DC Fast Charging In America: Our Findings In October 2022

hello and welcome to another out of spec reviews video guys you know we cover charging infrastructure from time to time and in my impression it's something we need to go deeper and deeper into so I'm thinking every month or every quarter we should do a video like this where you guys and us we all collaborate to share our experiences with charging of course you're going to watch the video we're going to share our findings the trends that we're seeing new hardware new locations new types of service and then of course I really want you guys to comment down below with your experiences driving an EV during this month of October 2022 and some things that you're hoping to improve and some things that you've seen improve that you're pretty pleased with so overall maybe we do this once a month we'll just do it you know sort of a charging report or our charger findings here in America in regards to Tesla and non-tesla electric vehicles Alyssa and I are with the dogs and we're actually in our rivian r1t towing a lucid air out to California right now and um you know we've been stopping at Chargers we said hey we've been talking a lot with friends other people in the industry about charging recently and I thought well let's just share you know sort of the the trends of conversations we're having with some of you guys and I think uh the first thing we've noticed is we should actually talk about this trip maybe later on in the video uh but there's some big news coming along um just in terms of the new charger locations opening up a major Corridor close to our hearts and where we live which is we just went to one the other day 80. I-80 through Wyoming should be open I think by late fall early winter hopefully so it sounds like Rollins is installed Cheyenne is going in Rock Springs I think is already online which means no longer do we have to add had five hours on our trip in a CCS vehicle about four hours longer to go down to Denver over I-70 and up to Salt Lake we could just go straight through Wyoming and go to Salt Lake City from where we live in Fort Collins so that for me is huge news uh what's your impression of that because right now we have to take a Tesla on that Loop right yeah I've I've been wanting to take that trip for some of our road trip videos for rescue dogs because a lot of the dogs in Fosters are actually in eat Salt Lake City Utah and I can't go there in this car yet but I can take the Tesla but I don't think we really want to have rescue dogs in the model as plaid right now so we're waiting for that to open up yeah I mean worst case yeah throw them in the car cars are meant to be used everything's a dog hauler that we ain't but certainly the the ribby and the e-tron those are you know dedicated dog Transportation vehicles and uh yeah I mean it's super exciting so my guests and I guess maybe higher level there has been a lot of talks especially recently of Tesla opening up their supercharger Network now in a year from now it's going to sound so funny because my prediction is it's just going to be wide open at select stations and we'll get into predictions in a little bit but right now uh Tesla the grumblings are the supercharger network will open to public CCS Vehicles the question is how right we don't know if they're going to be adding a separate cable under their Chargers we don't know if it's just going to be version four superchargers that are going to have the CCS plugs directly on them or if they're going to offer an adapter for us to purchase maybe 500 adapter or something like that for us to buy and charge you know to gain access to their network if you had to guess how do you think Tesla is going to open up their Network in America well if they're going to be opening up the current Chargers then there's gonna have to just be an adapter or if they just do the version four I think is what you said uh then I mean I don't see that it's a fix it's a help but it does how much does it really help if the infrastructure is not even there yet so we're still gonna have to be waiting for infrastructure right so infrastructure is really in my opinion right now the key I would say negative to driving an electric vehicle the cars are great the trucks are great driving Dynamics Are Awesome Towing ability is wonderful and in my impression infrastructure is still the pain Point um and with Tesla it's actually becoming a pain Point as well which is sort of new so we've driven Teslas longer than most other electric vehicles we own two of them currently for those who may not know our videos and some of the grumblings going on with the Tesla issues right now are expensive and full Chargers so during the day especially on the west coast we're seeing upwards of 60 cents per kilowatt hour which is a lot of money that's like 60 plus dollars to full charge a Model S that is pretty expensive that and that's again at fast charging we always recommend people to find a level two solution for home use or workplace charging or something other than relying on DC Chargers every day and uh we'll talk about that a little bit as well because we actually are home charging went down and we lived with some DC charging which was a fun experiment