we did to cause it do so. I was only a few minutes late to my appointment so no real harm done, but it was a stressful experience. If it had been our new MY instead of our Leaf, I would have been quite upset. Anyway, I won’t be using a third party charger anytime soon and have started accelerating my plans to replace the Leaf with a M3.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Would the manual release have helped? EVs all have a manual release.

Charge Port Lid and Lock Release

 

[kman42]

Thanks! I wish I had known that.

 

[GasNah]

sorry to hear about your bad experience, I have used EVgo many times and have not had an issue, I have actually used the one with the Tesla connector and the one for CCS and no issues so far.

 

[karkrazy]

Leaf? Was this using the chademo handle/port? Those things are larger in general, don’t think it’s an EVGo thing… just looking at the Tesla-Chademo adapter, that thing is monstrous too. But I agree, I had difficulty with Evgo too… experiences with Chargepoint and EA have generally been ok

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

Leaf? Was this using the chademo handle/port? Those things are larger in general, don’t think it’s an EVGo thing… just looking at the Tesla-Chademo adapter, that thing is monstrous too. But I agree, I had difficulty with Evgo too… experiences with Chargepoint and EA have generally been ok

Used a CCS/CHAdeMO charger today in my Kona (CCS). The CHAdeMO looked smaller than the CCS. I think maybe older CHAdeMO units were chunky, but they've become more reasonable as DCFC matured.