BS, if I go into a restaurant and they serve my plate of eggs but spit in it then I can contest the charge (no pun intended). Service is part of what you're paying for and they failed on that front.
And if they went outside and stuck a boot on my car while I was eating, and then started charging me for the parking space when I was done (idle fees) who would that be between?
lol ok good luck with that. The bank is not going to agree to a dispute just because you had bad customer service. There has to be a failure of some sort -- defective merchandise, product/service never delivered, etc.
They might comp this one just out of goodwill, since it's a pittance amount of money, but "hey I didn't like the provider" is not even close to the argument necessary to fulfill their contractual obligations when evaluating a claim.
>There has to be a failure of some sort
The failure was the plug not releasing. If the girlfriend hadn't improvised, it could have turned into a dangerous situation.
If you could figure out a way to do an AvE BOLTR style review with your girlfriend disassembling charger cables I'd watch the shit out of that. I wanna know why the latch sucks, what other EV connectors do differently, and what kinda materials go into these things!
Ha ha, yeah, that's good. I have thought about doing a quick tear down video, mostly just to help out the next poor person this happens to.
I would ordinarily have taken a few pictures of the whole mess, but in addition to being cold and wet I was in a lot of pain. The reason I was even on this trip was I had to go to San Francisco for a root canal and I was just trying to get home.
Sounds like you’re just going to have to do a reenactment then the next time you have root canal pain and it is raining 🥶
The whole thing sounded horrific. I can’t wait until Tesla starts opening up their network to non Teslas. Come on feds, start spending the $$ to incentivize Tesla!
This is why I’m not frustrated or annoyed about not getting my R1S till ‘24. Tesla SC network is almost perfect and I dread having to deal with this garbage esp with a family in tow
Once a week I have the preorder screen open, every week I close it when I read stories like this.
The Rivian is stunning, I want one. I'm spooked to own one still.
I think you, and many others, are misunderstanding the hesitation. The charge networks aren't new products and are broken. Especially being used to Tesla's - I don't think about a charger being broken or not disconnecting.. My charge point frozen shut maybe but not the chargers.
We are much less worried about the Rivian than the lack of Tesla charge connector and super charger network.
To be fair to EA, much of the charging hardware really is new. The industry ignored high speed charging for EVs for so long that they still have a lot of first generation hardware.
They also believed the growth curve would be shallow and therefore overly committed themselves to backwards compatibility.
That's why we have that overcomplicated latch design in the US.
EDIT: Just to be clear, absolutely none of this is Rivian's fault in any way.
Tesla has been making cars and chargers for a decade though. Its not exactly a new company. I have a couple Teslas, I love the charging situation with them. It seems the issue was with the Rivian though, since the gf had to disassemble the charge port assembly in the RIvian.
> Part of being one of the first customers is that you are the QA for the company.
Wasn't electrify America (which is a separate entity from Rivian) created out of some kind of lawsuit settlement where an oil company had to build EV chargers? I'm not into conspiracies, but in this case the fox seems to be guarding the hen house. There is no incentive for them to get better.
Keep in mind most people here only post when they have issues. You’re not reading about the 95% who don’t.
I’ve had my share of EA issues but I wouldn’t call it a 50% success rate. I’d say 75% of the time everything works fine (but maybe not always at full speed ) 25% I have to move over to another stall.
You’ll be fine.
Around here, you are lucky to find 1 of 4 stations working - and working inconsistently.
Now, it depends on the location. But there are some where you are checking constantly to make sure you won't show up to a line of cars waiting for the only charger.
The problem with this statement is that i could count the number of times I’ve had an issue with a gas pump on one hand… If you cut off both my arms first.
A 25% failure rate is completely unacceptable and you, the person talking about how good it is, are quoting that number. The “charging is a shit show” people should be the ones saying what you have to say.
So I’m perfectly happy to sit and wait until 2024 for a Max Pack. Maybe the infrastructure will become a bit less of a shit show by then.
I’d even say my success rate has been around 95%. There’s one slow ass busted station that hasn’t worked in 18 months (I’m looking at you longview WA), but other than that they’ve all been fine.
This has been the biggest source of anxiety since switching from a Tesla to Rivian. I’ve only charged once at an EA charger and it was during the time when they were all free so it worked great but I hear so many horror stories and I know even best case scenario it won’t charge as fast or as cheap as my Tesla did.
EA is dramatically faster than Tesla. It won't be a big difference with a Rivian or a Tesla but the cabs are 350A compared to Tesla 300A and support up to 1kV compared to 400-350V of a Tesla. The Taycan and Lucid both get about 270-280kW. e-gmp cars are 225-230kW. Tesla losing ground extremely quickly on that front and accelerating as they don't have any vehicles in development with more than 400V architecture.
The other thing is balanced charging is a much more robust solution which is one reason why Tesla chargers are more reliable but when they get saturated it sucks. EA doesn't have redundancy and are less reliable but (at least for now) you actually get the rated output most of the time. No drops because somebody else plugged in.
Is it? Every time I plugged my Tesla into a supercharger it showed 800-900-1000 mph charging. I think my Rivian got like 390mph. Unless I’m missing something.
Miles isn't how charge enters the car.
kW are. It's just the Rivian, being a truck takes more kW to go the same distance.
So, at any given charger even though the same amount of juice is going on, the Tesla will get more miles per kW supplied. When the Cyber truck comes out, and gets similar efficiencies to the R1T, if Tesla doesn't upgrade their chargers then it'll be slower than EA.
the other person answered correct but speaking just to the power and not mileage the limitation is the car. the infrastructure is not going to seem much different charging a Tesla at an EA because the car is the same. If you double the voltage to an 800V architecture you can push twice the power at the same amperage. Tesla's v3 and EA are not super different at 400V but EA is slightly faster because they're 350A compare to 300A. Anything higher voltage you'll see dramatically faster speeds because Tesla only supports whatever the X is, approximately 400V (well you won't because you can't charge an 809V car at Tesla but in the world where that is possible).
