News From Chicago: EVs Suck In The Cold! I Flew There To See What Is Actually Happening
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Storage with micro grid Solutions hello and welcome to another out of speec reviews video I have seen so much news over the last week or so that electric cars do not work in the cold that Chicago is a disaster for Ev drivers they’re dying everywhere I heard a quote
That said we got a bunch of dead robots out here and it well it’s the polar vortex of 2024 and every year there seems to be this news cycle where you know electric car owners or the news people who report on them uh don’t really understand how electric cars work
In the cold but actually this issue in Chicago is more than just that uh more than just negative news there were some actual problems here and I think it’s something we should pay attention to so what I’ve done is I’ve flown here to Chicago to make this video for you so
That I can dig into what was going on what is happening and maybe some tips for Ev drivers or even non-ev drivers to understand how electric cars actually work in the cold because I think yeah there’s some truth to the reporting that electric cars are worse than the cold
And then you have the like EV lovers the EV you know enthusiasts on the other side that are saying no electric cars are better in the cold this is bad reporting and honestly I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle which is why I’m here to hopefully explain this
Whole Chicago charging disaster situation to you well I’m here with my friend merchie this is his Mustang Mach e and we’ll get him on camera in a moment and of course he also is a YouTuber so I’ll leave his links in the description below also thanks dude for filming this behind the
Camera it’s really cold out here um so I’m a day or two after the real subzero temperatures happened here in uh the Chicago area but I have to be honest looking at the map from our side we did a whole podcast on our out ofpc podcast Channel about this and having merchie on
The ground to explain the real world situation was things did not look good it seemed like there was actually some Merit to the bad or the anti- reporting that was going around people were running out of charge there were issues at charging stations and cars were not
Charging that is all true but also all kind of avoidable and that’s what I want to make this video about an education piece more or less about how to optimize your electric car if you live in a cold environment you can see it’s really windy out here and really cold so you
Joined me at a 20 stall Tesla supercharging station we’re somewhere near Chicago and um not every stall is working I think there’s two or three that are offline out of 20 I want to talk about some of the charging problems that have happened um but first what I
Want to do is talk about the cars because I think Beyond just some Chargers being offline the main issue were the number of people that needed to charge and the throughput of charging stations I heard lines of up to 5 hours before people could get their car
Plugged in so let’s start first on the cars what happens to an electric car in cold weather and then we’ll get into the charging piece well guys I’m in Mer’s Mustang maky how’s it going dude still frig but you know what is the weather is warmer today it feels like barbecue
Weather in comparison that’s right it is nice out here uh and that is a little bit of a bummer I wish I was here yesterday or the day before when the madness was really happening but I think it’s important especially as much of our audience loves electric cars and our
True e Enthusiast to realize that what happened here in Chicago this week is actually a problem this is not a case of just bad I’m sure there were some people like oh EV suck whatever let’s just go with that but um there there were some issues here now there also were pretty
Much no issues in other cold weather environments like Northern Canada or we’ve had you know people in Alaska saying well people drive electric cars in Alaska with no problem I think there’s a lot of things that go into this so what I want to do is first talk
About cars in cold weather uh what happens to an electric car by the way we’re actually on our way to another charging station so we’re hitting as many as we can today what happens to electric cars in cold weather well the first thing that you have to realize is
Your consumption will increase just like a combustion vehicle you’ll have more loads on the car you have to run the heater and not only do you have to heat up the cabin I’m talking cold temperatures below zero fahrenheit you have to heat up the battery pack so you
Have more loads on the vehicle not only do you have more loads your battery pack actually has less usable capacity when it’s frozen uh and Teslas will indicate this with a little blue bar on your stateof charge indication saying there’s a inaccessible part of the battery pack
Some cars have really bad BMS tuning and they’ll just shut off at 5% like it’s it really you never really know um you know how much energy is left in the battery pack the car is always kind of guessing and cold weather makes that guess calculation even harder but th those are
Two truths in the cold weather you have to heat up the cabin and the battery and you have less usable capacity not only do you have less usable capacity when it’s cold to charge the vehicle you also need the battery to be warm and if your
Battery is cold and you try and plug in well you’re not going to charge maybe at all or very slowly and again I’m talking about frigid temperatures I did a whole video on this channel where I deep froze my Tesla Model 3 and plugged it into a
