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Electrify America is killing me!!!

4426 Views 15 Replies 9 Participants Last post by vhillmd, 3 mo ago

vhillmd

Discussion Starter · 9 mo ago

I love my Lucid GT. The best part of the ownership experience is that the car is well-built, luxurious, spacious, powerful and very fast! My Lucid customer service experience has been GREAT! As a start-up, I expected (and I am getting) the software foibles which in time will be worked out with the constant stream of Lucid software updates.

However, the worst and most infuriating Lucid ownership experience is the association with Electrify America (EA). I have used the EA charging network in Lakeside, Irvine (Spectrum), San Diego, Culver City, Napa, Paso Robles, and Bakersfield California, and with every charger (except Napa and Paso Robles), at least 50% of the charge machines are broken and non-functional. Charges at Lakeside, Irvine and Culver City have been broken for at least 8 weeks. While driving from Oakland to L.A., stopped with less than 50 miles of range in Bakersfield. I found 2 of the 4 chargers broken despite the EA app showing that they were "Available" I have talked with the EA service reps, but nothing seems to get done. Are other Lucid owners having the same problem.

vhillmd

1 - 16 of 16 Posts

JohnPaul

· #2 · 9 mo ago

I know it's still early days for the EV charging infrastructure transition, but this seems to me like a much bigger problem than even the size of the charging network. In 30 years of driving, I can count on one hand the number of times I saw a gas pump out of order.
If the chargers as they're currently designed are this unreliable (and I don't think this is just an EA issue because I see it on Bjorn Nyland's videos a lot), I'm not sure we're doing anyone any favours by creating a massive fast-charging network with unreliable equipment.
Of course, none of this is to say that I have a better idea.

s7davis

· #3 · 8 mo ago

That is true the EA network is not the best network right now. However, they are building new charging equipment to replace the old which is to replace all the older equipment that is not reliable. I have heard the company they are contracted with is 2 different ones I think one was SIGNET and can not remember the other. Are contracted to provide the charging stations for EA to install. These charging station should be more reliable than the older ones and since EA is getting GRANT Funding they have to ensure it is maintained as well as that is one of the stipulation to get the funding from the GOV't they need to ensure the equipment is maintained and Functioning properly to ensure smooth transition to EV's.

Lucid Dreams

· #4 · 8 mo ago

vhillmd said:
I love my Lucid GT. The best part of the ownership experience is that the car is well-built, luxurious, spacious, powerful and very fast! My Lucid customer service experience has been GREAT! As a start-up, I expected (and I am getting) the software foibles which in time will be worked out with the constant stream of Lucid software updates.

However, the worst and most infuriating Lucid ownership experience is the association with Electrify America (EA). I have used the EA charging network in Lakeside, Irvine (Spectrum), San Diego, Culver City, Napa, Paso Robles, and Bakersfield California, and with every charger (except Napa and Paso Robles), at least 50% of the charge machines are broken and non-functional. Charges at Lakeside, Irvine and Culver City have been broken for at least 8 weeks. While driving from Oakland to L.A., stopped with less than 50 miles of range in Bakersfield. I found 2 of the 4 chargers broken despite the EA app showing that they were "Available" I have talked with the EA service reps, but nothing seems to get done. Are other Lucid owners having the same problem.

vhillmd

Glad to hear you're enjoying your Air so far @vhillmd! Have you tried any of the other charging networks to see what the experience is like? Or have your experiences only been with Electrify America?

Lucid Dreams

· #5 · 8 mo ago

s7davis said:
That is true the EA network is not the best network right now. However, they are building new charging equipment to replace the old which is to replace all the older equipment that is not reliable. I have heard the company they are contracted with is 2 different ones I think one was SIGNET and can not remember the other. Are contracted to provide the charging stations for EA to install. These charging station should be more reliable than the older ones and since EA is getting GRANT Funding they have to ensure it is maintained as well as that is one of the stipulation to get the funding from the GOV't they need to ensure the equipment is maintained and Functioning properly to ensure smooth transition to EV's.

Also, EA made things more confusing for charging by changing the designations for their chargers.

