Trapped!
Or why poor process locked me into a charger.
I had an interesting experience yesterday.
At The British Motor Museum there are a set of 6 Shell Recharge units in the car park. I’ve used them before and I know they work. But when I plugged in yesterday the unit errored, the light turned red and I couldn’t do anything. This was 09:00
I wanted to move the car and plug in at an adjacent unit. But the charger wouldn’t release my cable. I tried a couple of things: lock and unlock the car, reauthorise the charge, push the cable in before pulling to release. Nothing worked. So I called the help desk number on the unit. When I finally got through to a live human (09:10), he couldn’t find the units in his system. He put me on hold several times and finally came back to say that the units were now managed by a company called 50five (uk) Ltd, on behalf of Shell Recharge (09:27)
I called them. Due to an abysmal phone signal and several failed connections I finally got through at 09:44. The lovely help desk operative, Sarah, listened to my story and promised help. I asked her to quickly reboot the unit so I could release the cable.
“I can’t do that, I have no access to the chargers” she told me.
All she could do was raise a ticket and pass it to the engineering department to action. She had no idea what they would do or how long it would take (09:50).
I asked her why the unit still had the Shell Recharge help desk number if 50five were now managing the. She told me they only recently took over and haven’t had a chance to relabel everything. (It’s actually been at least 3 months since 50five took over). I asked her what I could use to initiate a charge - could I use Zapmap? Electroverse? Plugsurfing? She didn’t know, other than to say ‘You can use the 50five app,’ (currently sitting at 1 star in the App Store and the 2,435th CPO app I would have on my phone1 ). ‘but I don’t really know much about this because I don’t drive electric’
The ticket was raised and I went to attend the meeting. (09:55)
In the meantime the museum staff came to my rescue, unlocked the green cabinet, and physically switched off the unit. The cable unlocked, I moved to another unit and successfully started the charge . (Which, incidentally, was 32p/kWh plus VAT - nice!2)
At 10:40 (1:30 after I spoke to a human at Shell Recharge), an engineer from 50five called to see if I was still having trouble. I told him no. I then asked if he could tell me what the error code was (it’s nice to know if it’s a hardware issue with the unit, a handshake issue with the car, or something else). He told me “I don’t know. We don’t have access to that information.’
So, to summarise: it took almost 90 minutes from the first phone call to get someone on the line who could help. There was a litany of issues and problems related to signage, ownership, and software access that slowed things down and, in the end, it was a third party who had nothing to do with the chargers who actually helped me.
I post this to show that - while we are making great progress with the charging infrastructure - there are simple things that are still not being done well that are causing friction. I knew what to do in this instance and was relatively unphased by the problems. But someone new to EVs would be straight onto social media with another ‘This EV thing is crap and we shouldn’t be going there’ post.
That’s not helpful.
(If anyone from Shell Recharge or 50five is reading this and wants to come on to the EV Musings podcast to discuss and explain this please get in contact with me info@evmusings.com)
Some exaggeration, here. I actually only have four CPO apps on my phone. Generally if I can’t start and stop a charger using a roaming service or payment card I’m not using this charger.
For context, 32p/kWh gives me a cost of around 10p/ mile in my Polestar 2 at this time of year. Much less than petrol or diesel and excellent value for public charging.