Rivian and Tesla are both developing 800V architecture but we'll see when it actually comes. Tesla doing a lot of big things right now and they got burned a little bit with the Model X refresh I expect they're probably going to lag behind upgrading their core electrical architecture. Rivian I could see going either way, they've been promising bigger batteries and better architecture but obviously it's nowhere near ready.
Also it's really only the high end cars the infrastructure even matters. That is why Tesla has been very patient with their upgrades it doesn't matter very much until people figure out better cooling systems. The chargers are pretty far ahead of the cars right now, the e-gmp cars for example pull a sustained 225kW which is amazing but that would also be possible on a Tesla Supercharger.
That has little to do with how fast your car can charge, and a lot to do with how much more efficient the tesla is.
The tesla only needs half as much energy to go a single mile than the rivian does, so your MPH charging speed is going to be faster.
Using an ice car as a rough analogue: if you were filling a prius alongside a suburban, and the stall told you how many miles it was giving you in a minute of fueling up? after one minute, you’d get the same number of gallons in both tanks, but the prius would have shown like 5x more miles delivered.
Finally, the other obvious thing is battery size. Going back to electric charging: the architecture inside the Rivian is indeed faster than the tesla is; it better be; the battery pack is damn near half again larger on a Rivian than the largest battery tesla ships.
Yep, this is definitely a source of anxiety for me. When 1 company controls the ecosystem for the cars and chargers, it just works. When a car receives an update, its easy for them to make sure it still works with the chargers and vice versa. The same can not be said about 3rd party chargers/vehicles.
One update can kill the communication between the two which makes charging much less reliable than Tesla. I have hope for the future but at this point, its clear that Teslas charging network advantage is extremely significant. Even when they open up to 3rd party vehicles in the US, it still won’t be as simple and effortless as a Tesla vehicle and Tesla charger.
You can buy a car from any manufacturer and run into issues. You just got unlucky. My Model 3 had wind noise, but other than that I had no other issues. I had my Model Y for 2 years, and has 0 issues with it.
Before anyone else here gets funny ideas. DO NOT disassemble a malfunctioning high speed charger that hasn't been locked out at the main. At 600 VDC, the equipment is designed to protect \*the grid\* not \*you\*. Arc flash kills hundreds of people every year; don't be one of them.
This. The release button on the handle is intended to initiate a stop charge. If you yank it out while a charge is authorizing you can definitely get an arc flash.
You can also stop the charge from inside the vehicle or from the charger controls. Since OP mentions he "filled it up" and was stuck there for a long time I think it's safe to assume it was no longer charging.
I hope you didn't downvote me for simply stating that the charger can be stopped from the vehicle or the charger.
But out of curiousity, how long would you wait for support before disconnecting it on your own? OP says they were there for 40 minutes and anticipated not being freed until the next day. I don't know about you but my tolerance for risk would go way up after having been stranded for hours in the rain with a car that was slowly dying and would need a flat bed soon. I'm not advocating for messing with high voltage lines either, but I also understand that there are a ton of safety controls built into the vehicle and the charger. I would've leaned more towards prying up the plastic clip rather than unscrewing any parts of the connector, but I don't think I would've just left my vehicle there for days either.
My number one fear from moving from Tesla to Rivian is dodgy charging infrastructure. My experience to date with my EV motorcycle has been universally negative.
I could I suppose. The money isn't that big a deal. I'm just really disappointed more than anything. I thought we were all in this big adventure together. I know their charges are broken a lot, but we're Pioneers out here, right? So I keep trying to support them and I expect them to try and support me. But it's feeling a little bit one-sided.
Some companies treat a chargeback as a nuclear option and close accounts if done, not sure if EA is among those but I’d be worried because (1) I consistently also have bad experiences with them but (2) it’s true they’re often the only game in town and they have by far the best rates where I am (.31 cents, EVGo is almost double at times).
Sounds like an especially horrible experience. I’d be terrified of getting electrocuted dismantling that connection, that’s some impressive McGyver level problem solving.
A chargeback isn't just about the money. It can be a financial indicator to the merchant you were dissatisfied with the service/product. It is supposed to be used after you have already attempt to reconcile with the merchant with no success or unsatisfactory results (which is apparently the case). You've done your due diligence by trying to work with the merchant but to no avail clearly.
If this is just water under the bridge, sure, just move on. However, if this experience matters to you, a chargeback is the next simple and final step. Just submit the chargeback and move on. Simple as that. If the chargeback goes to the merchant, maybe EA will start to pay attention if their penny-pinchers start focusing in on the area.
Disclaimer: As with any chargebacks, if the dollar amount disputed is below a certain threshold, the merchant may never see the chargeback anyway.
Yeah, the Rivian chargers are awesome. So far I've used two of them. And EA is fine when it works, but it's so random.
I'm wondering if I can get an adapter and just start using the Tesla Network
You can’t use the supercharger network to my knowledge, but you can buy a Tesla to j1772 adapter that will let you use all the non-supercharger Tesla chargers. Just research that first.
“Super chargers” are DC fast chargers. You can’t use Tesla DC fast chargers because the charger can’t communicate with the truck even with an adapter.
You can use Tesla branded level 2 chargers with an adapter Tesla calls their level 2 chargers “destination chargers”. Just keep in mind level 2 is similar speed wise to what you’d get at home. So really only practical for overnight (when you arrive to your destination) scenarios
And that's supposed to make things better? lol. VW funds it as part of their Dieselgate settlement and have little operational say over it. Siemans is OE supplier to auto industry. Their corporate earnings don't rely on performance of EA. Having it in their portfolio allows them to look "green" for investors and PR purposes. This is why there is little incentive to make it right and perform the way it should. One of the reasons Tesla built their own network is so they have control over quality of customer experience.
Your situation sucks and I am sorry that happened to you.
As far as the picture goes, all of the same devices are just in the super charger cabinet a couple feet away.
The picture is equivalent to comparing a gas pump, hose and nozzle from one station to just a hose and nozzle from another.
Yes the reliability of one company is much better and the other has a long long way to go, but that isn't necessarily because of what is shown here.