but now we're back to having home charging it's really nice very happy yeah but uh so we're noticing Tesla Chargers getting expensive and right around the same time as this Tesla just this month I believe it was earlier this month or end of last month launched the Tesla to CCS adapter and this is or is it ccs to Tesla I'm not really sure which way it is but basically it allows Teslas to charge on the public CCS Chargers now for years Tesla has offered a chatterbo adapter and the chatimo adapter was limited to 125 amps at your car's pack voltage and you would use a chat about Port like a Nissan Leaf would use or an beef or something like that but there's just really slow it's 50 kilowatts if you hit it just right with the CCS adapter they are uh you know you're typically going to get 500 amps in a charger which is about 210 212 kilowatts on Model S maybe 180 190 kilowatts on model 3 and model y since they're packed voltage is a little lower and you also get access to the Electrify America charging Network which if you're a member is 31 cents per kilowatt hour doesn't matter the time of day doesn't matter the location across the country and there are some states that bill by the minute but that's even cheaper if you have a fast charging EV so we've seen a lot of Tesla owners go for the official North American Tesla at CCS adapter to allow the cars to charge at pretty much half price on Electrify America some of the time that's pretty crazy isn't it that's very good I mean we've been totally lucky that we don't have to pay for supercharging due to all of our credits that we've gotten thanks to a lot of you guys and uh but yeah I honestly I don't think I really Road tripped a Tesla in a couple of years so yeah I don't remember what the charging Network infrastructure is even like oh you just plug in and walk away for the most well yeah yeah it's I mean I'm sure it's similar to what it used to be but if anything has changed I'm not 100 sure well let's talk about you know I mentioned plug-in and walk away there are some issues with Tesla superchargers going on right now uh and the first thing I'm noticing is because the cars especially with new model S and model X can charge so fast for so long we're starting to see the handle temperature the cable temperatures overheating and that was really a problem over summer where you would plug in you'd get good power and they would actually come off of max power uh sometimes quite a bit to try and cool down the handle even though it's all liquid cooled for version three charging uh that I would say is a pretty minor issue for most people it maybe adds a couple minutes to a charging session not the end of the world but definitely a consideration uh to you know something that I hope that they'll improve with version 4 charging especially as the currents go higher as the amps go higher the other thing we're starting to notice is version two superchargers the older ones are uh you know starting to get busier more people are buying Teslas and so that means more people are power sharing so you'll be there and you're really only getting a Max of 72 kilowatts now if you want to get dirty which I think we should version two superchargers no longer seem to do a first arrival priority what that means is the first car that plugged in the way it used to work got all the power and then the second car if you plugged in on 1A you got everything if someone came out 2B or yeah 2A get everything 2B you get the leftovers now it seems to do a force split calculation where you just kind of go right down at 72 kilowatts down the middle I didn't know that yeah and so I noticed that on my bottle s plaid road trip that's on our motoring Channel I did in Baker California and that was an interesting one because Baker is a 40 stall supercharger huge supercharger and I took the last spot so we're noticing a huge increase in traffic at Tesla superchargers I feel like we've noticed maybe even a little bit of a downturn especially in the Midwest of supercharger installations that we get these waves where certain regions get built up very quickly and then maybe the team focuses on another either way I think the Tesla network is pretty good where we live but I would love to have a charger you know closer up to us in Fort Collins and more options across Wyoming that are not version two superchargers a lot of the corridors especially the lower travel ones were what Tesla originally installed and so they're all version two Chargers and it's hard to find version threes along Highway corridors which is kind of when you want them trivia okay so one last Tesla topic before we continue on with the rest but uh I've noticed the CCS adapter that they offer uh we had a friend of ours Ryan who has a Model S plaid who got 590 amps with the CCS adapter it was a full 250 kilowatts on an Electrify America station these stations the station he used was the newer Signet one with the green glow around the outside of the unit and it actually outputted more than the standard allows for with ccs so the car asked for everything and the charger gave him everything now the Chargers are physically capable of doing that but the CCS standard as far as I understand it we did a whole podcast on this