Charger outages leave northern Ontario EV drivers stranded | Hacker News Reader

Charger outages leave northern Ontario EV drivers stranded

cbc.ca

51 pointsjames_pm74 comments

I’ve had the misfortune of driving through northern Ontario five times in the last four years and I am embarrassed that it is a vital link in our country. The distances between Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay and then Thunder Bay and Kenora or Winnipeg are devoid of any form of amenity, have terrible cell reception, and are poorly maintained in winter despite the traffic. If poor weather hits you can easily add 25-40% to your already long 8-9 hour drive, and have no option to split the drive. The few motels that exist in the podunk villages on the way are often boarded up out of season, and the temperatures get so low in the winter that sleeping in the car to break up the drive could literally be a matter of freezing to death.

Having also driven that route (Ottawa-Winnipeg) several times, there's an easy solution that solves the lack of infrastructure in that area (but also does not reflect well on Canada) - cross the border.

That’s often the easy solution in Canada. Want cheaper flights? Drive over the border and fly from there. Want guaranteed (but expensive) health care, just cross the border. Want cheap gas and groceries, just cross the border.

We as a country need to figure this shit out.

Wait til you find out about the stuff you can get from China!

In Oakland, California there is a DC fast charger that has been showing the Windows Update screen all year. These networks do not seem to have the operational know-how to keep the systems running.

Tesla is the only one making their own hardware for DCFC.

The other US networks are at the whim of both 3rd party hardware suppliers & 3rd party software vendors. So they are just integrators really, and do a very terrible job of it. They are slow to get new parts, slow to send out repair teams, etc.

Further a lot of them have screwed up incentives, such that the person charging is not really their end customer. Also they all lose money.

Some of this is the result of legal settlement mandated networks (EA) or them pre-selling some amount of charging to automakers (EA) or partnering with states (evGo) or running an ad network (Volta)..

All of which means you, the person charging, are not the customer. Whether you can successfully charge or not is besides the point, and possibly increases their losses if you do charge!

Yes I know Tesla also receives government money, but it is just one part of the funding, and they are actually performing well as a charging network, because they want to sell more cars. They must make enough money off it that they are willing to open it up to 3rd parties now.

I've had a good experience with EA tech support getting chargers rebooted quickly without a fuss, but my experience is universally that the networks don't have any proper telemetry to deal with or even be aware of issues before some sap shows up needing the charger.

One particular instance that stands out is I pulled up to a Shell Recharge station and found it completely off; checked their own app and it showed as offline; and called their support and informed them so they could open a repair ticket, being unaware of any problem. There's really no excuse for this: Shell had the information that this station was offline, but didn't have any automated action in place.

Yes, but you should never ever have to call. The fact that you've had to call once is a problem. The fact that you've had to call multiple times is a huge problem.

For this reason, I've never recommended a non-Tesla to anyone in US, despite having switched from Tesla myself. CCS network cars feel too much like a hobbyist / enthusiast situation for me still. Like 5 years of hoping they'd get behind the 2G iPhone on iOS 1.0 ...

> Yes, but you should never ever have to call.

That's what the GP was saying with "There's really no excuse for this: Shell had the information that this station was offline, but didn't have any automated action in place."

It's pretty simple why. The reason these chargers exist is to capture government subsidies, not because enough people actually want them for them to be financially viable. Once the vendors get their check from the taxpayers there's literally no reason for them to provide any more than the bare minimum level of support.

> It's pretty simple why. The reason these chargers exist is to capture government subsidies, not because enough people actually want them for them to be financially viable. Once the vendors get their check from the taxpayers there's literally no reason for them to provide any more than the bare minimum level of support.

Completely agreed. Tesla is the only one operating them commercially in practice. They probably are cash flow positive, and even if not, are a loss leader to sell cars.

EV DCFC can be commercially viable though considering 1) the markup on electric is HUGE compared to gas (possibly 2x) and 2) they have a captive customer stuck 5x as long as a gas buyer, to spend $$ in their convenience store (where they actually make all their money)

The problem is the current companies are trying to do standalone stalls in others parking lots. I think we will eventually see some gas station chains bring out an offering, but there needs to be demand first.

