Lucid-EA connection failure?

[Bunnylebowski]

@bunnylebowski,

It was 200 miles of range left. i did not want to drive 50 miles home from charging station as that was uphill (about 2,500 vertical feet) so would have consumed at least 100 miles of range. (Car has 240 miles on the odometer total and is averaging just about 2 miles per kWh so far. I’ve hear of people averaging over 3M/kWh but I chalk that up as BS). I can charge at home but as I only have 110 right now, charging would set me back nearly a week — already did that once, not going to do it again.

Chargers were not broken, several Taycans, Rivians, and others came and went in the 2 hours 20 minutes I was there. I was sure to use only chargers that I had seen at least one or two other cars successfully use in my presence.

All who observed the debacle were extremely thankful that they were not stupid enough to buy a Lucid.

I ttied to pay for the electricity with every credit card I had. The Lucid roadside assistance people asked me to work on inserting credit card quickly right after I plugged in car. Each time did not work. The EA equipment recognized the car enough to know it was a Lucid and therefore cancelled the credit card purchase . . . but refused to charge the car. Frustrating to say the least.

I told them that if it did not work the first 50 times, the same tactics were unlikely to work then next 50. It seems that the Tech tried the same tactics I did for the next 50 times. . . . and amazingly got the same result.

Really do not want the car back unless trim is up to mid-1980’s Chrysler standards and “Surreal Sound System” sounding equal to or better than the built in speaker of my iPhone. (I was expecting 21 speakers to sound better than a single iPhone speaker. I guess the system is aptly names “surreal”). Finally, there is the charging issue. If it cannot be charged, it has, at best, the 200 miles of range it indicates, likely less though.

Yeah definitely not BS. I just drove to Maine yesterday in the rain at around 72mph trying to replicate the Out of Spec numbers, starting at 97% SOC. Kyle’s test was pretty accurate. Trip A is when I reset the trip computer after I got up to 72mph.

Yeah those EA struggles are bad and there’s definitely a problem with Lucid+EA talking together. However I don’t understand why there wasn’t ANY other charging option within 200 miles of you. The point is to charge the car, right, or was the point to force this single EA location to charge your car and not try any other charging locations? And yes I understand 110v is useless. The EA location by me in Rhode Island also now fails 100% of the time while others drive off fine, but then every other EA site works for me (sometimes far too slow, same for other vehicles). In any case, if all the reboot tricks didn’t fix your sound system then the car needed to go in anyway. Sorry for the bad experience, I hope whatever they learn from your car helps solve similar problems in other cars.

 

[Coltonw011]

Are you in a state with charge per minute? This is the reason a number of states enforced charge per kW due to the various speeds cars charge at they deemed it unfair on owners to foot the bill.

It must be, I just charged yesterday, adding 83 kWh for what would’ve cost $35.48..

 

[Tesla2.0]

It must be, I just charged yesterday, adding 83 kWh for what would’ve cost $35.48..

View attachment 5488

That’s $0.43/kW.
He definitely was on slow bad stall at $28 for 17kW.

 

[Bobby]

Is it common knowledge that only one of the two EA charging cables can be used at a time? I just met an EA tech who told me they built them with two cables for redundancy (in case one breaks). He said the installation of the chargers is messed up all the time by independent contractors, and the design was from a company in Italy. Was news to me…

I am aware of that NOW after trying to use the “other” cable on a charger in-use by another car a few years ago. You’d think there would be some sort of label or instruction about that!

 

[Bel]

Are you in a state with charge per minute? This is the reason a number of states enforced charge per kW due to the various speeds cars charge at they deemed it unfair on owners to foot the bill.

Im in WA. I dont know if it charged per minute but the display on the charging station continously incremented the minute. KW, and $. The display seemed to update every 10 sec or so.

 

[maractwin]

Yesterday I also had a complete failure to charge at an EA station.

I pulled in, plugged in one of the 350s, and got an Authentication failure, unplug and plug in again." error. On trying a second time, it would connect and start charging, and then stop 1-2 seconds later. This pattern repeated, alternating between these two results. I tried moving to another charger at this station and got the same behavior. So I called EA. She rebooted the charger. Asked me to reboot my car. No change. Asked me to try paying by credit card--"How do you do that?" and she couldn't tell me, and I've never been prompted to pay. She eventually said she thought it was a problem with my car. So I called Lucid, who had me try many of the same things. Then the Lucid rep conferenced in EA, who wanted to try all of the same things a third time. While all of this was going on, two different VW ID.4s pulled in, had trouble connecting, but each eventually got charging. An Ioniq 5 pulled in and charged with no problems. After an hour and a half, we gave up. We did make it another hour down the road to the next charger, arriving with 50 miles of range left. And that one just worked. But if that one had also failed, we would have been stranded.

 

[Tesla2.0]

Im in WA. I dont know if it charged per minute but the display on the charging station continously incremented the minute. KW, and $. The display seemed to update every 10 sec or so.

