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Comment by nasmorn

3 months ago

On a recent trip through Croatia the best convenient charger had only 87kw. I would have been pretty sad with a 6C battery when most chargers could mostly do 1C at most.

On a recent trip home from the airport, there were 4 charging stations in range, three of which are 60kW, so I drove to the 150kW station.

Except 3/4 of the chargers there were out of order, and the remaining one was going at 30kW and there was a line.

After that drive, there was only one other station in range so I want there. There were 3 working 60kW chargers and an ICE’d in L2 charger and I was #2 in line.

When I finally got plugged in, it turns out that although the system purported to accept payment by credit card, you had to interact with the touch screen to do so, except the screen wasn’t actually a touch screen. So I downloaded the app, set the car charging, and went to lunch. And decided not to take the EV to the airport again until there are more DC chargers between there and home.

All of this was in Oregon.

  • You should report this to Tesla. I've got a tesla and have never had anything close to this. There is no card / screen or app needed. You plug the vehicle in.

    I was on a mountain trip and there was a non-tesla charger. It was charging a leaf that had some kind of derate issue so the leaf was going to be there 4 HOURS!! The line of cars then waiting for that leaf to finish charging - those folks were SCREWED. Meanwhile, the tesla chargers were not that full mostly because the charges were pretty quick (250kw charger but I only pulled about 150kw because I hadn't preconditioned fully I think - it was deep winter with snow).

    The non-tesla chargers are comical. They either don't work, or charge slowly or have weird payment / billing issues. All of this compounds the issues.

  • Stations lying about their availability is really the worst. There is no counterpart for gas cars really. In my whole life I have not seen a gas station out of order entirely.

    • Seriously? I've experienced this personally multiple times in my life: gas station ran out of gas, so you can't pump. Or they have bags over every single handle and they're out of order. Now, it's easy to solve: just go to one of many other gas stations nearby... but I've certainly experienced a gas station that didn't function.

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Chances are when these batteries become commonplace, there will be chargers for it (eventually, in some cases)

The trip was totally fine though. Apart from lunch we only stopped for 1x15min per leg during 7 hours of driving.