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Rate Your Charge Weekly Newsletter

3/18/2023 - 3/24/2023
Welcome to the weekly update from Rate Your Charge! Every Saturday we send out a newsletter summarizing data from numerous fast charger check-ins from regular EV owners. We hold no affiliations with any network, operator, or hardware manufacturer. Our goal is to provide objective feedback and data to improve your EV charging experience. If you would like to participate, tweet us @RateYourCharge and include a video or picture with your charging experience. Alternatively, you can use our Google Form (https://forms.gle/c834zmP9zf16ZqRC6).
First place: Another Tesla first place. 92% good check-in rate and 1 failed check-in. Keep it up.

Second place: ChargePoint comes second with 64% good check-ins. This is a bit lower than we typically see from Chargepoint.

Third place: Electrify America earns third with 60% good check-ins along with 2 failed check-ins. On the positive side, that's still a pretty low failure rate.

Fourth place: Other Operators come in 4th this week, also with 60% good check-ins. However, this group had a high failure rate, so it slips to 4th behind Electrify America.

Fifth place: EVgo came in last place with another very rough week. Only 31% of check-ins were good.
In order to effectively visualize the data, we identify whether a check-in was good, bad, or failed.

Good check-in: Requires all the following: 
  • A successful charge 
  • An accurate smartphone app 
  • Full charging speeds on first plug in 
  • More than 50% of chargers on site working at full speed
Bad check-in: Users were still able to charge their vehicles, but their experience was not up to our standards. Check-ins are classified as bad if the charge was successful but the user experienced at least one of the following:
  • Faulty/incorrect smartphone app
  • Charging speeds limited by the charger
  • Needing to re-plug in for any reason
  • Calling customer support
  • 50% or more chargers at site are limited or down
  • 5 or more minutes waiting at a full site
Failed check-in: A failed checking occurs when users are not able to charge their vehicle at all. These are our least favorite. This is the worst-case scenario and may even leave EV owners stranded. We believe failed check-ins are unacceptable. 
We like to start the report with some good news. This week we received 266 check-ins in total, 183 of which were good. We had an overall good check-in rate of 69%. Nice. This week's overall good check-in rate was the highest we have recorded this month, and by quite a good margin!

Now let’s dig into some data. We had 266 check-ins this week. An impressive 29 of those check-ins were from @pluginsites. Yes, you read that correctly. 29 check-ins in just 1 week! Thanks for all the help.
Of our 266 check-ins this week, 31% were using the Tesla Supercharger network while a nice 69% used other networks (CCS, primarily). Electrify America continues to be the most popular charging network in our check-ins.  

We saw a few bad and failed check-ins using Tritium hardware. We see reports of delaminated buttons, as well as units showing errors. We're keeping an eye on this situation.

Below we can see the percentage of good check-ins for each operator for the past 6 weeks. While ChargePoint had a relatively rough week, EVgo had an even worse week. When looking at our check-ins, Tesla is undoubtably the top performer.
Smartphone app accuracy is a critical yet often overlooked component to the charging experience. Imagine you pull out your phone and pick a charger, you even check the app and see 3 chargers are working and available. You arrive only to find two chargers down and one charger working at reduced speed. This is app inaccuracy.  
This week, we recorded 15 instances of app inaccuracy. We are still seeing many instances of Electrify America not accurately showing which stations were available, in-use, limited, or down. This appears to be a consistent problem, and we hope some EA updates can help improve the situation.

Thanks for reading our weekly newsletter, and thank you to everyone who submitted data this week!

-RateYourCharge






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