150 kW chargers are "Ultra-Fast" and 350 kW chargers are "Hyper-Fast".

www.electrive.com

Electrify America & Canada update their charger designations - electrive.com

Electrify America and Electrify Canada, Volkswagen's charging infrastructure subsidiaries in North America, are introducing a new labelling system on their fast-charging stations to help customers distinguish between them. The Electrify America & Canada CCS fast chargers with 150 kW capacity...

www.electrive.com

vhillmd

Discussion Starter · #6 · 8 mo ago

Lucid Dreams said:
Glad to hear you're enjoying your Air so far @vhillmd! Have you tried any of the other charging networks to see what the experience is like? Or have your experiences only been with Electrify America?

Lucid Dreams said:
Glad to hear you're enjoying your Air so far @vhillmd! Have you tried any of the other charging networks to see what the experience is like? Or have your experiences only been with Electrify America?

Lucid Dreams,
I have considered EVgo and ChargePoint. Both, I have membership with. However, with EA, I get free charging for 3 years. Plus, despite EA poor reliability, their chargers are still very fast with my Lucid GT. I used a EVgo charger and it’s charging speed was 16 kw. Way to slow for the Lucid’s 112 kw battery. It seems that at this point, I will have keep complaining about EA until the chargers are better or hope Tesla later this year allows other EV’s use their charging system.

Reactions: 2

s.sardaryan

· #7 · 8 mo ago

EA is actually using 3 different brands of chargers. ABB, SIGNET and BTC My personal exeprience driving cost to cost Vancouver to PEI through USA is roughly 40% of stations are malfunctioning. In many cases calling support and rebooting station works. Credit Card terminals are broken almost everywhere, so having account with EA and starting charge from the phone is the most realiable way. Vehicle builtin authentication with the station to start the charge automatically does not work either. With my eqs580 I was able to use the feature once out of ~30 charges in 11 USA states during the trip. BTC are the most garbage anyone can imagine. Canadian IVY charge and Electrify Canada (same as EA) are using them. I have 3 EV's and had just a few successful charges with these stations. Polestar 2 refuses to connect in 90% of cases the rest 10% is 43kw. Eqs 580 and AirGT are not authenticating and almost every time never go above 50kw. Calling support is always the same. We are having a problems with theses stations at this point. Ticket is created to rectify the problem. Just cycling through charging ports looking for a working station adds 12-15 minutes to each charging session. Inadequate charging speed makes each session super expensive. Per hour charging pricing...... The most reliable stations are Chargepoint. Don't know the brand, it appears they manufacture them. Never had a single failure with them. Unfortunately they are slow. 80kw is max I could ever get. Polestar and Eqs are 400v architecture, so charging power is limited. Never tried Lucid with them. In almost nine years of Tesla ownership (started with 0 DC fast chargers in the East cost) the only problem I had was broken/vandalized charging cables. How and most import why ?? If one company can make reliable charging station why others can't? I believe the answer is simple. Companies are getting government money to install the stations and not to maintain them. So all they need is installed stall and nothing else....

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Reactions: 1

Air Head

· #8 · 8 mo ago

s.sardaryan said:
EA is actually using 3 different brands of chargers. ABB, SIGNET and BTC My personal exeprience driving cost to cost Vancouver to PEI through USA is roughly 40% of stations are malfunctioning. In many cases calling support and rebooting station works. Credit Card terminals are broken almost everywhere, so having account with EA and starting charge from the phone is the most realiable way. Vehicle builtin authentication with the station to start the charge automatically does not work either. With my eqs580 I was able to use the feature once out of ~30 charges in 11 USA states during the trip. BTC are the most garbage anyone can imagine. Canadian IVY charge and Electrify Canada (same as EA) are using them. I have 3 EV's and had just a few successful charges with these stations. Polestar 2 refuses to connect in 90% of cases the rest 10% is 43kw. Eqs 580 and AirGT are not authenticating and almost every time never go above 50kw. Calling support is always the same. We are having a problems with theses stations at this point. Ticket is created to rectify the problem. Just cycling through charging ports looking for a working station adds 12-15 minutes to each charging session. Inadequate charging speed makes each session super expensive. Per hour charging pricing...... The most reliable stations are Chargepoint. Don't know the brand, it appears they manufacture them. Never had a single failure with them. Unfortunately they are slow. 80kw is max I could ever get. Polestar and Eqs are 400v architecture, so charging power is limited. Never tried Lucid with them. In almost nine years of Tesla ownership (started with 0 DC fast chargers in the East cost) the only problem I had was broken/vandalized charging cables. How and most import why ?? If one company can make reliable charging station why others can't? I believe the answer is simple. Companies are getting government money to install the stations and not to maintain them. So all they need is installed stall and nothing else....