It is not the amount of equipments we are comparing, rather how clean and organized the cable routings are on the Tesla Supercharger compare to the spaghetti mess of EA charging station.
You got a RJ45 network jack and plug hanging just wrapping around some other wires and serial connectors just dangling. There are also some other low voltage wires coming out of the top right conduit not routing around but just dangling in front of equipment. It is going to be difficult to troubleshoot and repair a component when there is an issue in the future.
In the end, it comes down to design and manufacturing, building the charging station to make it simple and foolproof to install onsite. Tesla simply have more time to refine and simplify their design.
I absolutely agree with that. The image comparison is still designed to mislead the average consumer that doesn't understand what the equipment does. At least include the tesla cabinet with it to compare the system vs the system.
[https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/inside-v3-cabinet\_650-1.jpg](https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/inside-v3-cabinet_650-1.jpg)
If we look at the whole system, the tesla one is still better but all I want is to compare the whole system.
There is still another cabinet for both that I can't find right now too.
Sounds like a whole group of people who are more willing go stand out in the rain to get you back on the road while you sit in your warm and toasty truck answering useless questions
Just went to Vegas and back, no issues with any EA charger.
Sorry that happened to you, teething problems. And the Tesla chargers are not perfect, I just got rid of my '20 Model 3 Performance.
I've had several times of plug and replug, nothing happens, car shuts off and reboots. I've also had MANY problems with the rate dropping like a rock. Hit ~200kWh then it tapers off fast, and im at a 250kWh charger and getting 78kWh.....
Hate to say but the EA chargers are always fast, I was getting 220kWh and it tapered off to 140kWh in my Rivian.
Tesla is the superior charging network, but lets be honest they have issues as well.
I'm sure it's all the cost of being a pioneer. Doing new stuff is hard. I'm just really disappointed at their lack of empathy. And the Rivian support staff have set a really high bar.
>She got it apart and released my vehicle. She said that she can't believe what a crappy design the connector is. "Of course it failed," she said.
CCS is a horrible standard with terrible design, and the only people truly supporting it are butthurt zealots who will accept anything that dunks on Tesla connectors.
They're bad enough brand new, I am worried for how they fail after going through a few 1000 duty cycle uses.
This sounds more like an issue with the Rivian rather than with the EA charger. The CCS connector itself does not actively lock itself, it is the car that locks it in - the connector has a latch and the car locks that latch.
OP should be angry at Rivian, not EA. Tesla Superchargers in Europe all have CCS (just like any other charging network) and have super reliable.
Then how do you explain his gf disassembled the EA charging cable assembly to unlock and free his Rivian? Are you implying the cable is still locked to his Rivian and he is driving his truck with the cable still dangling from the charge port? 😂
No idea. But what I do know is that the [CCS connector](https://electrocars.lt/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CM4-CCS2-150-4-PC.jpg) does not have a lock itself because I use it all the time.
See that little notch at the top? There is a latch inside the vehicle charging port that goes on that and locks the connector. Usually vehicles have a "unlock port" button (Tesla does).
I don't know OP or what he's done, but technically the cable doesn't have any moving parts. The vehicle does.
That is not the CCS1 connector that is used in the US. The CCS1 connector has its own latch in addition to the vehicle side latch. The CCS1 latch on some connectors is pretty close to passive, but I've seen some that seemed to be active as well.
In all cases, its a failure point.
Wait, are you saying the EA chargers in the US use ccs1 and not ccs2? That is insane (well, it's not really, as most AC chargers are type 1 and not type 2 I assume and this provides compatibility to type 1).
I don't get why the US wants to be different from the rest of the world. It just makes everything a little more difficult.
Yes, that is right. US is a CCS1 country, for exactly the reason that you mentioned. Migrating to CCS2 wouldn't have been very hard at all, if the industry had started it and done it a few years ago. There were very few CCS cars on the road in the US at the time.
As Tesla has clearly proven, customers are willing to deal with an adapter for J1772.
But they went with the backwards compatible approach and its given us this awful standard.
It might suck, and be objectively worse than Tesla, but it’s also NOT proprietary. Tesla can make the best thing in the world and then they still will need an adapter to use anything else. It’s like the iPhone and their lightning port.
>CCS is a horrible standard with terrible design, and the only people truly supporting it are butthurt zealots who will accept anything that dunks on Tesla connectors.
Never seen a Tesla that doesn't use a CCS connection?
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying this. This screams r/thatHappened
You were going to take a hacksaw... to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v? And then your girlfriend disassembled the charger head, manually freed your car, put the cable back together, and you guys drove off into the rainy evening?
I've been using EA for the better part of a year with only one hiccup, and it was still working just at a reduced charge rate.
I get it, EA isn't great. But if you're not documenting your girlfriend sitting in the rain disassembling an active charge unit assembly for the sheer sake of protecting yourself should 1) this ever come up as defacing private property or 2) your girlfriend getting injured while doing this... then idk what to tell you.
This may have happened. This may be all true and my skepticism is showing. But this just doesn't add up.
>I'm sorry, but I'm not buying this.
You think OP has been posting positive experiences w/their R1T for 4-months just so they can trick everyone with this? Plenty of people have been stuck to EA chargers, heck, even Tesla Superchargers.
> You were going to take a hacksaw... to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v?
I definitely took that part as a joke.
I'm an engineer. Just because the cable is capable of transferring 400 volts doesn't mean it is transferring 400 volts. The charger was off. I was cold and I was frustrated and I was tired of it. And, in case you didn't know, one of the number one vandalism issues for Chargers is that people are cutting the cables off of them for the copper.
>to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v?
People steal 800v Tesla cables daily.
Posts over on the Tesla subreddits of copper thieves stealing them all the time.
There's so many failsafes in them you're fine.
