I had a Spark EV with CCS connector and charged around the Bay Area many times. Apparently my model of car had design issues with the connector and half the time I'd have to try a different charging station. I mostly charged at home but this was annoying when doing local road trips.
Currently renting an Ioniq 5 in Florida (cost barely more than a petrol vehicle). Aside from a lack of L3 chargers near Indian Shores, the closest Electrify America near me was perpetually busy and one of the chargers was out of commission. Edit: the L2 chargers nearby require an app, need a payment method added, and require minimum top-ups (waste of money for a rental). And the closest one near me is out of commission anyway.
Compare this to my anecdotal Tesla situation: rented a Model 3 a couple of years ago and every time I'd plug in it would work perfectly (and no need to authenticate or deal with payment).
I love driving EVs but the fast charging situation must be rectified. My old Spark would only do 130 km on a charge and this new Ioniq does 450 km, so less of an issue. But for road trips, messing around with unreliable chargers is a non-starter for a lot of folks.
Yeah, it's pretty clear Tesla is still the best EV experience. I'm just waiting till the next gen of EVs to have proper connectors before I will consider another one. Our model Y is fine, but I don't want to buy another vehicle from them with Musk at the helm, and they don't plan to have a regular pickup anyways.
I wonder if the Spark shares that flaw with the Bolt EV. When Gig car share had a fleet of Bolts and an agreement with EVgo my experience was that the connections were dodgy and frequently the charging station would claim some kind of fault.
From my understanding, the Bolt corrected the issue (which made it even worse for my Spark since there was no desire to fix the chargers to work around the issue).
Currently renting an Ioniq 5 in Florida (cost barely more than a petrol vehicle). Aside from a lack of L3 chargers near Indian Shores, the closest Electrify America near me was perpetually busy and one of the chargers was out of commission. Edit: the L2 chargers nearby require an app, need a payment method added, and require minimum top-ups (waste of money for a rental). And the closest one near me is out of commission anyway.
Compare this to my anecdotal Tesla situation: rented a Model 3 a couple of years ago and every time I'd plug in it would work perfectly (and no need to authenticate or deal with payment).
I love driving EVs but the fast charging situation must be rectified. My old Spark would only do 130 km on a charge and this new Ioniq does 450 km, so less of an issue. But for road trips, messing around with unreliable chargers is a non-starter for a lot of folks.
(archive.is doesn't show full article but MSN does: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/i-visited-over-120...)