Re:I’m ready to trade in my electric car. Here’s why
by m463 on Sunday April 23, 2023 @11:22PM
(#35683321)
My experience was:
- evgo was decent, but had limited capacity (usually 2 L3 per location)
- chargepoint was usually pretty decent, but mostly was an L2 charger network
- blink was L3, but their chargers were ALWAYS broken.
that was 3 years ago, and switching to a tesla changed a few things:
- the range of the car was higher
- superchargers were in more locations
- had more stalls per location
- were faster at charging
- were more reliable
- one small detail worth mentioning - the other systems had payment networks that were frequently part of the problem - either preventing charging, or having you fiddle with things, or calling in to manually start things
But beyond that, when you pull into a supercharger, you know it's working. If it wasn't working it would say so on the dash. You park, pick up the cable, point it at your port and the port opens. You plug it in. You walk away. Your phone gets a notification when it's time to go. And it charges your card automatically. No goofy app required, no NFC/authorization, no noodling with the charger to make it work, no effort. It's really really nice.
Chargepoint stuff works fine. Stations are often broken (and like the author said, there's no way to know without going there). You have to use an app which thankfully supports an Apple wallet card. Before I figured that out it was super fiddly. I've had stations on other networks that are unusable because they have poor cell service. Then there's a whole "reload your card" thing where you get charged in $20 increments. And adapters, chunky connectors. To be fair I've never tried DC fast charging with anything but a supercharger.