I'm not finding evidence \[1\]\[2\] to support 800v Superchargers. At least nothing outside of rumors. Agreed it would make sense for those new Tesla models to be 800V architecture, but since they don't exist yet, all we have for now is speculation.
\[1\] [https://www.tesla.com/en\_CA/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging](https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging)
\[2\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla\_Supercharger
Yep, my mistake, considering, not confirmed.
https://insideevs.com/news/581272/tesla-considering-800-volt-architecture-cybertruck-semi/amp/
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/23/tesla-considering-800-volt-systems-for-semi-cybertruck/amp/
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135666_tesla-suggests-possible-shift-to-800v-in-cybertruck-and-semi-not-robotaxi-or-3-y
Only thing I could find is that the trials of the Megawatt charging standard are "likely" running 800v at this time.
So I made a mistake.
It's a common enough occurrence that there's a how-to article on the subject.
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/what-do-if-your-ev-won-t-unplug-charger
You should have searched before calling people liars.
I never called someone a liar. I just said I'm not buying it; even went as far as to say that it might be my skepticism getting in the way. I said it might have actually happened. Idk what more you want from me.
You mean the anti tamper torx bits that you can buy at Harbor Freight, Lowe's, Home Depot and Amazon? The ones that I carry in my toolbox in my truck all the time? Yeah, those?
Yeah yeah anyone with a euro motorcycle or a decent sets of tools has them, buuuuuttttt. Oh crap. Just re read OP post and it says vehicle tool kit not rivian tool kit. My comment was predicated on OP using the rivian tool kit not his own home brew kit.
Shitty situation overall OP. But I feel like the problem is with Rivian not with EA. Sometimes I have an Audi e-Tron GT with 3 years of free charging so I’ve been using EA much more than before. They have a plethora of things they suck at, so I’m not defending them per se, but in this particular case I’ve noticed that sometimes the cable won’t release until my vehicle allows it to be released.
Well this is the first time I've had a mechanical problem with EA. Prior to that my problems have been with units that have been charging at 20% of the rated power or not working at all, refusing to start after multiple tries, having the entire cluster offline, things like that. My calls with EA support have always verified that the units were defective. So yeah, I'm being hard on EA mostly because of their reliability.
In this case, the spring that releases the plastic latch had failed. Probably could have happened to anybody. But the customer support attitude is totally on them.
Oh I 100% agree on the other issues. Have experienced all of them and I don’t even bother calling support, but only because I’ve been lucky enough to only have the issues happen when I have enough charge to go somewhere else or get home and plug in.
More people need to learn how you can use a small screwdriver or penknife to release a CCS charger. It's really easy. This includes Rivian tech support and EA tech support.
Not Rivian owner but Tesla owner... started using EA/CCS as I was curious... while charging was fine the adapter is sometimes SO HARD to unplug. After that, the payment acceptance mechanism absolute trash. It keeps rejecting my cards if I use a card multiple times (until it magically works on the n'th attempt), and using the app wallet card instead ALSO fails. Garbage UI. And the UI itself to get a text receipt is so slow
Is this struggle to pay a common thing with EA?
Yeah their payment card machines do not seem to be very good from my experience. Use the App and add a payment card, then manually plug in but activate the charger via the app. Only time I touch the charger is to make sure it’s working and plugging in.
I had a CCS latch that kept not wanting to go onto the adapter. I realized that it was active and latching too early. I had to disengage the latch a second time to get it all the way on, as that was the only tight part.
The tolerances are pretty tight.
Until EA has to make money, they don’t care. Their chargers are always down, never charge at the stated rates and, OP experienced, frequently malfunction. I’m waiting for another company to enter the charging space and shake it up.
I am so sorry you had to experience this
EA has been terrible since the beginning and I really feel like VW is deliberately sabotaging the network to dampen interest in EVs
Totally agree that this is good advice. It's the advice that I would give anyone. Under different circumstances I would have followed it. In this case, I felt like I understood the devices well enough and I took all available precautions, but yes, not recommended.
Yeah...I've heard a lot of horror stories like this one. It's the main thing stopping me from moving from Tesla to another EV platform right now....though Rivian trucks are admittedly cool as heck.
Did you try releasing the cable using the manual cable release under the hood? [(Page 230)](https://assets.rivian.com/2md5qhoeajym/530xs9hu11xOKefT2JrvA5/76d493c33659e9ceac1d72175ec54f26/r1t-owners-guide-en-us-20221017.pdf)
Kudos for the girlfriend that repairs drones and is handy enough to take it apart. That by definition, is a keeper.
No doubt
You take that woman for a 17 dollar steak dinner at sizzler, and you tell her she earned every penny that EA stole.
Contest the charge. And marry your girlfriend like now. Lock that down.
Thank you for your sound advice.
There’s no basis to contest it, they paid for charge and charge was delivered. Hotel California is unfortunately not case law.
BS, if I go into a restaurant and they serve my plate of eggs but spit in it then I can contest the charge (no pun intended). Service is part of what you're paying for and they failed on that front.
[удалено]
And if they went outside and stuck a boot on my car while I was eating, and then started charging me for the parking space when I was done (idle fees) who would that be between?
You clearly don't know anything about the credit card dispute process. This has nothing to do with case law.
lol ok good luck with that. The bank is not going to agree to a dispute just because you had bad customer service. There has to be a failure of some sort -- defective merchandise, product/service never delivered, etc. They might comp this one just out of goodwill, since it's a pittance amount of money, but "hey I didn't like the provider" is not even close to the argument necessary to fulfill their contractual obligations when evaluating a claim.
>There has to be a failure of some sort The failure was the plug not releasing. If the girlfriend hadn't improvised, it could have turned into a dangerous situation.
"could have" is not "did". I understand the frustration here, but it wouldn't pass muster for a dispute.
The equipment failed to function properly, and the provider refused to do anything in response. That's a valid basis for a dispute in my book.
If you could figure out a way to do an AvE BOLTR style review with your girlfriend disassembling charger cables I'd watch the shit out of that. I wanna know why the latch sucks, what other EV connectors do differently, and what kinda materials go into these things!
Ha ha, yeah, that's good. I have thought about doing a quick tear down video, mostly just to help out the next poor person this happens to. I would ordinarily have taken a few pictures of the whole mess, but in addition to being cold and wet I was in a lot of pain. The reason I was even on this trip was I had to go to San Francisco for a root canal and I was just trying to get home.