is a 500 amp maximum and the Next Generation hasn't quite been implemented yet so I don't know what exactly is going on but definitely some changes there and that doesn't happen at every charging station to me that was like a fluke but in a good way because he said nothing got hot and he got all the power in the world so very interesting thing uh should we talk a little bit about the EA free charging situation that's been going on over the last few weeks yeah so EA is free the past as as they're rolling out a lot of their new charging is our speculation is why uh but now they're not anymore some are some aren't so right so now it was very much the overwhelming majority of the network was it free vent mode as they say it was labeled as complementary charging and this was for I think like a solid four weeks and maybe even more I don't know the exact dates but you could roll up to an EA station plug in and get free charging and this I you know we did our whole Towing road trip to Seattle and back and pretty much didn't cost us anything and to me that's like a blatant like just leaving money on the table I don't know what what system update would take so long that you couldn't figure out payment processing for a month now at the end of the day the consumer is in the win which is great but that was a little bit sketchy EA told us that this was because of back end system upgrades that they were operating in free vent mode so who knows I don't know the inside of the company or how everything works but apparently it took them a solid four weeks or so to implement their new back end strategy and now we're back to normal and honestly we have not had any issues since we they've turned off free then activating Chargers getting them to charge with the app it's been super seamless so maybe whatever they did worked really well and it's all good because we have not had any payment activation issues whatsoever the only issue you had was when you were driving a vehicle and we had an old expired credit card on our account right and it didn't tell me why I couldn't charge and so I was very confused um as to how to fix that problem and of course I have him to fix that problem but if I were just the normal average Joe I mean he would have been sitting and waiting for customer service to help yeah and you could always call them and honestly Electrify America's call center has and continues to be world class the nicest people uh really wonderful folks I typically don't call them very much in full transparency I'll just tweet about it on Twitter if we have an issue and go to the next because I know someone will look at it and I hate I don't know I don't want to call them every day but you know if it's a major issue where I was stuck which I'll get to I was at one location then I will give them a call um I think your issue was that the error code that specific error code didn't say it wasn't charging because our balance was in the negative or couldn't reload our card it just said charging error at nothing really else right and then and before that I wasn't able to charge because the charging station was full so it was already just not a good experience overall but if they would have just told me hey you don't have enough funds that would have been automatic oh okay I'll just reload the funds but didn't tell me that right so I logged into the app after you called and I was like oh yeah I remember sometimes I have to change our card on there so we just changed the default card to the current one and that was fine all good that's a very minor issue and we're good but we are noticing a big Trend over the last six months especially but maybe even over the last three months of just everyone is out and their electric cars road tripping we and also thank you to you guys a lot of you guys are viewers every charging stop we meet multiple viewers pretty much guaranteed and you all Drive the coolest cars we just met some folks driving from Washington to Louisiana in their Post Star three or sorry post R2 but the new update one uh we also bet some Lucid engineers at the last station some Mercedes Engineers who happen to be viewers it was really cool just to you know see everyone going out there testing cars pushing cars but this is leading to we very rarely get a charge where we don't see anyone even yesterday we pulled into a charger at about one o'clock in the morning and we were not the only car charging so the network usage I would love to see the statistics and this goes for evgo chargepoint Electrify America Green Box blink I'm just seeing way more cars charging across the network what I'm not seeing is a proportional increase in Chargers going in and so this is quite concerning to me I'm curious what you guys think about this will we have full charging stations more lines even in the middle of Utah Green River Utah we had a line just before and part of that line was another Trend which is we are seeing so many people full charge at charging stations like ignoring the 80 recommended limit and just going all the way to full for example the last charging stop there was a Volvo C40 and a a Volkswagen id4 it's always the id4 owners great card but stop full charging your cars all the time now if you need to make