Electrify America vs. EVgo vs. Chargepoint: Which offers the best DC fast charging experience?

Hi, it's Evan and Ruby, they've gone electric, it's time to charge the car, so I noticed that the car has a very low state of charge right now. I think it's turning around 16, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to talk. DC

fast

charging

and to compare a couple of local DC

fast

charging

stations and companies here in Long Beach so stay tuned I just got into the id4 and as you can see here we are at a state of charge of 16,

which

indicates a range of 42 miles, uh, that's really low, so this is what the id4 does when you have such a low state of charge.

If you turn the ignition on by simply pressing the brake pedal, you'll see this little drop-down menu that says, please charge. The range of your vehicle is 42 miles. You can also see it on the infotainment system. It says: charge your vehicle. You can search for a nearby charging station. So what we're going to do is go to three different DC fast charges. Stations here around Long Beach, the first one we're going to go to is a company called

evgo

.

evgo

is a fairly old charging company that

offers

DC fast charging and also

offers

level 2 charging at some of their stations that we are going to test.

That's because the one we're going to use is fairly new and its speeds compare, actually compete, with Electrify America's speeds. The one we are going to use offers 100 kilowatt and 350 kilowatt DC fast charging dispensers. dispensing stations, so we'll try that one first, then head to our local Electrify America DC fast charging station and compare what it's like to plug it in, activate it, and hopefully get the Electrify America DC. fast charging units, uh, dispensers to work, so we're going to end up coming to our most local charge point DC fast charging station,

which

is half a mile down the street and we'll use their CPE 250 DC. fast charge dispenser and see what it's like to activate and start a charge at the charge point so we'll compare evgo Electrify America and finally the charge point and then I'll come up with some last ideas as to why you might use one instead of the other and what is the overall user

experience

in the midst of this, I'm going to explain what DC fast charging is and why I personally use it and actually have to rely on it, okay, come on, so here we are.

At the EV Go in Long Beach, this is a 100 kilowatt and 350 kilowatt DC fast charging station. You can see here that it was about a five mile trip to get here. The evgo now we have a standard charge of 14 less than, I think. 16 37 miles of range, so we definitely need to charge. I only plan to stay here for a few minutes. I just want to activate the charger. Show them how to do it. And maybe add two or three percentage points to the battery, but that's really all I want to do, all I want to do is a cool Audi GT Park right next to me, only the second one I've ever seen, we're on a charger called Ivana and let's see how to start this here. then the screen says plug-in connector payment authorized charge and that's it here is the CCS combo that we are going to take, oh, let's see if with one hand we can undo the port and we are going to plug it in like on the screen.

It says oops, I always forget to take off this damn CCS dud, okay and we're going to get a pretty good connection there, let's see what the screen says, the screen says: log in using one of these simple methods, let's use the mobile app because that's what I have. I don't have automatic loading. But I do have the app, so we'll activate it through the app, so the app took forever to open and work. I was finally able to get it working. and I was able to locate the charger that we are on, which is Ivana and after a few minutes it finally registered and now we are charging, this is what the screen looks like when you are finally charging, you can see it.

You are reading correctly that we have 14, let's say charge and we are currently charging at a power of 30 kilowatts. Now this is a 350 kilowatt dispenser so hopefully that will go up and there it goes, we are now at a low enough state of charge that we can expect to get over 100 kilowatts and as you can see that is not exactly what is happening , we are currently at 48 kilowatts and the cost is not available so it's funny, I don't know how much this is going to cost. cost, so let's stay here for a second and see how high the speed can go.

This is actually my first time going to this evgo station, although I rely quite a bit on DC fast charging, now DC fast charging is something that is not recommended as the only charging source because it pushes so much energy into the charging cells. battery that, over time, continuous DC fast charging can degrade battery cells faster than slower charging, say level two or just level one. which is 120 volts. Power outlets that you can find in your house that can also charge the car, but very, very slow. However, Emily and I live in an apartment where we don't have access to charging at home, so we rely on public charging.