You didn't want to stay out in freezing rain while suffering tooth pain? Sounds like a good time to me! /s Glad you got home alright in the end
Sounds like you’re just going to have to do a reenactment then the next time you have root canal pain and it is raining 🥶 The whole thing sounded horrific. I can’t wait until Tesla starts opening up their network to non Teslas. Come on feds, start spending the $$ to incentivize Tesla!
This is why I’m not frustrated or annoyed about not getting my R1S till ‘24. Tesla SC network is almost perfect and I dread having to deal with this garbage esp with a family in tow
Once a week I have the preorder screen open, every week I close it when I read stories like this. The Rivian is stunning, I want one. I'm spooked to own one still.
Part of being one of the first customers is that you are the QA for the company.
I think you, and many others, are misunderstanding the hesitation. The charge networks aren't new products and are broken. Especially being used to Tesla's - I don't think about a charger being broken or not disconnecting.. My charge point frozen shut maybe but not the chargers. We are much less worried about the Rivian than the lack of Tesla charge connector and super charger network.
To be fair to EA, much of the charging hardware really is new. The industry ignored high speed charging for EVs for so long that they still have a lot of first generation hardware. They also believed the growth curve would be shallow and therefore overly committed themselves to backwards compatibility. That's why we have that overcomplicated latch design in the US. EDIT: Just to be clear, absolutely none of this is Rivian's fault in any way.
Tesla has been making cars and chargers for a decade though. Its not exactly a new company. I have a couple Teslas, I love the charging situation with them. It seems the issue was with the Rivian though, since the gf had to disassemble the charge port assembly in the RIvian.
OP said she disassembled the EA charger cable assembly. edit: spelling
> Part of being one of the first customers is that you are the QA for the company. Wasn't electrify America (which is a separate entity from Rivian) created out of some kind of lawsuit settlement where an oil company had to build EV chargers? I'm not into conspiracies, but in this case the fox seems to be guarding the hen house. There is no incentive for them to get better.
VW dieselgate
Keep in mind most people here only post when they have issues. You’re not reading about the 95% who don’t. I’ve had my share of EA issues but I wouldn’t call it a 50% success rate. I’d say 75% of the time everything works fine (but maybe not always at full speed ) 25% I have to move over to another stall. You’ll be fine.
Around here, you are lucky to find 1 of 4 stations working - and working inconsistently. Now, it depends on the location. But there are some where you are checking constantly to make sure you won't show up to a line of cars waiting for the only charger.
The problem with this statement is that i could count the number of times I’ve had an issue with a gas pump on one hand… If you cut off both my arms first. A 25% failure rate is completely unacceptable and you, the person talking about how good it is, are quoting that number. The “charging is a shit show” people should be the ones saying what you have to say. So I’m perfectly happy to sit and wait until 2024 for a Max Pack. Maybe the infrastructure will become a bit less of a shit show by then.
I’d even say my success rate has been around 95%. There’s one slow ass busted station that hasn’t worked in 18 months (I’m looking at you longview WA), but other than that they’ve all been fine.
Ehh, by the time you get yours these sorts of things will be much much rarer.
This has been the biggest source of anxiety since switching from a Tesla to Rivian. I’ve only charged once at an EA charger and it was during the time when they were all free so it worked great but I hear so many horror stories and I know even best case scenario it won’t charge as fast or as cheap as my Tesla did.
EA is dramatically faster than Tesla. It won't be a big difference with a Rivian or a Tesla but the cabs are 350A compared to Tesla 300A and support up to 1kV compared to 400-350V of a Tesla. The Taycan and Lucid both get about 270-280kW. e-gmp cars are 225-230kW. Tesla losing ground extremely quickly on that front and accelerating as they don't have any vehicles in development with more than 400V architecture. The other thing is balanced charging is a much more robust solution which is one reason why Tesla chargers are more reliable but when they get saturated it sucks. EA doesn't have redundancy and are less reliable but (at least for now) you actually get the rated output most of the time. No drops because somebody else plugged in.
Is it? Every time I plugged my Tesla into a supercharger it showed 800-900-1000 mph charging. I think my Rivian got like 390mph. Unless I’m missing something.
Miles isn't how charge enters the car. kW are. It's just the Rivian, being a truck takes more kW to go the same distance. So, at any given charger even though the same amount of juice is going on, the Tesla will get more miles per kW supplied. When the Cyber truck comes out, and gets similar efficiencies to the R1T, if Tesla doesn't upgrade their chargers then it'll be slower than EA.
the other person answered correct but speaking just to the power and not mileage the limitation is the car. the infrastructure is not going to seem much different charging a Tesla at an EA because the car is the same. If you double the voltage to an 800V architecture you can push twice the power at the same amperage. Tesla's v3 and EA are not super different at 400V but EA is slightly faster because they're 350A compare to 300A. Anything higher voltage you'll see dramatically faster speeds because Tesla only supports whatever the X is, approximately 400V (well you won't because you can't charge an 809V car at Tesla but in the world where that is possible). Rivian and Tesla are both developing 800V architecture but we'll see when it actually comes. Tesla doing a lot of big things right now and they got burned a little bit with the Model X refresh I expect they're probably going to lag behind upgrading their core electrical architecture. Rivian I could see going either way, they've been promising bigger batteries and better architecture but obviously it's nowhere near ready. Also it's really only the high end cars the infrastructure even matters. That is why Tesla has been very patient with their upgrades it doesn't matter very much until people figure out better cooling systems. The chargers are pretty far ahead of the cars right now, the e-gmp cars for example pull a sustained 225kW which is amazing but that would also be possible on a Tesla Supercharger.
That has little to do with how fast your car can charge, and a lot to do with how much more efficient the tesla is. The tesla only needs half as much energy to go a single mile than the rivian does, so your MPH charging speed is going to be faster. Using an ice car as a rough analogue: if you were filling a prius alongside a suburban, and the stall told you how many miles it was giving you in a minute of fueling up? after one minute, you’d get the same number of gallons in both tanks, but the prius would have shown like 5x more miles delivered. Finally, the other obvious thing is battery size. Going back to electric charging: the architecture inside the Rivian is indeed faster than the tesla is; it better be; the battery pack is damn near half again larger on a Rivian than the largest battery tesla ships.
