'Out of Service' Display on Broken EA Chargers...

[Buffalo Bob]

The craziest thing to me is that I have never encountered a broken EA Charger that simply displayed that it was broken. Has anyone seen one of EA's chargers that showed it is 'out of service' on the display? I ran into one the other day which showed the 'please unplug' notification, with about 900 minutes of idle time racking up. I plugged into a different charger, but watched as people would pull up to this (last available) charger and try unsuccessfully to hook up. I called EA to see if the unit could be remotely reset, but it apparently could not, so I asked the agent to switch the display to indicate that it was out of service. He said that he could not do that either. I wonder how many people wasted their time trying to hook up before it was fixed. (BTW, I also wonder if the poor bastard who last used that station got a huge idle fee charge. Yikes!)

 

[j4gates]

I've seen what you described. Also, a screen that looked like MS DOS running an update, a screen that looked like the Matrix with fonts I've never seen before, and one that said credit services were currently unavailable (yesterday). Sadly, none have said "out of service" on the screen.

The time I experienced the message you saw, 2 people had already spent 30 minutes each on the phone with EA with no resolution prior to my arrival.

The EA app has status if you check before you arrive, but like availability, it's only good for that second in time you viewed it.

 

[Tâm]

The craziest thing to me is that I have never encountered a broken EA Charger that simply displayed that it was broken. Has anyone seen one of EA's chargers that showed it is 'out of service' on the display? I ran into one the other day which showed the 'please unplug' notification, with about 900 minutes of idle time racking up. I plugged into a different charger, but watched as people would pull up to this (last available) charger and try unsuccessfully to hook up. I called EA to see if the unit could be remotely reset, but it apparently could not, so I asked the agent to switch the display to indicate that it was out of service. He said that he could not do that either. I wonder how many people wasted their time trying to hook up before it was fixed. (BTW, I also wonder if the poor bastard who last used that station got a huge idle fee charge. Yikes!)

Yes. Their monitoring software needs to be improved. Faulty, inaccurate status reports should be fixed after all these years, starting in 2016 or the past 8 years.

Maybe they can't fix it, and they might have to get brand-new software to do this, but it's just too costly.

 

[DeaneG]

Some of EA's earlier stations couldn't report their status, and could not even be rebooted remotely. EA's standardization on their new v4 350kW stations (slanted top with longer cable), and retrofits of same, is supposed to help with that.