I've been on several road trips in the last four months I've had my ID4 Pro. Virginia to Cape Cod twice (9 hrs) and Arlington, VA to Blacksburg, VA (4-hr trip) twice. Overall the charging has worked well except for the occasional need to switch chargers for one reason or another. The issue I am getting slightly annoyed at is lack of signage. When EA stations are at Walmarts and other places with single, large parking lots, it's not hard to find them. But when they are at a very large shopping mall with tons of parking circling the mall or in the bottom of a multi-level parking lot (below street level) would it really kill EA to put up a sign or two directing drivers to the exact location? I'd really like to not search every level of the parking garage to figure out which level that EA dot on my app map is on. Extra directions regarding specific location could also be included in the EA app. And it wouldn't hurt to build roofs over the chargers like gas stations have. I'm planning on sending suggestions to EA, but I encourage anyone else to also send suggestions so that these more hidden EA locations are more visible, not only for us EV drivers, but also to get non-EV people to start noticing what and where these are. And I suppose it will take a while before we can stop depending on the EA or PlugShare app and just see physical fast charger signs along the highway for exits, just like we have gas signs that list available gas stations.
Finding hidden EA stations
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Call them out on Twitter ( @ElectrifyAm ) & Instagram ( @electrifyamerica) and they've been fairly responsive. I got completely drenched plugging in recently during a storm. Not sure how they didn't see the need to provide shelter when plugging in. Did PlugShare not have any info on the stations that are hard to find?
If you are using Android Auto, the EA app now supports Android Auto. You can select a station, and tell it to navigate to it. It then hands the destination to Google Maps to handle the rest.
I noticed on a road trip that I was continuing to get guidance to the charging station location after pulling in to the parking lot. I was using a mix of ABRP, Waze, and Google Maps, plus my in-car nav (BMW), over the course of 17 stops, so I wasn't really paying attention to which app was providing the best guidance.
Waze for sure is a good bet. Locations are set by users, and the community does a thorough job is mapping parking lots. Not sure about the others, though BMW does rely on Google for some data.
I expect that as VW gets up to speed — and for what that's worth, they've said to expect nav improvements with respect to locating charging stations — we'll see this level of guidance. The data is there to do it.
As for physical signs, I suspect that's going to be case by case. I can't imagine your multi-story parking garage example working well on any current nav — it would need to be elevation-aware and provide 3rd dimension guidance. That's a perfect place for signs.
On the other hand, last year I circled a huge parking lot one night looking for an EVGo station. They would have had to install a dozen signs in various spots to catch all the possible entry routes, where nav should have taken me right there.
Waze for sure is a good bet. Locations are set by users, and the community does a thorough job is mapping parking lots. Not sure about the others, though BMW does rely on Google for some data.
I expect that as VW gets up to speed — and for what that's worth, they've said to expect nav improvements with respect to locating charging stations — we'll see this level of guidance. The data is there to do it.
As for physical signs, I suspect that's going to be case by case. I can't imagine your multi-story parking garage example working well on any current nav — it would need to be elevation-aware and provide 3rd dimension guidance. That's a perfect place for signs.
On the other hand, last year I circled a huge parking lot one night looking for an EVGo station. They would have had to install a dozen signs in various spots to catch all the possible entry routes, where nav should have taken me right there.
PlugShare is pretty good at pinpointing the location via crowdsourcing. The only EA location in Orlando is at the giant Florida Mall and if PlugShare didn't mark the exact location I would NEVER have found it. I mean... the mall has 9,220 parking spaces.
I agree. I have used Plug Share twice to find the exact location of an EA charger at a Mall. It would make sense for the EA app to navigate you exactly to their own charger. And it would make even more sense for the ID.4 to navigate you to the exact charger. I have found with the car that I have to put in the Walmart location for some chargers.
It already does exactly that.
I was only using Googlemaps and the EA app. I do use PlugShare, but typically only for non-EA stations.
So, I have done the round trip Arlington to Blacksburg trip three times now this year. The first two times I went all the way to Brughes Mill Country Store to do enough charging not only to replenish the battery from the over-three-hour trip, but also enough to get to Blacksburg and back to Brughes Mill again to charge, then back home. However, on this last trip, I did a little bit of exploring in the mountains around Blacksburg and used up a bunch of charge. So I ended up using the only level 3 charger in the Blacksburg area (EVGo in Christiansburg—use EVGo app, NOT Googlemaps to find it in the mall parking area) to charge enough to get to the Staunton Walmart, which was a good halfway point home. Go Hokies!! 🦃 Turkey, but not turkey! ☺
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