6 ms·

This is why GM and Ford were so eager to jump on NACS. All the charger networks other than Tesla's Supercharger are a clown show. Why hitch your horse to them

This is why GM and Ford were so eager to jump on NACS. All the charger networks other than Tesla's Supercharger are a clown show. Why hitch your horse to them? I hope that changes and there's competition, but right now I would never even consider trying a non-Tesla charger. I've literally never found one that works properly, and 100% of the times I've used a Supercharger it was effortless.

jeffbee 3y ago
How much of supercharger reliability comes down to selecting the population of cars, though? I've wondered if deploying chargers that are meant to plug into various vehicles is somehow more difficult, or more likely to damage the charger. Aside from software flaws, by far the most common problem I see with non-Tesla chargers is some current module has taken itself offline due to internal fault detection, leaving the dispenser operating at half capacity or sometimes zero capacity. This has also made me curious as to whether Tesla simply lacks these fault-finding safety devices, or they do the better.
- hedora 3y ago
  The CCS chargers have an emergency stop button. You can twist it (or whatever) to bring it back online. From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen. 90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers. Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate. I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology. Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
  - teagoat 3y ago
    You keep a credit card on file in your Tesla account. The supercharger recognizes your car and it automatically charges your card.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      I shouldn't need a Tesla account though in the same way I shouldn't need an EVgo account or an Electrify America account or a Chargepoint account or a Waygo account or a Sheetz account or an Exxon account or a Shell account or... I don't need an account to go pump gas from whatever gas station nearby. I shouldn't need an account to get a charge from a Tesla charger, and it shouldn't be able to just deny service to my car because the CEO of Tesla doesn't want to play ball with some other manufacturer at the moment. Exxon or Shell shouldn't be able to just refuse to pump gas into a Hyundai.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Here in Norway the charging companies almost all have their own solution. They try to pass it off as some kind of advantage that I need 45 accounts and apps. Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz. Hopefully they'll make that rule universal in a not too distant future.
    - lastofthemojito 3y ago
      > Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz. Norway leads the way yet again!
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      But wouldn't adding a payment terminal to a tesla supercharger add another point where it could break? I think the future are chargers without any interface at all, as well as no apps, the car just negotiates payment when you plug it in.
- nunuvit 3y ago
  It's a hardware reliability problem, and Tesla simply has the most advanced capability to tackle the problem in this product market.
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    I figured it was more software. In a filing with the state government of California, manufacturer ABB said that they repair 75% of charger faults remotely, which means their software must be garbage. If it was hardware, wouldn't they need to fix it in the field?
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Right, pretty horrendous. This reads like "75% of our charge issues are because we need to reboot our garbage software stack".
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Yup. I like to look in the ElectrifyAmerica app periodically at the ~5 stations nearby, and its just a sh*tshow at all times. 9 times out of 10 there are more stalls out of service than in use. And it's always the same ones, because they aren't getting fixed. And it's not just old hardware, because this includes stations that only went live in the last 6-9 months. If US makers ever sold enough CCS cars, it would have been a huge problem. We are moving over to NACS instead.. If VW wanted to slow EV adoption in the US market, there's not much they would have done differently in their management of EA.
      - nunuvit 3y ago
        EA is actually working on the reliability problems now, but they're a few years behind.
        steveBK123 3y ago
        They've been "working on the reliability problems" for years. First it was going to be the new hardware. Then it turned out they were having new, possibly even more reliability problems with that hardware, lol. Can't wait to get my car on NACS and never have to think of EA again.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  The CCS networks also fail to send out anyone to repair their stations. It would be one thing to argue its a safety culture if they actually sent out staff to fix broken chargers and didn't let them sit in broken state for months on end.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  A great deal comes to the tight integration of cars and chargers. There are a lot of factors, but the most obvious factor is that cars do not have a standardized charging port location. This means: (a) sometimes stations have multiple cables on different sides, increasing the number of parts and complexity; (b) sometimes when drivers try very hard to plug in amid weirdly shaped parking spaces and non-optimal placement of chargers, they stretch the cables way too much. Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages. Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.

jeffbee 3y ago

How much of supercharger reliability comes down to selecting the population of cars, though? I've wondered if deploying chargers that are meant to plug into various vehicles is somehow more difficult, or more likely to damage the charger. Aside from software flaws, by far the most common problem I see with non-Tesla chargers is some current module has taken itself offline due to internal fault detection, leaving the dispenser operating at half capacity or sometimes zero capacity. This has also made me curious as to whether Tesla simply lacks these fault-finding safety devices, or they do the better.