Supercharger you can watch it has over a million views on this channel a lot of people have seen it and um it took 45 minutes before that car even started to accept a charge now that should not happen in the real world I’ll explain why but it is important for you guys to
Realize that if you’re trying to plug in a stone cold car to a charging station an electric car uh the chemistry needs to be above freezing it needs to be above 32 or so otherwise you’ll have lithium plating and each chemistry Works a little bit differently but ultimately
What we want is we want a a warmer than freezing battery pack and to get really fast charging speeds you need it toasty you want that battery pack at you know 70 80 90° Fahrenheit for it to really rip the juice so before we get over to
The charging station I want to talk about what you as a driver can do to optimize your EV in cold weather well the first and most important thing to really EV drivers is the ability to charge at home or work and and not relying on public DC fast charging
Infrastructure this is so important to living a sane life I mean electric cars can truly uh reduce the annoyance of living with a vehicle like when I drive my combustion cars I’m like ah crap fuels low I got to go somewhere to fill it up H with my electric cars I plug it
In at home it’s full you know at least at 80 or 90% when I’m ready to go on a trip and I can just get in and it’s always topped up the thing is in urban environments especially one as sprawling as Chicago there are so many people that
Do not have home charging here and they’ve purchased an electric vehicle for cost or because you can buy a Tesla pretty cheap and they’re like oh I can get a Tesla used for 20 grand or whatever they’re going for now and so we’re just seeing a huge influx of
Private owners that are stepping into an electric car whether it’s a Tesla or a non- Tesla electric vehicle because the prices are so great and you know you don’t have to deal with maintenance all the other benefits that that you guys I’m sure are well aware of the problem
Becomes when you rely on DC charging as your main charging Source in the summertime you know the car’s charging anywhere between 15 and 45 minutes I mean it’s really not that big of a deal for me on road trips the most I try to ever spend at a charger is 10 to 15
Minutes if I’m in a fast charging car when it’s the winter time and I’m going you know and I don’t have home charging and I live in Chicago and it was minus whatever it was 12 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit out here I I have to charge
The car you still have to get to work and so you go over to the supercharging station you plug in the car and maybe it charges really slow if you’re lucky but in some cases they don’t charge at all quick note I’m just at the airport sorry
For the noise um when you plug it in and the car doesn’t charge what’s actually happening is it’s taking a small amount of energy from the charger to warm up the battery to the point where it can accept a charge so if you plug into a
Supercharger and you see like five or 6 or 7 Kow and it’s really cold outside leave it on the hook let it warm up the battery pack and then it’ll dump in the power again like that video that I did if you’re plugging in a stone cold car
Then it won’t charge but what you can do as an owner is precondition your car on the way to a charging station you can tell it hey I’m going to this supercharger or this fast charger especially Tesla vehicles all have this function and on the way to the charger
They’ll burn a little bit more energy but it’ll you know push as much heat as possible into that battery pack so you get the fastest charging possible when you get to your charger however if you live right down the street from the charger then that’s probably not enough
Time for the battery to get warm to even accept a charge in some cases on the flip side of this there are also a ton of ride share drivers I mean almost every Tesla that we’ve seen at the last two superchargers uh merchie wouldn’t you agree have all been ride share
Drivers all ride share d drivers it’s so so forget the even home charging part cuz I think that had a little bit to do with it but okay we can ignore that the Lyft and Uber drivers that are all driving rental you know I guess you can
Sign up for a program you pay a few hundred bucks a week I don’t know and you get to to pile the miles on a a um electric vehicle to uh use for ride share they are all the ones at the charging stations so these are people that did not research EVS when
Purchasing they just had to get into a car and now they’re driving an EV not understanding how you know they charge slower in the cold or anything like this not only are they probably not preconditioning to the superchargers but let’s just say they are most of the ride
Share vehicles and I’m talking just on the Tesla side at the moment are the model 3 lfps these are the base model 3 the cheapest ones and it’s a lithium iron phosphate uh battery pack and also a single motor and and the thing is we can park anywhere over here should
Should work just fine the thing is the single motor variant of model 3 which I think are the most popular even in Chicago with ride share drivers they can only precondition half the heating power as a dual motor variant one of the all-wheel drive cars because they use
The motors to heat themselves up and what what’s happening is I think there must be something where it either takes a really long time for the battery to precondition or uh it may not even have enough power to precondition Against The Wind that’s constantly blowing under the
Battery and cooling it off where they may not charge at all there’s definitely got to be a temperature and a wind component where it could be so cold and so windy that it overpowers the car’s ability to heat up the battery pack now my guess is we probably didn’t see much