a stretch look I we're Towing and Lucid we need to do deep charges in this totally acceptable but just there seems to be an unnecessary amount of people that are sitting there for an hour to really just wait to that last point where your card clicks off at 100 and so that comes with education that comes with time but people will figure it out I mean Alyssa your e-tron charges faster up top than almost any other car but do you ever full charge it um it depends I mean it just depends on how far the next Charger is but I really don't road trip that car as much just because what I would be road tripping it for they do have really long spots in between and I don't even think the car itself could make it uh so that is just we drove it across the country what are you talking about uh when I go like into Nebraska and stuff like that there's really long stretches so I mean if there was wind if there's something else then I'd just be stranded and I don't really want to risk it so I just don't really road trip that car as much so but if I am charging it out of fast charger I probably charge it maybe to around like 80 percent 60 just really depends on how long I just want to sit there which is usually not long that's the nice thing about the e-tron a very flat curve but we even saw a guy yesterday full charging his Mustang Maki sitting at 12 kilowatts for it over an hour and I'm like dude I didn't say anything that's not my place at the end of the day if someone's plugged into a charger and accepting power it is my belief they have all the right in the world to to charge their car do whatever they want look I I do charging tests typically in the middle of the night when we're not blocking anyone but I think it is uh something to at least be aware of if you're new to EVS that maybe you could save some time unplugging early getting to the next Charger lower like we've shown on our motoring Channel with a lot of our road trips and ultimately you'll have a faster road tripping experience that way and you know we might push it harder than most do going down to zero percent or five percent some people want a five to ten percent buffer or 15 buffer that's fine but a lot of chargers are only 100 miles apart and it's it's faster just to hop skip and a jump across the but this has been a real thing that was the issue with Green River everyone there could have made it to the next charger but we had a line forming because people wanted to full charge their cars one of them was also a viewer who was full charging his id4 and I'm like you must not be really a viewer since he's watching much the battery Channel sure sure that makes sense that was it was pretty funny but uh ultimately no I I don't really give suggestions I don't encourage people to do different things at Chargers if they're accepting power great I the only time I might say something if someone's like clogged up a charger the car's done charging and someone's waiting then I think I'd be like hey just so you know you're done charging but yeah we we uh not not our place really but just something to keep in mind okay I want to talk about the big situation which has been going on in my opinion uh which is really changing the face of charging for us which is we have talked for a long time about the ABB Chargers in particular outputting very weird power levels having lots of issues going with downtime and I'm not sure if that was due to lack of Maintenance or poor Hardware initially or what exactly the issues were I'm not on the inside but we do know we at least in our experience had most problems charging at Electrify America ABB Chargers and we've also seen their response which is ripping out a lot of the ABB Chargers so they must have agreed that there was an issue with ABB I think we can surmise from this uh our local station was swapped out others were swapped out I think they've probably done 20 or 30 stations now I don't know the exact number I haven't followed the progress but these new Chargers are beautiful they're single cable only they're they're at least the post is built by BTC the Chargers themselves are brand new hardware co-developed with Electrify America BTC or SK Signet you can have two different chargers there's no way really of knowing when you're at the charger but just background for you guys and so a lot of the older ABB Hardware is being ripped out of the ground now before we get into how the new hardware is being produced let's talk about that upgrade process because we've followed this upgrade process pretty closely right and so what we've noticed is when a station is about to go offline they definitely update plug share and they let you know that hey this station is going to go offline so always recommend checking plug share but not necessarily their native app right Alyssa right yeah I ran into the issue when I was coming home from a girls weekend and thought our local Loveland charger was open and available and I really needed to charge and it ended up being down right so what happened was Electrify America did not update their app saying that this station's actually Powers off shut off but plugshare was somehow updated that made no sense to me as soon as we tweeted about it five minutes later what was it