We rely on DC fast charging because it's super efficient and when they work they really work so DC fast charging when it's working I can take the id4 from a state of charge of about 20 to 80 and about 38 to 40 minutes, depending on whether I can actually reach top speed or not, um and when it works it's great, but when it's struggling to work, as you're seeing here, we're only charging at 49 kilowatts and we're still out of state of charge of 17, so this is not enough, if things were going well or were what I would expect, I would expect that four minutes into our session with a state of charge of just 17 I should be over 100 kilowatts uh and uh.

Yes, we are not so good, it could be that our battery temperature is still very low, so the pack voltage is still too low to meet the maximum charge rate requirement, but still our state of charge is 17 and it's not cold. I'm wearing short sleeves as you can see we should be over 100 kilowatts so again Ivana evgo you're just not doing it for me today so let's go ahead and unplug a note here that says we've been here for four. minutes and a half we have only gained four percentage points in our state of charge and we are still only charging at a rate of 49 kilowatts before reaching 20 to 20.

I want to disconnect and get closer to Electrify America, which is about five miles down the road and we will compare what evgo is like with dc fast charging from

electrify

america

. We added almost four kilowatt hours to the battery pack, so I had to unlock my car door to get the CCS combo. disconnecting from my charging port, uh, that's never happened before, so, evgo, last thoughts on evgo, uh, not a great

experience

today. I'm not sure if it will always be this way, but let's go to Electrify America and compare experiences before we take off.

In this evgo, I looked at the Audi GT EV e that's plugged in right next to me at the other 350 kilowatt dispenser uh. I thought maybe since these units are balanced, maybe that was the reason I wasn't getting the charging speed I thought I would get just means the power is shared between these two 350 kilowatt chargers, so that if there is only one car connected and currently charging in one of them, they will get all the power they need. I need it, but if another car like mine shows up and plugs it in, the power between the two 350 kilowatt DC fast charging dispensers is split between the two cars; however, that is not the case.

I just looked at its screen and it has only had a state of charge of 56 and is only charging at a rate of 81 kilowatts, which is also not good for the Audi Audi GT. I know that car is capable of much faster charging speeds with a state of charge of 50 or 60, so there you have it. and it might not be me or the car, it might be the station itself. I guess we don't know for sure, but we're going to Electrify America, anyway, see you there, and we've stopped at Seal Beach Electrify America. at a state of charge of 15 with an estimated range of 39 miles.

It was a bit of a wild ride from the Long Beach evgo to this Electrify America. It was supposed to be six miles, but it turned into 10 miles because, well. I missed a couple of shifts and you'd think that would be impossible since I live here, but there you go, so I'm going to pre-activate this DC fast charging dispenser at Electrify America and let's see if we can. Get this started right, so we've pre-activated it in the app, we're ready to plug in, open the flap, we're going to take control number two because it's closest to the plugged in port and let's say it electrifies America now again.

I could have chosen handle number one or handle number two. I just chose handle number two because technically it's closer to my car and for Electrify America it can be really confusing because every dispenser that I'm on at dispenser three there's this dispenser 4 and then you have dispensers one and two there, each dispenser It has two handles, so when you approach them it looks like you can use both handles simultaneously, like two cars can charge simultaneously, for example, on dispenser three, but actually that's not the case. In this case, each dispenser alone It can accommodate the load of one car at a time.

You can choose to drive one or drive two, but you cannot use both simultaneously in two separate cars. The two cables are there so that if one breaks, there is still another one for you. It also helps accommodate different parking positions, so what are we loading up on here? I can hear the contactors. I hear some action and we're good. I hope we increase because we are at two kilowatts and we only have a 15 percent stated charge, so I hope things happen here. I can hear it increase two kilowatts. Oh wow, this seems like a pretty typical Electrify America experience so far, oh wow, at least it's free instead of evgo and it stopped, there we go, you could hear it stop.