Of that I think it was probably like people just plugging in not getting fast charging speeds and going oh the Chargers are broken in that case or um you know just just clogging up a charger for 5 hours to charge the car whatever it is um but that certainly played a
Role we’re over here at another charging station let’s take a look well the first problem I mentioned were the cars and the drivers not really knowing maybe how to optimize them and really I would say over utilizing uh public DC fast charging infrastructure especially from the ride share side those are typically
Uneducated EV drivers rolling up to stations plugging in now my opinion is you should be able to drive any car in any environment with very little information so I still think there’s needs to be rapid Improvement on electric vehicle cold weather performance uh for this to for this to
Work at Mass scale but the other problem of course is Chargers and you join me at an Electrify America charging station where I thought we were going to charge up Mer’s very cool Mustang Mai uh but you will notice this charger shows let’s just show the viewers unavailable this
Is a BTC power charger completely unavailable and then if you come over here this is another charger completely unavailable which means only one DC fast charger is working at this site and it’s the old BTC power one not even the new ones this crazy Electrify America has
Tried to tell EV drivers and automakers because I’ve had automaker CEOs tell me no of like I was talking to Pablo Des who’s CEO Volkswagen North America and he was like Kyle you don’t understand the EA new infrastructure is so much better and like the new charers have
High reliability well here’s two dead new ones and a working old one and I constantly have been seeing this a year ago we saw the dead BTC power stations in Colorado where we showed yeah I think the title was like they don’t work in the cold and that caused a huge stir and
I think they like flew out the BTC team to like fix it the next day is kind of the rumors that I hear um and it was just really a disaster how like our entire station went offline because it’s cold but here’s another example A year later in Chicago with the same exact
Hardware the brand new BTC power EA stations not working this ev6 owner has to sit on a level two charging station at 7 Kow to charge up because well when your car is dead you need to charge and that was his only option really not great so you have compounding problems
Here there’s more as well that that comes into this but um not only EA stations were down and caus lines there were also problems at Tesla superchargers that were causing issues not just here in Chicago but in other places I was in uh Colorado driving back from Las Vegas during the Cold Snap
Actually and I noticed that like half of the superchargers were not working in Colorado my local station for example it’s an old version 2 charger I’ve charged on that one at like minus 35° F really cold working fine for some reason this cold snap which only got us down to
– 10 or -5 uh basically made half of the Chargers not available I figured we’d throw in a Tesla Supercharger so I’m here at our local version 2 Loveland Colorado charger I’ll hop out in a second but our charger is actually power limited the vehicle’s battery pack was
More than warm with preconditioning to accept full power and we’ve been sitting at 118 Kow all the way through so maybe some cold weather power limit perhaps it also is indicating that three of the 10 stations are unavailable however when I first got here I was talking to some
Model y owners and they said they could only get the last three to actually work over here and they couldn’t get any of these to operate now the one I’m on Tob is working however I plugged into a couple of these down here and some of them had ice in the connectors other
Ones just wouldn’t interface or connect and uh they of course the cables get extremely stiff at version two so all in all about half of the Stalls here at leveland Colorado version 2 are working which is not a good enough ratio I would say I don’t know if um you
Know I very rarely do I have issues with Tesla charging you guys know that I’ve been in way colder environments than this up in Canada in the middle of winter with no issues maybe it had to do with the wind could be the placement could be maybe just owners leaving them
On the ground but some of the handles on these V2s were getting stuffed up with snow ultimately uh we are able to charge so this is good uh the equipment seems to be okay but not perfect and again this this um 3 2B that we’re on could be
Derated for issues not related to the cold sometimes they just lose some uh some power modules in there but certainly not getting the maximum charging experience and only 118 KW from pretty low state of charge up to here is eh not ideal there was definitely issues on the Tesla side with down Chargers
There was stalls you know version three superchargers were having issues so I think it’s really important and I think you guys will agree with me that we can’t just write off that negative news story as an anti- EV piece there are problems here whether the problems are
With the cars or with the infrastructure or with customer education there are problems I would argue on all sides mostly on the education side let’s go to another charging station see what’s going on there because this one we can’t even charge at unfortunately but there it does seem to have calmed down from
The big news story I will say at least today it’s again plus 15° fah there’s not a major line we haven’t seen any craziness no stranded cars coming in on tow trucks but I do want to talk about that a little bit as well throughout this video so we have more exploring to
Do back in the car we go let’s go find some more Chargers well you guys join me at an EV GO station now again there’s different network operators providing EV charging the three main ones for those of you who may not be into EVS are of course Tesla supercharging Network for