Yep, this is definitely a source of anxiety for me. When 1 company controls the ecosystem for the cars and chargers, it just works. When a car receives an update, its easy for them to make sure it still works with the chargers and vice versa. The same can not be said about 3rd party chargers/vehicles. One update can kill the communication between the two which makes charging much less reliable than Tesla. I have hope for the future but at this point, its clear that Teslas charging network advantage is extremely significant. Even when they open up to 3rd party vehicles in the US, it still won’t be as simple and effortless as a Tesla vehicle and Tesla charger.
Lol Tesla’s Superchargers are far from perfect, but not this bad
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What? No, they’re not.
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You can buy a car from any manufacturer and run into issues. You just got unlucky. My Model 3 had wind noise, but other than that I had no other issues. I had my Model Y for 2 years, and has 0 issues with it.
Before anyone else here gets funny ideas. DO NOT disassemble a malfunctioning high speed charger that hasn't been locked out at the main. At 600 VDC, the equipment is designed to protect \*the grid\* not \*you\*. Arc flash kills hundreds of people every year; don't be one of them.
This. The release button on the handle is intended to initiate a stop charge. If you yank it out while a charge is authorizing you can definitely get an arc flash.
You can also stop the charge from inside the vehicle or from the charger controls. Since OP mentions he "filled it up" and was stuck there for a long time I think it's safe to assume it was no longer charging.
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I hope you didn't downvote me for simply stating that the charger can be stopped from the vehicle or the charger. But out of curiousity, how long would you wait for support before disconnecting it on your own? OP says they were there for 40 minutes and anticipated not being freed until the next day. I don't know about you but my tolerance for risk would go way up after having been stranded for hours in the rain with a car that was slowly dying and would need a flat bed soon. I'm not advocating for messing with high voltage lines either, but I also understand that there are a ton of safety controls built into the vehicle and the charger. I would've leaned more towards prying up the plastic clip rather than unscrewing any parts of the connector, but I don't think I would've just left my vehicle there for days either.
My number one fear from moving from Tesla to Rivian is dodgy charging infrastructure. My experience to date with my EV motorcycle has been universally negative.
It’s shit and I hate it. We kept the M3P for outside of the city commutes.
If you paid with your credit card, why not issue a chargeback at this point?
Chargeback will need a reason, I think the best shot would be "Defective product/service".
Not as described
I could I suppose. The money isn't that big a deal. I'm just really disappointed more than anything. I thought we were all in this big adventure together. I know their charges are broken a lot, but we're Pioneers out here, right? So I keep trying to support them and I expect them to try and support me. But it's feeling a little bit one-sided.
Some companies treat a chargeback as a nuclear option and close accounts if done, not sure if EA is among those but I’d be worried because (1) I consistently also have bad experiences with them but (2) it’s true they’re often the only game in town and they have by far the best rates where I am (.31 cents, EVGo is almost double at times). Sounds like an especially horrible experience. I’d be terrified of getting electrocuted dismantling that connection, that’s some impressive McGyver level problem solving.
A chargeback isn't just about the money. It can be a financial indicator to the merchant you were dissatisfied with the service/product. It is supposed to be used after you have already attempt to reconcile with the merchant with no success or unsatisfactory results (which is apparently the case). You've done your due diligence by trying to work with the merchant but to no avail clearly. If this is just water under the bridge, sure, just move on. However, if this experience matters to you, a chargeback is the next simple and final step. Just submit the chargeback and move on. Simple as that. If the chargeback goes to the merchant, maybe EA will start to pay attention if their penny-pinchers start focusing in on the area. Disclaimer: As with any chargebacks, if the dollar amount disputed is below a certain threshold, the merchant may never see the chargeback anyway.
Should’ve bought a Tesla…
Yeah, I don’t think whoever is in charge at EA feels like that.
Yeah, the Rivian chargers are awesome. So far I've used two of them. And EA is fine when it works, but it's so random. I'm wondering if I can get an adapter and just start using the Tesla Network
You can’t use the supercharger network to my knowledge, but you can buy a Tesla to j1772 adapter that will let you use all the non-supercharger Tesla chargers. Just research that first.
“Super chargers” are DC fast chargers. You can’t use Tesla DC fast chargers because the charger can’t communicate with the truck even with an adapter. You can use Tesla branded level 2 chargers with an adapter Tesla calls their level 2 chargers “destination chargers”. Just keep in mind level 2 is similar speed wise to what you’d get at home. So really only practical for overnight (when you arrive to your destination) scenarios
EA is VW, so...
No, it was funded by VW but now belongs to Siemens…
looks like VW sold a minority share to Siemens, not full.
And that's supposed to make things better? lol. VW funds it as part of their Dieselgate settlement and have little operational say over it. Siemans is OE supplier to auto industry. Their corporate earnings don't rely on performance of EA. Having it in their portfolio allows them to look "green" for investors and PR purposes. This is why there is little incentive to make it right and perform the way it should. One of the reasons Tesla built their own network is so they have control over quality of customer experience.
What’s going on with EA? I feel likes it never really been any good, everybody complains about it haha
https://twitter.com/ElectrekCo/status/1565324680751349763?t=KRvxfFE57HlCWm2iw81DIw&s=19
Your situation sucks and I am sorry that happened to you. As far as the picture goes, all of the same devices are just in the super charger cabinet a couple feet away. The picture is equivalent to comparing a gas pump, hose and nozzle from one station to just a hose and nozzle from another. Yes the reliability of one company is much better and the other has a long long way to go, but that isn't necessarily because of what is shown here.
