Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by russell_h 422 days ago
At least in the Pacific Northwest most Electrify America installations are in Walmart parking lots. These have caused me to spend more time at Walmart the past two years, honestly its a pretty good experience - aside from EA reliability issues, which seem to have improved but still far short of Tesla.
2 comments

> honestly its a pretty good experience - aside from EA reliability issues, which seem to have improved but still far short of Tesla.

Going from the Tesla Supercharger network I can't share this sentiment at all. Virtually every time I charge at an EA station (which is admittedly only a few times a year) there is either random power degradation with no notice or one or many totally dysfunctional stalls. This latest time a few days ago the only open stall was busted because the terminal said to unplug from the last session over an hour ago.

The flakiness is compounded by the lack of chargers per station. Superchargers often have 10 or even 20 chargers, EA chargers often have 2 to 4 chargers so a charger going out is much worse.

Every time I've used an EA charger there was an open one and all I had to do was just drive up and plug in. The car negotiated payment and it worked fine with reasonable charging rates.

Driving a Mach E around Texas.

I have a hard time just picking up and plugging that heavy fatass CCS connector. And then I have to try plugging it in 3 times because it waits for the car and the car waits for it and one gives up before the other succeeds.
I'm not a big dude, but I've never struggled with this.
Used an EVCE charger yesterday that my wife struggled to pick up. The cable its self was just enormous and heavy compared to more modern chargers. Hopefully they go back and retrofit older chargers with newer cables when swapping over to NACS.