something like that uh then they popped up in the eam so that's why I tweet about things instead of just calling them because it gets stuck faster in my opinion um so I uh you know we found out that situation that our station was one of the early ones it didn't turn out to be the first I think we were the fourth or fifth station to get updated uh but we got the brand new hardware and honestly it's been rocking at that station it took the I want to say about three weeks was it maybe a little less than three weeks two weeks in a bit something like that to fully rip out ABB and then put in the new ones what's interesting is most of these stations are Four Stall locations so they're actually only putting three new dispensers in and charging hardware and leaving the original chat amount right the only time that they've actually swapped out the chat about and upgraded it is in Las Vegas I noticed that they took out the ABB chat about and put in a Signet chat about yeah so that's very interesting to me so my guess is the Las Vegas Chargers are the SK Signet Chargers and then the chadamo is also fed by a Signet unit and of course we know that it is a Signet unit the new ones are all BTC on the outside I mentioned of course so it's hard to know what Chargers are there but that's uh the South Premium Outlets uh that was the only time I've seen them rip out the ABB chadamo just from browsing plug share and see you around so that's an interesting development uh but but I would say overall we've seen a much higher success rate with these new Chargers we've seen fastest power on any car that we've ever seen 351 kilowatts delivered to the Lucid air they do load sharing and balancing but I have to say even charging with other cars at our local station I have not felt the effects of balancing yet so that's something I want to explore more especially as we have Hummer EV coming in rivian r1s and some other things to try and max out the station and figure out how the balancing logic works but right now I would say it's it's flat out these things rip I'm very impressed with them overall except for one issue which we ran into yesterday with the new Chargers which was apparently at around 70 percent state of charge there is there tends to be a fluke thing that happens with rivians uh and actually now to e-tron GT it happened to who knows exactly but the Chargers don't seem to be outputting fully regulated power and I spoke to some rivian Engineers about this and they're going to give us an official response which we're going to include right after this little clip because I have a phone call with them in five minutes and I'm curious to see what they have to say uh but basically we you know how to our truck we were charging hit 72 state of charge it's an arivian r1t we're on the new units and the whole thing shows electrical fault to cars and turtle mode you know everything freaked out but the charger did not show a fault the charger saw oh the car stopped charging and it just said everything is fine so no faults we plugged in again after resetting the truck same thing happened I posted about it on Twitter of course that's the best way to find out what's going on with us and uh multiple Roofing owners chimed in saying hey on the new EA Hardware the same things happened to me also internally rivient confirmed uh that the same thing's happening with some of their test trucks so very interesting to see there was also an Audi e-tron GT there you know the J1 platform car again at about 77 state of charge uh the car bricked itself faulted and said you know electrical malfunction so the theory is the Chargers may not be either they might be you know not being able to regulate power well enough and over boosting or it might what rivian told me is that there's too many swings and it's almost dirty power if you will I'm not sure if the exact issue I'm not sure if we need to find out the exact issue all I can say is the new hardware that's going in there is some interoperability issues with some of the cars that are existing out there now whether all of this turns out to be how the cars are programmed how they're handling the the new Chargers or if the new Chargers are programmed wrong I can't say that's always the figure-pointing issue where we end up in the middle trying to guess and ultimately we don't know either way because I'm not looking at canned signals or logs from either and what I can say is that there seems to be i o issues with at least a riviant and Audi with the new hardware and reported multiple times and we've seen it multiple times we've also had other totally Flawless charging sessions with the new hardware charging this truck up to full that's generally been my experience there's almost no issues with the new hardware until yesterday so and we also charged again on the new hardware after that at Glenwood Springs yesterday no issues there so that'll be an interesting one to watch unfold so uh other things I want to mention Eevee go is going hard into their new units uh expanding out they're putting in Delta units and Signet units up to 350 kilowatts my impression is that the Delta units go up to 540 amps at least labeled on the Chargers those ones seem to be able to to deliver all the power