hedora 3y ago
The CCS chargers have an emergency stop button. You can twist it (or whatever) to bring it back online. From what I can tell, people press it instead of dealing with the touch screen. 90% of the problems I've had come down to payment processing issues. They all thought they should bundle a crappy social network with the ability to pay for charging, and installed buggy / broken card readers. Ford made it pretty clear they're supporting NACS because they sent people to chargers to see if they could charge or not, and the failure rate was way above the networks' reported broken charger rate. I don't think the switch to the supercharger network has anything to do with the charging technology. Having said that, can you pay to charge a tesla with a credit card? Does it actually work reliably? If the other networks are any indicator, that's the hardest technical challenge in this space.
- teagoat 3y ago
  You keep a credit card on file in your Tesla account. The supercharger recognizes your car and it automatically charges your card.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I shouldn't need a Tesla account though in the same way I shouldn't need an EVgo account or an Electrify America account or a Chargepoint account or a Waygo account or a Sheetz account or an Exxon account or a Shell account or... I don't need an account to go pump gas from whatever gas station nearby. I shouldn't need an account to get a charge from a Tesla charger, and it shouldn't be able to just deny service to my car because the CEO of Tesla doesn't want to play ball with some other manufacturer at the moment. Exxon or Shell shouldn't be able to just refuse to pump gas into a Hyundai.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Here in Norway the charging companies almost all have their own solution. They try to pass it off as some kind of advantage that I need 45 accounts and apps. Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz. Hopefully they'll make that rule universal in a not too distant future.
  - lastofthemojito 3y ago
    > Gov't finally got their act together and have now mandated that all new chargers must accept a standard payment card withou any fuzz. Norway leads the way yet again!
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    But wouldn't adding a payment terminal to a tesla supercharger add another point where it could break? I think the future are chargers without any interface at all, as well as no apps, the car just negotiates payment when you plug it in.
nunuvit 3y ago
It's a hardware reliability problem, and Tesla simply has the most advanced capability to tackle the problem in this product market.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  I figured it was more software. In a filing with the state government of California, manufacturer ABB said that they repair 75% of charger faults remotely, which means their software must be garbage. If it was hardware, wouldn't they need to fix it in the field?
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Right, pretty horrendous. This reads like "75% of our charge issues are because we need to reboot our garbage software stack".
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Yup. I like to look in the ElectrifyAmerica app periodically at the ~5 stations nearby, and its just a sh*tshow at all times. 9 times out of 10 there are more stalls out of service than in use. And it's always the same ones, because they aren't getting fixed. And it's not just old hardware, because this includes stations that only went live in the last 6-9 months. If US makers ever sold enough CCS cars, it would have been a huge problem. We are moving over to NACS instead.. If VW wanted to slow EV adoption in the US market, there's not much they would have done differently in their management of EA.
    - nunuvit 3y ago
      EA is actually working on the reliability problems now, but they're a few years behind.
      - steveBK123 3y ago
        They've been "working on the reliability problems" for years. First it was going to be the new hardware. Then it turned out they were having new, possibly even more reliability problems with that hardware, lol. Can't wait to get my car on NACS and never have to think of EA again.
steveBK123 3y ago
The CCS networks also fail to send out anyone to repair their stations. It would be one thing to argue its a safety culture if they actually sent out staff to fix broken chargers and didn't let them sit in broken state for months on end.
kccqzy 3y ago
A great deal comes to the tight integration of cars and chargers. There are a lot of factors, but the most obvious factor is that cars do not have a standardized charging port location. This means: (a) sometimes stations have multiple cables on different sides, increasing the number of parts and complexity; (b) sometimes when drivers try very hard to plug in amid weirdly shaped parking spaces and non-optimal placement of chargers, they stretch the cables way too much. Next, electrically different cars also have different battery pack voltages. An Ioniq 5 has a much higher voltage than an ID.4. There's limited room for cars to change DC voltage so non-Tesla chargers tend to need to support a wider range of voltages. Then there's the fact that the CCS connector is bulkier than the Tesla ones so people use more force, and are more likely to drop them if they have limited dexterity. This also accelerates reliability problems.