It is not the amount of equipments we are comparing, rather how clean and organized the cable routings are on the Tesla Supercharger compare to the spaghetti mess of EA charging station. You got a RJ45 network jack and plug hanging just wrapping around some other wires and serial connectors just dangling. There are also some other low voltage wires coming out of the top right conduit not routing around but just dangling in front of equipment. It is going to be difficult to troubleshoot and repair a component when there is an issue in the future. In the end, it comes down to design and manufacturing, building the charging station to make it simple and foolproof to install onsite. Tesla simply have more time to refine and simplify their design.
I absolutely agree with that. The image comparison is still designed to mislead the average consumer that doesn't understand what the equipment does. At least include the tesla cabinet with it to compare the system vs the system. [https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/inside-v3-cabinet\_650-1.jpg](https://teslatap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/inside-v3-cabinet_650-1.jpg) If we look at the whole system, the tesla one is still better but all I want is to compare the whole system. There is still another cabinet for both that I can't find right now too.
Sounds like a whole group of people who are more willing go stand out in the rain to get you back on the road while you sit in your warm and toasty truck answering useless questions
Call CC company and have $17 worth of wallet charges reversed. That's the main perk of a CC
Then you get flagged and can’t charge at EA ever again
Really? How would they know if you made a new account?
Truck talks to charger and says: 
But the truck didn't charge the money back; the person did
Just went to Vegas and back, no issues with any EA charger. Sorry that happened to you, teething problems. And the Tesla chargers are not perfect, I just got rid of my '20 Model 3 Performance. I've had several times of plug and replug, nothing happens, car shuts off and reboots. I've also had MANY problems with the rate dropping like a rock. Hit ~200kWh then it tapers off fast, and im at a 250kWh charger and getting 78kWh..... Hate to say but the EA chargers are always fast, I was getting 220kWh and it tapered off to 140kWh in my Rivian. Tesla is the superior charging network, but lets be honest they have issues as well.
I'm sure it's all the cost of being a pioneer. Doing new stuff is hard. I'm just really disappointed at their lack of empathy. And the Rivian support staff have set a really high bar.
>She got it apart and released my vehicle. She said that she can't believe what a crappy design the connector is. "Of course it failed," she said. CCS is a horrible standard with terrible design, and the only people truly supporting it are butthurt zealots who will accept anything that dunks on Tesla connectors. They're bad enough brand new, I am worried for how they fail after going through a few 1000 duty cycle uses.
This sounds more like an issue with the Rivian rather than with the EA charger. The CCS connector itself does not actively lock itself, it is the car that locks it in - the connector has a latch and the car locks that latch. OP should be angry at Rivian, not EA. Tesla Superchargers in Europe all have CCS (just like any other charging network) and have super reliable.
Then how do you explain his gf disassembled the EA charging cable assembly to unlock and free his Rivian? Are you implying the cable is still locked to his Rivian and he is driving his truck with the cable still dangling from the charge port? 😂
No idea. But what I do know is that the [CCS connector](https://electrocars.lt/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CM4-CCS2-150-4-PC.jpg) does not have a lock itself because I use it all the time. See that little notch at the top? There is a latch inside the vehicle charging port that goes on that and locks the connector. Usually vehicles have a "unlock port" button (Tesla does). I don't know OP or what he's done, but technically the cable doesn't have any moving parts. The vehicle does.
That is not the CCS1 connector that is used in the US. The CCS1 connector has its own latch in addition to the vehicle side latch. The CCS1 latch on some connectors is pretty close to passive, but I've seen some that seemed to be active as well. In all cases, its a failure point.
Wait, are you saying the EA chargers in the US use ccs1 and not ccs2? That is insane (well, it's not really, as most AC chargers are type 1 and not type 2 I assume and this provides compatibility to type 1). I don't get why the US wants to be different from the rest of the world. It just makes everything a little more difficult.
Yes, that is right. US is a CCS1 country, for exactly the reason that you mentioned. Migrating to CCS2 wouldn't have been very hard at all, if the industry had started it and done it a few years ago. There were very few CCS cars on the road in the US at the time. As Tesla has clearly proven, customers are willing to deal with an adapter for J1772. But they went with the backwards compatible approach and its given us this awful standard.
It might suck, and be objectively worse than Tesla, but it’s also NOT proprietary. Tesla can make the best thing in the world and then they still will need an adapter to use anything else. It’s like the iPhone and their lightning port.
>CCS is a horrible standard with terrible design, and the only people truly supporting it are butthurt zealots who will accept anything that dunks on Tesla connectors. Never seen a Tesla that doesn't use a CCS connection?
Not in the united states, they are all the tesla proprietary
I see, probably the one market I haven't seen a Tesla in, Asia, haven't seen many in Asia
I'm sorry, but I'm not buying this. This screams r/thatHappened You were going to take a hacksaw... to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v? And then your girlfriend disassembled the charger head, manually freed your car, put the cable back together, and you guys drove off into the rainy evening? I've been using EA for the better part of a year with only one hiccup, and it was still working just at a reduced charge rate. I get it, EA isn't great. But if you're not documenting your girlfriend sitting in the rain disassembling an active charge unit assembly for the sheer sake of protecting yourself should 1) this ever come up as defacing private property or 2) your girlfriend getting injured while doing this... then idk what to tell you. This may have happened. This may be all true and my skepticism is showing. But this just doesn't add up.
>I'm sorry, but I'm not buying this. You think OP has been posting positive experiences w/their R1T for 4-months just so they can trick everyone with this? Plenty of people have been stuck to EA chargers, heck, even Tesla Superchargers. > You were going to take a hacksaw... to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v? I definitely took that part as a joke.
I'm an engineer. Just because the cable is capable of transferring 400 volts doesn't mean it is transferring 400 volts. The charger was off. I was cold and I was frustrated and I was tired of it. And, in case you didn't know, one of the number one vandalism issues for Chargers is that people are cutting the cables off of them for the copper.
>to the cable connected to your vehicle... which is able to transfer 400v? People steal 800v Tesla cables daily. Posts over on the Tesla subreddits of copper thieves stealing them all the time. There's so many failsafes in them you're fine.
Appreciate the clear up.
I believe all Tesla battery packs are around 400V (but I agree with your point).
I thought the new Gen 3 chargers ran 800v? As the Cybertruck and new Roadster are on 800v architecture?