they're also simultaneous charging available on one unit so I'm pretty thrilled with their new Delta units although again not perfect because I rolled up to one the other day and it said totally offline because the charging cable cooling system wasn't pressurized correctly that bricked the whole charger it didn't even dip to a Fail-Safe power level so more work to be done with robustness on some of this new hardware going in uh and we've also done a lot of podcasts on charging topics and we'll continue to do so on specific topics related to charging so keep an eye on the out of spec podcast it's a separate channel here on YouTube and we're doing daily episodes related to cars mostly electric cars and a lot of charging topics so that will be coming um what else do we have blinked recently redid their entire back end app which is very cool so I have to play around with that a little bit more the problem is most blink Chargers are offline right so that's kind of a shame Francis energy is redoing their entire back end up you know they have a lot of chargers out in the Midwest and they're actually making users create an entirely new account they're like we are switching over systems completely okay seems interesting the thing is if you're gonna do something like that better to rip the Band-Aid off early and you know do it sooner rather than later so it seems like right now everyone's like holy crap electric cars are hitting mainstream we need to get our you know what in order in order before we you know are ready for next year so my guess is October 2022 this is my feeling and you tell me how you feel but I'm feeling okay a lot of like craziness going on with charging experimenting new back end systems and a lot of robustness improvements all seemingly for the goal of 2023 to have a much more reliable system-wide Network that's my impression how would you feel about that I hope that's true I hope that's true yeah I mean I I just I hope for improvement overall so I don't want to say that it's gonna go downhill because that would not be good yeah so just a quick little summary on October 2022 maybe we'll do one in November and December going forwards Tesla seems to be right on the cusp of installing their brand new version for Chargers they've just started actually installing their mega chargers for semi trucks although that's not for light duty stuff so separate topic uh they've announced their CCS adapter and that has been brought to Market so now we're seeing a lot of Tesla's charge at non-tesla superchargers we also are uh hearing rumors that the supercharger Network might open soon in America to non-tesla Vehicles however we don't know the details of the rollout if it's going to be station specific if it's going to be adapter or cable or a mix of all the above um moving on to the public networks we're seeing a lot of new hardware going in seemingly pretty reliable although of course a little bit of bugs here and there but I guess that's to be expected when you're putting in new hardware I would have liked to see probably a little bit more robustness from that you know it's just a shame that we're having issues with the brand new touted to be most reliable Hardware out there we're seeing uh a trend of a lot more EV drivers clogging up stations I would say more improper use of stations but overall if they're getting power is that really considered improper I don't know but this can be solved with more dispensers and I think a better way of spending money when it comes to charging is actually to have a diversified power delivery system which is basically have a centralized power brick and that's actually a plug-in hybrid Volvo towing a trailer pretty cool to have a centralized power source with multiple dispensers scattered around we've seen this in Zeus Marsh housing in Germany this seems to be the most cost effective way to produce or to make a charging station expand problem is there's not really readily available technology on the market to do that so I'd love to see that more more Tech coming down the road we're seeing a lot of uh other networks starting to announce deals Partnerships with automakers for free charging plans and things with EVS I'm not a fan of them personally I don't think I I don't know why you would need free charging when you buy a car but hey I you know that's how these companies stay in business I guess but in my impression we just end up with more Cloud Chargers the thing we need to do is encourage as much home charging as possible when possible to allow for the most amount of throughput at DC chargers for people who actually need to charge quickly so there you go October 22 the state of charging from our experience what should everyone do let us know what you all are finding down in the comments below we would love to know what everybody else is experiencing as well thanks for watching another out of spec reviews video see you in another one soon bye-bye

Channel: Out of Spec Reviews

Views: 34,606

Keywords: Car, Review, Acceleration, Braking, POV, Handling, Test, VS, Comparison, Interior, Exterior, Supercar, Hypercar, Sedan, SUV, CUV, TFL, Redline Reviews, Motor1, sports car

Id: tbpNIe5EUsY

Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022