You have encountered a very bad stall. According to EA website, WA users pay by kW.

 

[Tesla2.0]

Yeah definitely not BS. I just drove to Maine yesterday in the rain at around 72mph trying to replicate the Out of Spec numbers, starting at 97% SOC. Kyle’s test was pretty accurate. Trip A is when I reset the trip computer after I got up to 72mph.

Yeah those EA struggles are bad and there’s definitely a problem with Lucid+EA talking together. However I don’t understand why there wasn’t ANY other charging option within 200 miles of you. The point is to charge the car, right, or was the point to force this single EA location to charge your car and not try any other charging locations? And yes I understand 110v is useless. The EA location by me in Rhode Island also now fails 100% of the time while others drive off fine, but then every other EA site works for me (sometimes far too slow, same for other vehicles). In any case, if all the reboot tricks didn’t fix your sound system then the car needed to go in anyway. Sorry for the bad experience, I hope whatever they learn from your car helps solve similar problems in other cars.View attachment 5487

This stats make me ponder about 19”. I know 99.5% of time I don’t have to deal with snow in Texas. I wish there are other rims to choose aside from OEM for 19”, just personal preference.

 

[Bel]

You have encountered a very bad stall. According to EA website, WA users pay by kW.

View attachment 5500

I see thanks. Ill try again and using credit card if Lucid/EA cant get my three years free charge working. According to Lucid it should only be to plug in the cable and EA should recogize its me and just start charging.

 

[Tesla2.0]

I see thanks. Ill try again and using credit card if Lucid/EA cant get my three years free charge working. According to Lucid it should only be to plug in the cable and EA should recogize its me and just start charging.

Yes, it should be seamless for Lucid. It has to be a registration issue. One time I saw Taycan changed 5 stalls didn’t work and ended up using credit card and still not working either for him. I saw his fear bc his range isn’t much and we were in RoundRock Texas. You know how big Texas is for next EA station. I felt terrible for him.

 

[stratus]

@bunnylebowski,

It was 200 miles of range left. i did not want to drive 50 miles home from charging station as that was uphill (about 2,500 vertical feet) so would have consumed at least 100 miles of range. (Car has 240 miles on the odometer total and is averaging just about 2 miles per kWh so far. I’ve hear of people averaging over 3M/kWh but I chalk that up as BS). I can charge at home but as I only have 110 right now, charging would set me back nearly a week — already did that once, not going to do it again.

Chargers were not broken, several Taycans, Rivians, and others came and went in the 2 hours 20 minutes I was there. I was sure to use only chargers that I had seen at least one or two other cars successfully use in my presence.

All who observed the debacle were extremely thankful that they were not stupid enough to buy a Lucid.

I ttied to pay for the electricity with every credit card I had. The Lucid roadside assistance people asked me to work on inserting credit card quickly right after I plugged in car. Each time did not work. The EA equipment recognized the car enough to know it was a Lucid and therefore cancelled the credit card purchase . . . but refused to charge the car. Frustrating to say the least.

I told them that if it did not work the first 50 times, the same tactics were unlikely to work then next 50. It seems that the Tech tried the same tactics I did for the next 50 times. . . . and amazingly got the same result.

Really do not want the car back unless trim is up to mid-1980’s Chrysler standards and “Surreal Sound System” sounding equal to or better than the built in speaker of my iPhone. (I was expecting 21 speakers to sound better than a single iPhone speaker. I guess the system is aptly names “surreal”). Finally, there is the charging issue. If it cannot be charged, it has, at best, the 200 miles of range it indicates, likely less though.

Sorry about your lousy charging experience. I sincerely hope they figure it out. Of note, I am averaging about 3.7 m/kWh since I received the car in September. I have a rather intimidating hill I have to go up to get home, so I have generally been pleased with my car’s energy performance thus far .
Each time I drive I seem to get more efficient; perhaps you will experience a similar increase in efficiency as the car breaks in a bit and you master a few tricks to really get the best m/kWh possible. If you are going up a bunch of long uphills and pushing the pedal very aggressively, it can really drop m/kWh.

Additionally, when you get the sound system working as it should you will be happy.

Good luck!!

 

[Car Guy]

Damn, I bought my car for its potential for long distance driving. I'm sorry to hear all the EA issues. I know VW is crap, their Taycan has been a disaster.

 

[HC_79]

I avoid EA like the plague. I have very little patience and the free charging just isn't worth everything you have to go through at EA. Whether it be chargers not working, poor speeds and now what appears to be authentication issues, i'm not fumbling around at a charger for 30+ mins to try and get it working. The network had promise but VW has rolled out an absolute disaster.

EVGo has been rolling out higher speed chargers so its worth paying attention to them also. Yes, EA has a monopoly on the interstates etc. but even then I will run the car down so low so I only have to stop at one EA charger vs two etc. You all should have received the survey from Lucid and one topic asks about charging. I encourage everyone to raise the concerns about EA because clearly customer complaints aren't helping them. Lucid, Ford, GM, etc. need to band together and tell EA to get it sorted because free charging doesn't come free. If the customer experience is lousy then why should EA get to keep their money.

