LOL, funny story: Mrs. Toe's 2015 Kia Soul EV (formerly mine) is now in the shop begging Kia for a new battery (second large battery replacement), with this saga in it's third week. Anyhoo, they did provide an EV6 for her use while they presumably spend the next several weeks/months contemplating why they offered a 100,000 mile warranty on a poorly designed compliance car. So it occurred to me that it might be fun to actually take the EV6 to the local DCFC watering hole to experience the joy of using a non-Tesla DCFC, just to see how the other poor souls get tortured.
Was looking through some information on Plugshare related to EA rollout of their brand spanking new 350kW DCFC's, to see if there was one close by that I might also frequent just for fun, since these guys may be replacing the obsolete first gen units that are essentially inoperable a large percentage of the time. Closest one was in Burbank, where there is purportedly a scam going where a "charging mafia" is controlling access to the large queue waiting to charge there. No kidding.
So I checked Plugshare for the local watering hole at my local site that was recently lit up. It turns out that the non-Tesla DCFCs have all (8 total) been completely off line since January 3rd.
Not willing to believe that a brand new site of 8 DCFCs could be completely broken for 10 days, I stopped by this morning. Sure enough, every single one was as dark as the deepest crater on the South pole of the moon. So: new site, new equipment, lit up November 25th, now non-functional for 10 straight days. Sitting literally right next to 12 Tesla Superchargers that are all working flawlessly since they were first turned on.
I have to ask the obvious (largely rhetorical now) question here: How can any entity, public, private, non-profit, Vulcan, install 8 brand new DCFCs, and have zero idea whether the electrical infrastructure in place can keep those units up and running? Freaking Caltech is literally 3 blocks down the street. There are 47 Nobel Prize winners living within a one mile radius of Caltech, including Albert Einstein's great-granddaughter. You would think someone would have had the sense to grab one of the 267 freshmen undergrad EE students (or even an ambitious art history major), and have them spend 5 minutes looking over the site plan to spot the ten most egregious mistakes that somehow found their way into the as built system. Maybe suggesting a few changes, or providing the contact info for the company that installed the 12 Superchargers sitting literally 3 feet away that work flawlessly? Crazy idea, right?
It's like Tesla hired everyone who isn't a direct descendant of the three stooges, and then the other companies hired them.