Their own vehicles they will open up here very soon but then also Electrify America and Evo charge point will sell their Hardware but they don’t typically manage a charging Network and what you see is a Evo station behind me there’s a BMW here waiting there’s a bolt waiting
An I3 waiting um those two cars down there are both Nero electrics they’re waiting to charge and both the bolt and actually both Nero so three of these cars here are again rid share drivers so really the Uber the lift guys clogging up the public Chargers just another
Example of it what I want to do though is actually bring merchi on the camera cuz he has lived through this trying to charge up his Maki and and merchie is the biggest Eevee Enthusiast I know but also very realistic to say like okay cold weather there are some problems
After we talk to merchie we’ll end the video giving you my tips for cold weather driving in an urban environment and what to expect because I think we’re going to see more of this into the near future future so I’ll hand it over to merchie and uh let’s talk about what’s
Going on here at the Evo or actually I should say What’s Happening Here in allive Chicago could be quite interesting great now it’s really starting to look like an EV situation around here we got cars waiting we got a lightning we got three of them down there for some reason there’s a leaf
Parked there not plugged in and then this station isn’t being used merchie what’s going on cuz you were here last night yes I was actually here uh last night as early as 1:30 in the morning and in fact that Nissan leave what has been here since last night my assumption
Is is that this is one of the vehicles that got told here and the owner is just nowhere to be found so we don’t know what’s going on it’s possible because that EV go in the back that one’s not working and so there’s no way for that
Nissan lble to reach up to find another uh to uh to move the vehicle to charge up the second one last line it was working we don’t know why that spot’s vacant I’m guessing it’s not working now I don’t know we should try it for yeah
We we’ll try it just to double check but I would think if it’s working someone here would have plugged into it absolutely so when I got here last night I was parking at the last spot and these two are actually 100 kilowatt machines it was working it was working at at at
The best as it could so I actually pulled in right around 25% state of charge and the beginning rate was like about I want to say about 62 Kow or 54 Kow and it start to slowly climb up into like a upward curve and until it reaches to the max about
7677 what the vehicle can um yeah with 200 amp cables that’s all you’re going to get on that thing so that all seems good but I think ultimately high level ultimately high level tell me about what happened with the with your experience in Chicago ride share drivers seem to be
Adding to it longer charging times because of cold batteries seems to be adding to it what’s your impression of what happened so I really believe that it’s not just the cold weather the obviously the cold weather is contributing to the issue that we’re facing here in Chicago but the the
Bigger problem here we have in Chicago that’s been happening over the last 6 seven months you just have a collection of right share drivers Uber and lift they’re renting Vehicles they’re renting Tesla Model 3s they’re renting konos they’re renting Chevrolet bolts I’m seeing just an army of Chevrolet bolts
Just you know coming into these charging stations and even as I’m driving around Chicago because I myself doing lift part-time and I’m every every time I go to like a fast charging station I see I’m always seeing at least two bolts at the same site sometimes just a roll of
Cheret bolts checking up taking up the stations and a lot of them are just charging up to 100% even starting even above 50% state of charge I get it you know the bolt doesn’t have a lot of range people going to have the range anxiety I totally get it but I mean
That’s that’s one of the big contributing factors was been happening here in Chicago and then you have Electrify America you know they’re having reli reliability issues of course it’s been a lot A lot has been covered into this Channel and most other yeah our viewers know they’re not always the
Most reliable yeah sure absolutely but you know with EVO they they tend to be a little more reliable than Electrify America except in this case except in this case of course yeah but um but also just like the and also just like going back to what you said Kyle it’s just
Like the general education you know when people are driving electric vehicles they need to be aware of what happens when a cold battery with the cold battery and what affects to them and so if you’re driving in cold battery and you’re down to about 4% you know you’re
Going to run out of luck really fast yeah absolutely well thank you for that quick tour we have another EV rolling up we actually have to make room for them to park over here to queue up but uh unless that’s just an ionic regular hybrid could be an EV don’t know uh yep
I think it’s just a regular hybrid one okay all part of the fun so uh yeah let’s wrap up this video let’s give some tips on what to do do and then we’ll give a summary of the situation we won’t make this drag on but there definitely
Was a situation here it wasn’t just anti- EV reporting something was going on for sure right merchie that’s right so this one over here shows error detected on the charging it says please unplug and wait 10 seconds well error code zero and unfortunately this Leaf
Has just been left here uh so yeah feel bad for the owners of that one and then over here this one is looking like it might be working I don’t know why no one’s choosing to charge on it though that’s weird also I have to say a huge