I also asked on the survey to look at other vendors like EVGo etc. for Plug n Charge also.

 

[Bel]

I avoid EA like the plague. I have very little patience and the free charging just isn't worth everything you have to go through at EA. Whether it be chargers not working, poor speeds and now what appears to be authentication issues, i'm not fumbling around at a charger for 30+ mins to try and get it working. The network had promise but VW has rolled out an absolute disaster.

EVGo has been rolling out higher speed chargers so its worth paying attention to them also. Yes, EA has a monopoly on the interstates etc. but even then I will run the car down so low so I only have to stop at one EA charger vs two etc. You all should have received the survey from Lucid and one topic asks about charging. I encourage everyone to raise the concerns about EA because clearly customer complaints aren't helping them. Lucid, Ford, GM, etc. need to band together and tell EA to get it sorted because free charging doesn't come free. If the customer experience is lousy then why should EA get to keep their money.

I also asked on the survey to look at other vendors like EVGo etc. for Plug n Charge also.

Think ill agree. 2nd day with new agt and 2nd time ea charging. Free charging still doesnt work. Only 55 kW charging in a 350 station having reached 80% so far and im the only one here.

 

[Shuasha]

Think ill agree. 2nd day with new agt and 2nd time ea charging. Free charging still doesnt work. Only 55 kW charging in a 350 station having reached 80% so far and im the only one here.

Out of curiosity, do you enable pre-conditioning for a while before charging?

Also, for people with charging problems at EA, has anybody had the same problems on the "updated" hardware. I'm curious if it fixes a lot of the problems. Here's what the new ones look like:

 

[HC_79]

Out of curiosity, do you enable pre-conditioning for a while before charging?

Also, for people with charging problems at EA, has anybody had the same problems on the "updated" hardware. I'm curious if it fixes a lot of the problems. Here's what the new ones look like:

I don't think the hardware is the problem. This is all about making sure EA will get its money and not give out free charging. Something broke when they did the last major maintenance on the EA network so it seems EA and Lucid need to work together to figure out what broke and how to fix it. It's the authorization that's failing to my understanding and thats all software.

It's interesting to note that Kyle had issues on those new chargers as well. He tweeted a video at one of the new chargers because he couldn't get it to work. It's when EA told him to stop tweeting about them because he's not helpful.

 

[LucidDropkick]

@bunnylebowski I’ve hear of people averaging over 3M/kWh but I chalk that up as BS).

BS checking in here:

Sorry you're not having a good experience.

 

[Sandvinsd]

@bunnylebowski,

It was 200 miles of range left. i did not want to drive 50 miles home from charging station as that was uphill (about 2,500 vertical feet) so would have consumed at least 100 miles of range. (Car has 240 miles on the odometer total and is averaging just about 2 miles per kWh so far. I’ve hear of people averaging over 3M/kWh but I chalk that up as BS). I can charge at home but as I only have 110 right now, charging would set me back nearly a week — already did that once, not going to do it again.

Really? On trips I average over 4 miles/kWh

 

[Bel]

Out of curiosity, do you enable pre-conditioning for a while before charging?

Also, for people with charging problems at EA, has anybody had the same problems on the "updated" hardware. I'm curious if it fixes a lot of the problems. Here's what the new ones look like:

No, i didnt and on purpose. I mainly wanted to see if i can get free charging as promised and i couldnt. Secondary was to see what is realistic charging when forgetting pre-conditioning.

 

[NPN]

I avoid EA like the plague. I have very little patience and the free charging just isn't worth everything you have to go through at EA. Whether it be chargers not working, poor speeds and now what appears to be authentication issues, i'm not fumbling around at a charger for 30+ mins to try and get it working. The network had promise but VW has rolled out an absolute disaster.

EVGo has been rolling out higher speed chargers so its worth paying attention to them also. Yes, EA has a monopoly on the interstates etc. but even then I will run the car down so low so I only have to stop at one EA charger vs two etc. You all should have received the survey from Lucid and one topic asks about charging. I encourage everyone to raise the concerns about EA because clearly customer complaints aren't helping them. Lucid, Ford, GM, etc. need to band together and tell EA to get it sorted because free charging doesn't come free. If the customer experience is lousy then why should EA get to keep their money.

I also asked on the survey to look at other vendors like EVGo etc. for Plug n Charge also.

Sorry for your and others forum members' poor experiences with EA. I feel very fortunate as I live close to a cluster of new EA chargers (at Fashion Island in Newport Beach, CA) and my free charging has worked well each time since I received the car mid-September. I will say, however, that the speed I've received at EA chargers has topped out at 90 even when on a charger that says it goes up to 350 KW. Still everything else has worked as advertised from the first plug in! Hope EA gets these issues worked out soon for those experiencing issues.