(The caveat to all of this is I can’t tell if this violates PlugShare’s TOS. Though I invite commentary on that.)
As many of us can attest, lines are getting longer at many charging stations. In my opinion, charging networks aren’t keeping up with the growth of EV adoption, particularly when so many drivers have free charging plans that incentivize them to reply completely on public charging for all of their needs.
As a small way to do something about this, I’d like to encourage drivers to mark a “Could Not Charge” checkin on PlugShare every time they have to wait for a charger. Note the length of the line and the approximate amount of time you had to wait.
If you do end up charging at that station, create a separate checkin for your successful charge.
This is in line with what Kyle Conner and some others started encouraging people to do late last year when they encounter broken public chargers. Originally he asked people to make one “Could Not Charge” checkin for each broken charger – PlugShare said that violates the TOS but allowed people to make one failed checkin for each station that had multiple failures. More on that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/10058jz/plugshare_is_editing_and_removing_legitimate/
The idea here is to name and shame charging networks. We know that PlugShare scores matter to them – they monitor the scores and know that drivers avoid stations with low scores. But if you wait in line for an hour and still get a charge, while you had a bad experience, it counts only as a positive for PlugShare purposes. A long line is a failure on the part of the charging network, and should be recorded as such.
(As a side note, I truly believe PlugShare should allow something like a 1-5 rating scale so that drivers can take into account broken chargers, wait times, downrated chargers, bad customer service, amenities, location, etc., in rating their charges, not just a binary “yes” or “no” on whether they got electrons.)
PlugShare is such a bullshit application. We really need an alternative
I think this is a bad idea. I want to know if the charger works not that it happened to be busy when you went to it.
You can add a comment that you had to wait.
Better to post when you were there and if there was a line. Lev 3 near me is usually empty at 8 am but has a line by 10 am
Long lines at a particular charger is not a failure of that particular charger, it’s a systemic failure of multiple companies and government entities. Giving it a bad rating in Plugshare feels satisfying and is something you can do in the moment with little effort but isn’t actually very productive.
Imagine this applied to restaurants. The place was clean, the servers were friendly, and the food was fantastic. It was the only good food for miles!
However, there were other people there, causing a line. One star… trash.
“In my opinion, charging networks aren’t keeping up with the growth of EV adoption, particularly when so many drivers have free charging plans that incentivize them to reply completely on public charging for all of their needs.”
Not the responsibility of private charging networks. They follow the money and it’s not in EV charging, except for Tesla, due to low volume. The EV charging would follow demand not lead it.
It us up to government to fill in the “what needs to be done” vs. “what pays to get done”. And US government went big on just that issue in the BuildBackBetter/IRA bill with $5B for 500,000 public chargers over next five years. For perspective, there are about 500,000 gas pumps in the US. That build out over the next five years should match the EV sales goals.
Oregon’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Plan in response to the Federal NEVI program.
I agree with you… we only have single 50kw stations every 100km or so where I live. Summertime weekend travel leads to lines 3+ cars deep. If I have to wait 2+ hours to plug my car in at your station, you bet you’re getting a negative review. Build more!!
so if you are a charging network provider, and people in a particular area keep leaving negative reviews for 100% perfectly operational stations, your natural response is to … build more of them? is this intended to be logical in some way?
Charging network operators use PlugShare as one of the methods to determine if a charging station at a location needs servicing.
Marking “Could Not Charge” on a working charging station would distract charging network operators from servicing those locations that actually need servicing.
Why would a line cause you to mark it as could not charge.
This sounds like it would trigger an alert that a charger is malfunctioning and then a company might dispatch a service tech. So you wasted everyone’s time and money.
No. Under the “Could not charge” option, there is a sub-item for “In use”
The whole point of having plugshare is you can look in advance and see if the stations are in use. I’ll go where people are not.
What PlugShare could do is color charging stations by recent utilization: 90% or more probably means a line for example.
No charging station can build for the worst case capacity.
There is already a method for doing this in PlugShare. Select “Could not charge” then select “In use”
This is in line with what Kyle Conner and some others started encouraging people to do late last year
With all due respect you are idiolizing a douchebag. My theory is that EA won’t give him an interview and for this reason kyle goes out of his way to shit on them. He had long tours and interviews of freewire and chargepoint and talked them up but in the end they’re mehh providers. I’m not excusing EA, they need to continue improving but his visceral hatred is unfounded.
I wouldn’t follow his miguided advice that lines = failure. A failure is when the charger fails to charge your EV. Anything outside of the charging stalls control (ex: lines, black out, acts of god, etc) are not failures.
you must be one of those people who think not unplugging a millisecond after hitting 80% is a war crime
I’m not. But I waited 40 minutes at a single DCFC as the guy before me ‘needed’ to charge to 100%. His next leg had multiple chargers on it, he just didn’t want to use them.
I think PlugShare would also merge those reports. Your energy probably would be better directed at getting more people to use RateMyCharge so their stats were more representative rather than just people posting when they want to rant about station failures and not posting when they charge successfully.