I'm not sure if you can hear it, but it just stopped, so instead of wasting time here, let's go ahead and log out, so we're offline. I'm going to put the CCS back flat so the gentleman next to me on the id4 will actually disconnect it, so let's try this again on dispenser number four which was just pre-activated in the app and doesn't seem to be doing anything right and there You know, I don't know why it took so long to switch to the plugin screen, but wow, it took like a full minute just to pre-activate it, so let's take control number two one more time, whoops, gotta open port! and of course I have to remove the lovely flap here we go it's connecting to the vehicle come on EA come on EA do it this is dispenser number four this is our second chance here we'll see if EA can recover he can redeem himself I heard the contactors come on come on Connor you think we're still white cars, you're thinking, okay, let's click continue to see where we are, anything over two kilowatts is kind of a win, well, there it is, so 15, we're going up, oh. don't always go back bouncing into the future okay even though we have eclipsed the evgo speed of 48 kilowatts there we are 123 127 128 I saw 128 flashing again the maximum charging speed of the id4 is 135 135 kilowatts I just saw 128 let's see if we can back to that, so we're stuck here at about 123 kilowatts, that's what it looks like, we're currently at a 16 percent state of charge, okay, that's how it was, while dispenser 3 didn't work.

Even though the app said it was up and running, we switched to dispenser number four here when the blue ID4 went and even though pre-activation took a full two minutes to work once it worked. It's charging very well 121 kilowatts at 17 state of charge I'll stay here just long enough to grab something at CVS and then we'll see where our listed charges are when I get back and then we'll head to our local charging point. DC fast chargers. Just to make a good comparison, where are we? We're at 39 and still charging 104 kilowatts, which is pretty good. We've been here for a total of nine minutes, so in the time it took me to go. to CVS for two drinks, we went from charge state 18 to 39 now we're at 41 again.

We've been here a total of 10 minutes to go from 15 to 41, so that's DC fast charging. The advantage is that it is fast. Alright, we're at 42 and I think we're going to unplug now and run to the Point CBE 250 DC fast charging units which are about three miles from here and about a half mile from my apartment. so let's make a quick stop at the dispenser, there it goes, a total of 11 minutes, we add 20, a little over 20 kilowatt hours, we end up with an indicated charge of 43 percent and again we start at 15, we're blocking and we exit here, let's take this. boy, in our CCS, let's go back and go, so again.

I am currently 42 years old after the Electrify America session, of course I had to travel three or fourmiles to get here to the charging point. I have a range of 110 miles, so let's go. jump in and we have our charge point unit and the easiest way I have found to activate the CPE 250 DC fast chargers from the charge point is via the RFID card so while I do that you can see it says directly on the screen that the station is not available and when I look at the top it says not available now there are two units and I'm going to go here.

This one also says not available what fun so far it doesn't work well here for the charging point now I know there are There are a couple of other charging points with DC fast chargers in the city so let's go there but first I want to show you the

best

part from this station, this charging point station right on the beach. I don't know if you can see it very easily, but sometimes we are practically on the beach. when we're charging here we take Ruby um and we walk a little bit so we're a little bit tight here to get to the parking spot of the charging point okay so let's activate the charger here we have the RFID card it looks like the RFID card of the charging point I have worked on this station, it says it is available, so let's disconnect the charging point now.

DC fast chargers always come with a CCS handle which I have in hand and then a chat quantity handle which Nissan Leaf uses since we are an id4. We're going to take the CCS combo and plug it in here. This time I opened my port. I came well prepared. Let's plug a loose connection into this one and see what works with the dispenser. it says dispenser it says plug in but we came with cp250 there you go so it says we're charging so we're gonna stay here for a while maybe it'll take us to 50 55 or so and then we'll give this to the next person so These Charge Point units are much slower, less than half the speed of the Electrify America unit we just used.

That dispenser from Electrify America dispenses up to 150 kilowatts as a charging speed. Again this Charge Point CPE 250 is only dispenses 62 kilowatts so there is still a use case for these it's a little different you have to be prepared for the slower speed when I talk about slower speed this is what I want say with 45 kilowatts slower while I wait a bit. no charge here, some power at the charging point unit here in Long Beach. I thought about advocating for DC fast charging, so like I said before, you know, Emily and I live in an apartment that doesn't have charging at home, so DC fast charging becomes a normal part of having an electric vehicle;

In that case, DC fast charging is for people who don't have fast charging at home. DC fast charging is for people who need fast charging, like if you are on a road trip and your charge status is very low and you are in the middle of the road trip, you know there is not much around, maybe just there is a restaurant where you can spend half an hour and you need that state of charge to get juice, it is a great case for DC fast charging, so we are at state of charge 55, you can see it in the infotainment system , so we'll go out and disconnect from the charging point unit. and you know what I think I'm actually going to do from the infotainment system here, so in id4 there are several ways to stop charging, one of them is by pressing the arm to stop charging directly on the infotainment system, which makes it easy and I could only hear the contactors, so let's go out here.