Hey @s.sardaryan welcome to the forum! In your travels, which provinces/states do you think have the most reliable chargers?

povsi001

· #9 · 8 mo ago

As a Tesla owner and future lucid owner..this is a non-Tesla charger problem. Tesla supercharges work 98% of the time, occasionally a few stations may be out, but they are totally reliable and popping up all over the place. I think they are looking to reap tax benefits by making their charges CCS compatible. This would be the best news ever for Lucid owners, because I find Charepoint and EA charges a total crap shoot.

s.sardaryan

· #10 · 8 mo ago

Air Head said:
Hey @s.sardaryan welcome to the forum! In your travels, which provinces/states do you think have the most reliable chargers?

For some reason chrome decided to crash and not post the reply

Writing it again.....

Idaho, Utah, Colorado are least reliable ones (least number of stations per location, so natural). NY and IL are the best. Although in Chicago area chargers are usually 150kw. They still not authenticate the car automatically, but work fine starting the session from the app.
In Canada Ontario is worst. Although a lot of stations are available nothing is working. A month ago I was looking for a properly working station from Windsor ON to London ON. Charging 40-50kw for 10-15 minutes in 3 different locations under heavy rain. After number of unsuccessful attempts just got angry yelled at EC and IVY support and drove all the way to Toronto coming home with 3% of charge. Shell started rolling out dedicated 180KW stations, never tried using one.

I have used stations in USA : Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Maine.
Canada : British Columbia (Petro Canada, Flo), Ontario (Electrify Canada, Ivy Charge, Flo), Quebec (Flo, Charge point), New Brunswick (Petro Canada, Flo), PEI (Flo).

Overall driving across the continent is doable in non Tesla vehicles, however very careful planning is required. It is absolutely critical to factor in the malfunctioning stations. New Brunswick for example has only one Petro Canada station that's not always working. Both credit card terminals are broken, but app worked on one station out of two and I got 143KW of power. It was a happy moment for the whole family

Plugshare is a very good source of information, but don't blindly trust its data.

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s.sardaryan

· #11 · 8 mo ago

povsi001 said:
As a Tesla owner and future lucid owner..this is a non-Tesla charger problem. Tesla supercharges work 98% of the time, occasionally a few stations may be out, but they are totally reliable and popping up all over the place. I think they are looking to reap tax benefits by making their charges CCS compatible. This would be the best news ever for Lucid owners, because I find Charepoint and EA charges a total crap shoot.

Unfortunately Tesla Supercharger is no go for Lucid.......
The Lucid battery architecture is 924 Volts while Tesla SC is 4x0 (don't know exact voltage, 450 max I believe). Lucid engineers never thought most probably that Tesla will open its charger network to others, so they designed voltage boost converter (400->924V) to be 50kw max. It is understandable because vast majority of standard 400v only DC chargers are 50kw anyways. So all we will have at Tesla SC is 50kw which translates to on average 5.5 times slower charging.
The reference to this info can be found in "Wunderbox" video presentation made by Lucid a few month ago.

One more thing. As I understand (again this is unverified information and can be totally inaccurate which I found sweeping through openly available docs) only 50% of "new" chargers installed will have the CCS connector. Overheating might be an issue as well due to CCS standard being actively cooled. So I expect super limited power draw, nothing even close to 250kw for v3 SC for true 400V architecture vehicles such as EQS580 or IX50 (both max charging power is ~200Kw). Again assumption here is at least in the beginning Tesla will use an adapter.