Shout out to Evo I called up my friend Jeremy we’ve done podcasts with him on the out ofpc podcast Channel I told him like dude you need to get this site rocking right now and he went into the system rebooted some of the things and got the charger that showed an error he
Got that one working the one that looked like it was working the CCS still doesn’t work at the moment but he at least got one of the high power stations up so people can hopefully get some more throughput through there this is great stuff hey dude I just met you here at
The charging station what was your name oh man my name is chur hey chur and so you mentioned that you have a bolt this one sitting there so I have Chevy Bol which is rental one I supposed to return on Monday uh but Monday were closed so I
Thought like let me charge something so I can go to the you know the rental place but what happened I have really low charging so when I came it was 2 hour of the waiting so I cannot sit inside the car so I was waiting inside
The jewel but when I every time I come back someone else was charging so car sitting from last 3 days today I have to bring my own car and wait in a car meanwhile someone charging so I can get my slot so you’re trying to return this car back to
The rental company and it has like one mile of range yeah so I cannot go there I I tried to call the you know like some of the toying company they were like waiting for 5 hours and still they were not ready to go charge minum $ 3400 and
You had mentioned that this so the first EV GO station over there doesn’t work but on the second one only the Chad is working I think both were out yesterday maybe today something working so not sure man but it’s crazy oh my I hope she’s leaving so I can charge I I only
Want to charge 10 miles so I can go try ask everyone yeah so she’s go get the bolts out there you’ve been ahead of everyone let me ask her so merchie we have gone to at least four or five charging stations today to be honest it seems like the disaster has settled down
On the Tesla side but the CCS cars are struggling still and I think uh just some tips for everyone if you’re living in an urban environment in cold weather conditions and you don’t have home charging well this is sort of worst case scenario for an EV regardless you know
There’s no way to slow charge it overnight what I would do is look on plug share try to find a level two station anywhere in a parking garage near where you are just slow charge it and avoid the craziness at the Chargers also of course you know if you can
Charge at home if you can find a level two charger precondition your car before you drive away that will warm up the battery pack and the cabin using Shore power and then really the efficiency I just did a video it’s really not that bad once your battery is warm uh Eevees
Are great in cold weather but it’s that initial heatup process which is really rough and living in an urban environment you’re never really going on a long enough trip to do that big heatup process and then let it balance out it’s just like let me run to the store so
You’re burning a lot of energy and then it’s cooling off and then you’re going to run I don’t know where else you go and then it’s going to burn a lot of energy so you’re just your efficiency just goes into the toilet with all of these short trips and Rapid heating uh
Cycles so your range is decreased your charging times are increased because even if you tried to precondition to a charger there may not be enough time for the car to even warm up but a big tip I think maybe would have helped a lot in this situation which is if you arrive to
Your charging station and there’s a line and you have to wait which we’ve heard merchie right like four or five hours some people have been waiting we met this guy who waited for three days for his Bolt he finally just got it on the charger that was pretty crazy I think
He’s just been coming back trying to see if there’s an open spot basically he’s just trying to return the car he just need to put 10 miles in it but I think um when you arrive at your destination there is no U like in a Tesla at least they shut off preconditioning because
You’re like oh you got there um but if you’re waiting in line rigate to the charger so that it can keep the battery warm if you have energy to spend now merchie you were saying that this charging station isn’t even in the maki’s system right yeah is is um this
Is like one of the few very few stations around Chicago where it doesn’t have the the the station in the syn for navigation because what because when you activate so the only way to activate preconditioning in the mai is that you put the the destination to the charging
Station in the sink for navigation it will start preconditioning for you but the funny thing is too it doesn’t even tell you that you’re preconditioning but that’s what’s something that the for has told us right so you just have to trust that it’s warming up the battery yeah so
You know it’s very specific to each vehicle making model for example the new GM ultium stuff the BMW stuff they all let you manually precondition even if you’re not heading to a charger that could be extremely helpful in cases like this but ultimately coming you know driving in EV we’re still very early
Days of EV technology we’re still very early days of EV charger technology for example we have two Chargers down here there were two Chargers down at the EA site Tesla seems to be doing better but there was a dip where like their stations were going offline too um which
Is pretty crazy and extremely rare for Tesla but it does happen and we do have the screen shots of course uh when we sent out the rate your charge alert that you helped us do so thank you for that but um you know basically it’s all thermal management that’s what cold