Confirm that it is not being loaded directly into the dispenser. Let's unplug without problems. Unplug there. I'm going to put the CCS handle back on. Oh boy, that's not a good connection and that's it, so let's go. We were here for a total of 15 minutes and we came out at 2.72 cents, we have 10.3 kilowatts, sorry, 10.3 kilowatt hours, I should say, and there you have it, thank you, Long Beach charging point, we are at take off point from the loading point, easy. fast charging station, um, so yeah, I'm out of the charging state of 55, so the question is why didn't I charge you 80.

The reason is because DC fast charging, as your only long-term charging source term, it will. deteriorate battery cells at a faster rate than level one or level two, with a slower charging rate, so I'm 55. I am satisfied with that. I'll get it to the end using the level 2 charge that's right down the street. I, um, now the downside of level two compared to DC fast charging is a lot slower, but I'm fine with that. I'll be home for the rest of the day. I'm editing videos and stuff like that and doing other things. other things are fine and we are back home so reviewing today's video was intended to compare three big DC fast charging companies just to compare the experiences using each of the three and in Long Beach here we are lucky to have access.

For those three companies DC fast charging stations, the first station we went to was evgo. evgo was quite successful. We were able to activate the charger using the evgo app, although it was slow and clunky. It was successful because we got some juice flowing. from the dispenser but it wasn't successful if you look at what was supposed to happen we were at a 14 percent state of charge so I should have gotten around 120 kilowatts maybe even 130 kilowatts we only got 48 it's not Well. an attack on evgo, sure we were only there for four minutes and after that we went to Seal Beach chosen by the United States, which again was difficult, our first attempt at dispenser 3 was unsuccessful, not only did it cost us a lot of pre- Activating the dispenser in the app, we actually couldn't at first, once we got everything working it only dispensed at a rate of two kilowatts and there's no way I'm sticking with that, we were just lucky to than the id4 next to it.

We left just as I was about to get frustrated and just take off, so he was kind enough to give us his dispenser and that dispenser, which was dispenser number four, actually worked as intended, we plugged it into a charging state of I. I think than 15 percent and, um, we maxed out, we got close to the maximum top speed for the id4, we got to 128 kilowatts and in 11 minutes of being there in total we increased our state of charge from 15 to, I think, 40, what was it? 42, I mean um, and that's pretty much how DC fast charging is supposed to work when it's going well.

The problem with Electrify America is what you just saw, is that it's kind of a Russian roulette experience where it could work, it could work. I'm not giving you anything and you may have to leave or everything will be perfect. Then we went to the charging point which is about half a mile from my apartment, the one on the beach, and uh, total failure. They have two DC fast charging dispensers, both were. it wasn't available, we couldn't even try to activate it so we left to go to the other DC fast charging station which is about a half mile away from that one and one of those two dispensers was also down, not great but We were able to activate using the charging point's RFID card one of those chargers, but that unit that can max out at 62 kilowatts was only giving us a top speed of about 45 kilowatts, which in the grand scheme of things again was not It's enough, uh this. our state of charge was low enough, we were around 41 at the time and the battery was warm enough and the temperature outside is warm enough.

The pack voltage should have been good enough that we could have gotten the 62 kilowatts, but we didn't. However, we were able to increase our state of charge from 41 to 55 within 15 minutes of being there, so at the end of the day we got some juice from the charging point and at least that charger, you know, that dispenser, I should say, dispensed. better than the evgo DC fast charging dispenser, which essentially only gave us about a third of the speeds it should have, while the Charge Point CPE 250 DC fast charger gave us about two-thirds of the speeds it should have. kind of experience with using public charging when you have an electric vehicle, you need to do your homework, you need to download the right apps, you need to familiarize yourself with the process, especially DC fast charging, and you need to know how to troubleshoot when things go wrong, you need to know where the nearest other station is so you can leave and go to the one we did today, so there are a lot of things to consider overall, although I still recommend getting an electric vehicle right now and since my shoulder is about to fail.

I'm going to sign off for today. I hope to bring you even more content, bye.