I was watching a YouTube video where somebody was showing a full charging station, and said this is a regular occurrence for them.
Given how long some cars take to charge, this seems like it could be a big issue.
Is this something any of you have experienced? What can be done about it?
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I’ve never had to wait to charge, Supercharger sites are usually very over built in terms of capacity.
I suspect that long waits for charging has become more of an issue this year. A combination of federal and state incentives have helped boost EV sales considerably. The charging infrastructure (non Tesla) was mediocre at best before the surge and now it likely gets better servicing and less chance of down units but still not enough stations to meet demand. I suspect that both the number of stations and their locations/layouts will improve. We are just in a painful junction right now
It just depends where you live. I’m in prairie Canada and have never had more than half of the chargers being used. Typically I’m the only one using them.
On my last round trip to Toronto, there were just three of us at the Belleville 20 V2 Superchargers and coming back, I was alone at the Madoc and Perth Superchargers for the 15 minutes I was there. No issue here either.
Why do I have 7 comments but 0 upvotes. Is this community not interested in discussing issues ev’s face and how to solve them?
What a confusing comment, since people discuss the issues through comments, not through fake internet points.
This is why Tesla formerly implemented idle charges and is currently implementing congestion charges for users charging beyond 90%, and congestion warnings that automatically reset cars to 80% (but can then be reset by users) at high-utilization chargers.
It’s also why outages like “2/4 plugs are broken at this location” (which is shockingly common at some brands of chargers) isn’t acceptable.
Finally, a system that detects when a charger is full and automatically directs users to another nearby charger is very helpful, especially given the scenario that sometimes there are multiple nearby chargers, but one gets more popular than others due to location.
Tesla manages all of these.
I’m not sure why Tesla is the only one who can do this right, however, it’s a bit baffling.
It’s something I have experienced, yes, but only once did I give up and come back later. This was before I had reliable access to chargers at work, though. During those several times where I actually waited for chargers to open up, I just hung out in my car, on Netflix or playing my Steam Deck.
As for what can be done, your options are somewhat limited. You can hope your local government installs more chargers, but that seems like a long shot. You can try charging at off-peak hours. It’s not ideal, but fewer people seem to be charging around midnight. Do you not have access to home charging? See if your work has plans to install some L2s.
Also, as the tech advances, charging times should go down, so this will hopefully work itself out.
If you catch it right time at right place you can make anything seem like what you’re pushing. I’m seeing a lot of anti ev news
My local EA is probably less than 5 minutes away. I have at times grabbed my kindle late late at night and gone to charge and been in and out in 20 minutes with nobody around. Generally it’s not much of a long wait anyway (and there’s a Culver’s nearby to grab a bite) but if I cared to avoid crowds I’d do that more often.
I rarely run into this, even charging on Chademo
I’ve had it happen once and it was this Thanksgiving.
I can take a picture of my local costco at any time of day where the five lanes of gas lines stretch to the end of the block.
people that don’t like EVs will spend 20 minutes in line a week to save $0.20 per gallon and then balk at the extra hour of time per seasonal road trip it takes to charge
Those are idiots. There are options. They don’t know how do do math they think they are saving money.
I can take a picture of my local costco at any time of day where the five lanes of gas lines stretch to the end of the block.
I’ve waited in a few long Costco gas lines, and the longest that took was ~20 minutes…including the time to refuel to 100%. Plus there are usually several other choices nearby, if you’re willing to pay a few more bucks to save most of that time.
Compared to recent stories of people waiting hours to charge EVs on a busy weekend, even Costco gas lines aren’t bad. We’re going to need a lot more chargers.
But you can fill up at home where the ICE vehicles cannot.
Not disagreeing that we need more chargers, but pointing out 1) it’s possible to take an instance out of context and make waiting for gas look bad, and 2) some people presume they’ll feel the pain of a longer road trip four times a year more than they feel the grind of making that choice to save a few bucks.
The solution is buy a Tesla. In 2025 it should be better for non Tesla’s.
On the way home Sunday, not only were 2 of the 8 stalls at EA nonfunctional, but the remaining 6 were degraded, so I got 7kw out of the sole “working” 350 and 46kw out of a “working” 150. The best I saw on any of them was 88kw. This was a bank of 6 150s and 2 350s.
I charged just enough to get home. Even for EA, this was particularly bad.
Only place I had a wait charging was a busy bank holiday Monday in the UK but these were at motorway services. If you went away from them it was pretty empty
I drove from Indiana to Florida in my Tesla SR+ last month and never had to wait at any chargers. Heck I’d say they were more empty than full. I bet it’s a drastically different experience on the West Coast tho.