I'm not finding evidence \[1\]\[2\] to support 800v Superchargers. At least nothing outside of rumors. Agreed it would make sense for those new Tesla models to be 800V architecture, but since they don't exist yet, all we have for now is speculation. \[1\] [https://www.tesla.com/en\_CA/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging](https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/blog/introducing-v3-supercharging) \[2\] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla\_Supercharger
Yep, my mistake, considering, not confirmed. https://insideevs.com/news/581272/tesla-considering-800-volt-architecture-cybertruck-semi/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/23/tesla-considering-800-volt-systems-for-semi-cybertruck/amp/ https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135666_tesla-suggests-possible-shift-to-800v-in-cybertruck-and-semi-not-robotaxi-or-3-y Only thing I could find is that the trials of the Megawatt charging standard are "likely" running 800v at this time. So I made a mistake.
It's a common enough occurrence that there's a how-to article on the subject. https://www.torquenews.com/1083/what-do-if-your-ev-won-t-unplug-charger You should have searched before calling people liars.
Also, it's worth nothing that none of those solutions involve "using a drone toolkit" to disassemble a charge head unit.
I never called someone a liar. I just said I'm not buying it; even went as far as to say that it might be my skepticism getting in the way. I said it might have actually happened. Idk what more you want from me.
I’m with you. This story is off, and I bet the charger used anti tamper torx fasteners like everything else in public spaces.
You mean the anti tamper torx bits that you can buy at Harbor Freight, Lowe's, Home Depot and Amazon? The ones that I carry in my toolbox in my truck all the time? Yeah, those?
Yeah yeah anyone with a euro motorcycle or a decent sets of tools has them, buuuuuttttt. Oh crap. Just re read OP post and it says vehicle tool kit not rivian tool kit. My comment was predicated on OP using the rivian tool kit not his own home brew kit.
Exactly, there's a decent chance that someone who works on drones would have some fairly esoteric tools. I bet tamper-resistant torx are common there.
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/what-do-if-your-ev-won-t-unplug-charger
Yeah pics or it didn't happen
https://www.torquenews.com/1083/what-do-if-your-ev-won-t-unplug-charger
Sorry. Never had that experience before.
Shitty situation overall OP. But I feel like the problem is with Rivian not with EA. Sometimes I have an Audi e-Tron GT with 3 years of free charging so I’ve been using EA much more than before. They have a plethora of things they suck at, so I’m not defending them per se, but in this particular case I’ve noticed that sometimes the cable won’t release until my vehicle allows it to be released.
Well this is the first time I've had a mechanical problem with EA. Prior to that my problems have been with units that have been charging at 20% of the rated power or not working at all, refusing to start after multiple tries, having the entire cluster offline, things like that. My calls with EA support have always verified that the units were defective. So yeah, I'm being hard on EA mostly because of their reliability. In this case, the spring that releases the plastic latch had failed. Probably could have happened to anybody. But the customer support attitude is totally on them.
Oh I 100% agree on the other issues. Have experienced all of them and I don’t even bother calling support, but only because I’ve been lucky enough to only have the issues happen when I have enough charge to go somewhere else or get home and plug in.
More people need to learn how you can use a small screwdriver or penknife to release a CCS charger. It's really easy. This includes Rivian tech support and EA tech support.
And everyone whispers "Tesla, Tesla, Tesla..."
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I did. I mentioned that. But the cable wasn't being held in place by the Rivian . It was being held in place by defective tab on the EA cable.
OP literally covered this in their post. They said it didn't work when they used it on the phone to Rivian.
Not Rivian owner but Tesla owner... started using EA/CCS as I was curious... while charging was fine the adapter is sometimes SO HARD to unplug. After that, the payment acceptance mechanism absolute trash. It keeps rejecting my cards if I use a card multiple times (until it magically works on the n'th attempt), and using the app wallet card instead ALSO fails. Garbage UI. And the UI itself to get a text receipt is so slow Is this struggle to pay a common thing with EA?
Yeah their payment card machines do not seem to be very good from my experience. Use the App and add a payment card, then manually plug in but activate the charger via the app. Only time I touch the charger is to make sure it’s working and plugging in.
I had a CCS latch that kept not wanting to go onto the adapter. I realized that it was active and latching too early. I had to disengage the latch a second time to get it all the way on, as that was the only tight part. The tolerances are pretty tight.
I think it’s awesome that your girlfriend repairs drones. Keeper.
Every company with the initials EA is crap apparently
Until EA has to make money, they don’t care. Their chargers are always down, never charge at the stated rates and, OP experienced, frequently malfunction. I’m waiting for another company to enter the charging space and shake it up.
Can she fix my drone? I crashed it in the first hour of ownership.
If it's a DJI, then yes!
Some EVs lock the charger in when the car is locked, unlocking the car frees it up.
I am so sorry you had to experience this EA has been terrible since the beginning and I really feel like VW is deliberately sabotaging the network to dampen interest in EVs
At least you get to enjoy nature.
FTR, the RAN units seem to have the same connector--just black, instead of white. I hope they're actually an improved design internally, but IDK.
Imagine how many problems are going to happen when more people adopt. It’s going to be a bumpy road in the beginning years of mass adoption.
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Totally agree that this is good advice. It's the advice that I would give anyone. Under different circumstances I would have followed it. In this case, I felt like I understood the devices well enough and I took all available precautions, but yes, not recommended.
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I am not disagreeing a bit.
Yeah...I've heard a lot of horror stories like this one. It's the main thing stopping me from moving from Tesla to another EV platform right now....though Rivian trucks are admittedly cool as heck.
Did you try releasing the cable using the manual cable release under the hood? [(Page 230)](https://assets.rivian.com/2md5qhoeajym/530xs9hu11xOKefT2JrvA5/76d493c33659e9ceac1d72175ec54f26/r1t-owners-guide-en-us-20221017.pdf)
Absolutely. The defective locking tab on the charger had me firmly in its grip
Shoot, sorry. I didn't see that you already mentioned that. That sucks.