EV Connect updates this morning

[lpickup]

In addition to the handful of "regular" updates to the database this morning, there were 35 EV Connect stations marked as "temporarily closed", almost all of which are at dealerships.

Most of EV Connect's recent expansion has been at car dealerships. Based on what I've seen at other dealerships, I predict the fate of these stations will be that the dealership (that isn't really interested in hosting EV charging in the first place, but was forced to) will lose interest in the charger which will fall into disrepair, or they will block it off and only allow customers (if even that) to use it. Sometimes this process doesn't take long at all, and unlike ChargePoint who will let this go for months/years before finally cutting ties, EV Connect does appear to clean house a bit more often.

But this kind of bulk cleanup is a bit unprecedented for them and I'm not sure what it means.

For now I'm going to ignore it because I suspect in a day or two many of these will "come back" (possibly a glitch in their system). I may spot check a few to see what's happening. Nonetheless, be advised that technically there are several EV Connect sites that are listed as open here but may in fact be unavailable. That said, before heading out to ANY car dealership to charge, I would be very cautious anyway!

 

[tkmedia]

Good thing about ev connect is that they are starting to have more and more plug and charge pedestals.

 

[lpickup]

As I more or less expected, all of those stations came back as OPEN this morning (my spot check yesterday showed that the stations were never actually down).

It drives me nuts when they do that kind of thing. Of course it could be worse...some CPOs actually remove their entries altogether and then add them back a day or two later, which winds up creating more work than simply ignoring them for a day or two because then I have to reassociate them with their AFDC id's (Electrify America did this for a couple of months--I basically had it hard-coded to ignore EA deletions!)

And this morning I woke up to find that Rivian changed apparently ALL of their entries. They changed the names of their sites from the very user-friendly format of "US-TDM-SCC-2B" to "2577 Jeb Stuart Highway (US-TDM-SCC-2B)". Still no actual place name (and adding the street address doesn't add much since the address is already part of the record anyway). To make matters worse, like ChargePoint, Rivian creates a separate AFDC entry for each pedestal, so instead of 50 updates to process, there are actually 300! Each one is not a big deal since there were no material changes to be made (I basically have to click the confirm button), but when I wrote the code for that admin screen I didn't anticipate that kind of volume of updates on a daily basis, so it literally is 600 clicks (one to "ignore" and one to "confirm" and add a comment if I want).

I already filter out many changes that I don't care about--it's getting to the point where I'm probably going to start ignoring some of the fields that I previously cared about (like site name -- I usually choose a more appropriate place name anyway) and/or introduce a "delay" for some providers so that if a provider tags a site as temporary closed, it won't trigger in my system until 2-3 days later so I can determine if it was just a glitch or a real closure.