Something like 90%+ of EVs on the road in US are still Tesla, so CCS has always been a niche within a niche here.

>not because enough people actually want them for them to be financially viable.

But there are enough people, they are packed.

I don't understand why they even have fancy screens. Why can't they just put a payment card tap thing and some LEDs and be done with it?

Marketing says we'll make a fortune with ads on a big screen! Plus we can upsell related products and charging packages!

The same reason everything is being replaced by fancy screens VS just a hardware interface with buttons and LEDs:

You can change the UI and UX after deploying it. Say you want to illustrate the charging differently, you'd just deploy software updates rather than having to switch out a bunch of hardware panels. Company branding changed color and now you want to display those instead? OTA updates, instead of replacing charging station hardware.

Not saying it's great, I prefer good old interfaces myself, especially outside of the internet, but I can totally understand why companies consistently make this choice over and over again.

> You can change the UI and UX after deploying it.

Its a dumb gas pump.

Tesla superchargers have no screens OR buttons. Everyone wins. Just plug in and go pee.

They rely on the screen in the car to confirm that you are actually charging.

You could do the same with LEDs, just like the LED ring around a Tesla charge port changes color to indicate status (red or amber = fault, white = ready to charge, blue = preparing to charge, green = charging).

https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/diy/modely/en_us/GUID-...

whose charger?

EVgo. Checking in on the plugshare for that station I was thinking, apparently the cords have been chopped off by vandals.

I dont understand why they didnt put the cable in the car itself. Just two female plugs (car and charger) with a M-M cable?

That's how Type 2 cables in Europe work, at least for L2 AC charging. DC chargers have built in cables, probably because the wire gauge needs to be a lot thicker to support the current (why haul all that around?) and for water cooling in the case of Supercharger V3s.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hasn't been an issue with the regular gas pumps, which have had card terminals for decades.

And they're only requiring to accept card. The chargers could still offer charging via app or sms like now.

I would prefer Tesla style, where it is negotiated via a protocol over the power plug rather than app, SMS, or POS.

Sure, but that won't happen without gov't intervention. Card is easy enough, just blip and you're done.

> 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!

You keep a credit card on file in your Tesla account. The supercharger recognizes your car and it automatically charges your card.

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.

> 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.

I don't think it's a technical challenge. I just don't think any of the charging networks are content to only sell the electricity - they do everything they can to get users to download an app so they can aggregate and sell user data as another source of income.

From a user point-of-view, of course EV chargers that could work just like a gas pay-at-the-pump system would be preferable, but that hasn't been mandated, so that hasn't happened.

The credit card fees are also relatively high for small transactions (it's usually just about $1.20 for me to top up my PHEV battery at the chargers near my work). So the apps prefer to get you to "load" 10 or 20 bucks into the app at a time, and then debit your app account for each charge.

I've been seeing more and more credit card terminals on CCS chargers which don't require any kind of account. Swipe a card or tap NFC, plug it in, and it charges.

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.

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.

It's a hardware reliability problem, and Tesla simply has the most advanced capability to tackle the problem in this product market.

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?

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.

EA is actually working on the reliability problems now, but they're a few years behind.

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.

Like I said, they're behind. Don't hold your breath for them to catch up.

I fully expect them to go out of business before they manage to operate their business well.

Lost opportunity.

Not really. ABB is good at hardware protection, which is why the faults don't usually result in failures. Tesla is ahead in terms of anticipating, avoiding, and automatically handling such issues. The variety of cars absolutely creates a challenge, but Tesla is better positioned to meet the challenge.

Right, pretty horrendous. This reads like "75% of our charge issues are because we need to reboot our garbage software stack".

I'm surprised that the chargers aren't more of a target for theft (or maybe there are already). They have enormous copper cables which could be fairly easily stolen? Especially in our of view highway rest stops.

My wife works at an EV company and they have areas designated "high vandalism" areas which completely changes the design of the charger. It still happens but they try to combat it. Often times, the high vandalism areas are also the areas where state and federal grants are given so they end up installing it anyway due to the easy money.

Aren’t most copper thieves hoping the wires are not live?

Perhaps the thought of crossing the wrong wires and being met with 400V at 625A is a deterrent.