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rgtichy

· #12 · 8 mo ago

s.sardaryan said:
Unfortunately Tesla Supercharger is no go for Lucid.......
The Lucid battery architecture is 924 Volts while Tesla SC is 4x0 (don't know exact voltage, 450 max I believe). Lucid engineers never thought most probably that Tesla will open its charger network to others, so they designed voltage boost converter (400->924V) to be 50kw max. It is understandable because vast majority of standard 400v only DC chargers are 50kw anyways. So all we will have at Tesla SC is 50kw which translates to on average 5.5 times slower charging.
The reference to this info can be found in "Wunderbox" video presentation made by Lucid a few month ago.

One more thing. As I understand (again this is unverified information and can be totally inaccurate which I found sweeping through openly available docs) only 50% of "new" chargers installed will have the CCS connector. Overheating might be an issue as well due to CCS standard being actively cooled. So I expect super limited power draw, nothing even close to 250kw for v3 SC for true 400V architecture vehicles such as EQS580 or IX50 (both max charging power is ~200Kw). Again assumption here is at least in the beginning Tesla will use an adapter.

This all sounds unfortunate. I wonder why chargers are better in Illinois, as was stated by someone?

I can attest that the EA chargers in Springfield,IL were excellent, and my local Target has EA chargers with the 350kW speed, too. New, and working well in both places.

vhillmd

Discussion Starter · #13 · 8 mo ago

rgtichy said:
This all sounds unfortunate. I wonder why chargers are better in Illinois, as was stated by someone?

I can attest that the EA chargers in Springfield,IL were excellent, and my local Target has EA chargers with the 350kW speed, too. New, and working well in both places.

rgtichy,
That is great news! Hopefully, EA will upgrade all their chargers to work like the Illinois network. I believe this is a case of the 'squeaky wheel getting the grease", if we as a collective complain enough, EA will be forced to fix and better yet, produce a superior charging network.

vhillmd

Reactions: 1

s.sardaryan

· #14 · 8 mo ago

vhillmd said:
rgtichy,
That is great news! Hopefully, EA will upgrade all their chargers to work like the Illinois network. I believe this is a case of the 'squeaky wheel getting the grease", if we as a collective complain enough, EA will be forced to fix and better yet, produce a superior charging network.

vhillmd

Unless government start punishing subsidized vendors for the downtime nothing will happen.
Something like 95% guarantied uptime for each charging port. Not for the network in general.
Otherwise very large stations that are easy to maintain will swallow hard to reach stations.
It is possible to achieve.
We are in 2022, why should I arrive at the station, find its screen frozen, call support, wait 5 minutes for operator to send a reset which miraculously brings the station back to life. I believe software engineers developed that thing never heard of watchdog timer. Windows, really ?????

davidc

· #15 · 3 mo ago

vhillmd said:
I love my Lucid GT. The best part of the ownership experience is that the car is well-built, luxurious, spacious, powerful and very fast! My Lucid customer service experience has been GREAT! As a start-up, I expected (and I am getting) the software foibles which in time will be worked out with the constant stream of Lucid software updates. However, the worst and most infuriating Lucid ownership experience is the association with Electrify America (EA). I have used the EA charging network in Lakeside, Irvine (Spectrum), San Diego, Culver City, Napa, Paso Robles, and Bakersfield California, and with every charger (except Napa and Paso Robles), at least 50% of the charge machines are broken and non-functional. Charges at Lakeside, Irvine and Culver City have been broken for at least 8 weeks. While driving from Oakland to L.A., stopped with less than 50 miles of range in Bakersfield. I found 2 of the 4 chargers broken despite the EA app showing that they were "Available" I have talked with the EA service reps, but nothing seems to get done. Are other Lucid owners having the same problem. vhillmd

I have the same issues with chargers on the east coast. Very unreliable service and frustrating when traveling far from home

Reactions: 1

vhillmd

Discussion Starter · #16 · 3 mo ago

I would welcome EV maker intervention to this problem. It’s a poor reflexion on Lucid. It cannot be that difficult to get these chargers fixed…….it’s not like EA has tens of thousands of chargers like Tesla!
vhillmd

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