Most copper thieves are at rock bottom - likely feeding hard drug habits and have few firing brain cells left. There have been plenty killed trying to steal wiring from substations and rail but they keep doing it despite the dangers thanks to desperation.

Since you mentioned 625A, I actually recently discovered that the Tesla superchargers only have a rated amperage of 350A or thereabouts, but the chargers simply do a lot of thermal monitoring to compensate the fact that actual amperage is higher than rated amperage.

That's smart: you can use thinner wires which are easier to handle, has less copper so isn't a target for theft comparatively.

Please excuse my ignorance, but why wouldn't they just cut the cable when it's not in use then?

And on the flip side; there's plenty of cases with thieves cutting into live high voltage lines. This one is the most visible example I know of though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuXeJ4_s8G8

> why wouldn't they just cut the cable when it's not in use then?

It's dangerous to cut cables if you don't know which are the hot ones, since you run the risk of completing a circuit with the live wire, the scissors, your body, and the ground beneath you.

... wait, why would the chargers keep the the high voltage DC lines energized when not in use?

My rough understanding is that AC conductors (energized, i.e. having a significant potential difference than ground) come into the charging stations, go through an inverter, after which point the DC conductors may or may not be energized. I don't think copper thieves would be able to tell accurately which wires are which.

Mind you, I'm not an electrician or electrical engineer; I just work on my home wiring sometimes.

The cables from the dispenser to the car plug end shouldn't be energized unless the car and charger negotiate it. They're not sitting at 400VDC all the time.

"Not in use" means that nothing is closing the circuit. A machete going through the cable has a high likelihood of completing the circuit.

No way a car charging cable has current running through it when it's not charging.

That's right. It could theoretically have voltage though.

Look im a uneducated guy so I might use the wrong terms. I suspect these work like usb cables and you negotiate a rate of charge between the charger and car (that requires some energy but not enough to hurt anyone) and then the device internally flips a switch to enable charging.

If it was just live all the time I don't see how you bill anyone, they could just plug in, that also seems unsafe if say the cable is damaged or something.

They are probably (hopefully) smarter than my house, but!

The power to my home is live all the time, so there is voltage.

The current draw is measured to charge me money.

There can be no current until I short it with a blade, then it serves me 15A until the breaker pops.

Then why have all these different systems and standards if it's just 240 AC (or something) down a regular wire? Just use one of these[0] and call it a day.

[0]https://i0.wp.com/makezine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Fi...

Level 2 chargers stop at 7kW for single phase and 22kW for 3 phase. That’s fine for home or destination charging but woefully inadequate for long trips.

Beyond that you need to switch to DC chargers that go directly into the battery pack. This is where it starts to get complicated as different battery architectures need different voltages and max currents.

> Level 2 chargers stop at 7kW for single phase

Incorrect, at least for the US, might be different in different areas. 7kW is very common but not the limit for single-phase. J1772 can handle up to 80A/240V which would be 19.2kW of power. A Tesla Model S has a 17kW charger, so it can pull up to ~70A of power on single-phase 240V. A Mach E has an 11kW charger. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 has a 10.2kW charger on board.

This doesn't change the fact this charging speed for Level 2 charging is inadequate for long road trips. Just wanting to share that level 2 charging on a single phase can be higher than 7kW.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Yes but the ones I've seen have giant emergency shutdown buttons which I assume kills all the power to the charging cable.

More precisely, charger outages have left non-Tesla EV drivers stranded.

Tesla chargers have had no outages, so Tesla EV drivers are A-OK.

> CCS and CHAdeMO fast chargers in Marathon, White River and Wawa were down for most of June; the Ivy location in White River has been out of service since mid-April.

> Tesla chargers in the region were still working, according to reports on the forum PlugShare, where drivers update each other on charger status, but they are not currently compatible with non-Tesla vehicles.

> "June was a rough month for this area," said Real Deschatelets, a volunteer with the Electric Vehicle Association of Northern Ontario (EVANO).

Ontario, where most of the millions of immigrants wind up. Zero money spent building infrastructure, most of the province is uninhabitable or even reachable by anything other than sea planes or ski planes.

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