Weather with EVS are if you’re like me and have a driveway and home charging I don’t even think about the cold weather it you know 10 minutes before I left uh for the airport this morning I hit my model 3 warmed it up was GR rip to the
Airport no problems and you know it’s all all good in in my world but there’s still so many people without home charging that rely on public infrastructure that it becomes a problem and that really brings me to the summary of the video which is what happened here
In Chicago to get all of the attention I think the the issues in Chicago go beyond cold weather your infrastructure your uh you know the the people who are driving EVS the ride share problem this has all been happening already your stations have been clogged I noticed the
Same thing when I visit New York or La it’s already a pain to charge under nice warm normal conditions at least in those conditions you don’t have to you know remember to precondition an EV or have you know even further compounding problems of broken chargers there’s just
So many people charging so first you have a throughput issue under even normal conditions then you add cars that have you know longer charging times because lack of preconditioning and so that means that your 30 minute charge may turn into a 2hour long charge to get what you need and that’s where
Lines build up throughput is decreased and then you have cars that are literally dying because you’re sitting for hours waiting to charge and then you also have drivers who don’t understand what the heck they’re doing with their cars and you have cars that maybe aren’t suited uh with the configuration to the
Coldest environment I’m thinking rear wheeel drive model 3 is an example only having that rear motor that can create waste heat plus the Heat pump it can do as well but it’s not enough to rapidly heat up the battery pack so what I think ultimately uh happened here was you were
Already strained yeah but then the cold weather just really destroyed the whole thing took it to a whole two new levels absolutely and I think it probably will get to this level naturally with more EVS you know start going into the rental fleets and with ride share drivers who
Are doing them I think we’ll see lines regardless I see them in La I see them in New York I see them in Miami it’s getting crazy with the infrastructure not keeping Pace with the number of vehicles sold Tesla is doing the best job but even then it’s not perfect so I
Think that sums it up here which is things were already strained and then the additional charging times of cold weather made it worse now I may want to do another video uh in the future about what happens to an electric car in extreme cold because we’ve heard reports
Of Just Cars dying at 10% or 6% and other things like that and you know a lot of them you know that’s that’s just a whole another video that we need to do um and that’s a very rare case I think in general like for example this bolt
Started up with one mile range after sitting since Monday so like they they’re fine it’s just for the most part it was a charger issue it was a throughput issue and people didn’t plan for the lack of efficiency uh that they were expecting to get so any final thoughts
Merchie invested a level two charger that’s all I have to say you know the the uh this problem is going to continue to get worse until the charging infrastructure gets better or the Battery Technology gets better overall but in the meantime if you own a home or
If you own a home please invest in a level two charger but if you do rent in the Pro in the property see if you can ask the property management to include a level two charging infrastructure even just a nema1 1450 plug that’s all you need you can get a portable charger for
For for as little as $200 or $300 and it’s all you need if you’re living in a city environment please get a level two charger CU that way you save a ton of headache and a ton of time too yeah and I think this problem spans beyond cold
Weather or hot weather it’s just brutal conditions out here so well thanks for watching we’ll see you on another one again soon bye-bye well just after we ended that video is pretty interesting the gentleman who uh was trying to charge the bolt was just giving us some more information where he’s an Uber
Driver he rented the bolt and he’s like I don’t want the bolts he’s like you know get me a regular car because he’s been so frustrated having to publicly charge this thing and I guess as an Uber driver you have that program where they
Let you borrow a car um but damn I think what needs to happen here is Uber and Lyft are massive companies they should take care of their drivers understand that people need to get around and they shouldn’t be sitting here at charging stations all day it’s bad for people who
Use them from the public it’s bad for the Uber drivers they need to build their own hubs there needs to be ride share only charging hubs uh for sure there’s just no option at this point and you know he was basically saying that the you know he has to rent two cars now
So he’s rented that ionic hybrid um basically to continue working while he’s also paying the rental in the bolt that’s sitting here wow and he’s just like waiting to charge it up so he can get it back to the depot and return it wow it’s crazy he said he’s been driving
Here for 3 Days every two hours coming by this station and just now surprisingly when we were here he got it to get plugged in for the first time and this Leaf has been here for two days just parked there so owners don’t do that and like e go you should probably
Tow them because fix the Chargers first and then tow them yeah yeah I think that’s a good order craziness out here thanks for watching see you guys byebye
Kyle flew to Chicago to meet up with Merchy (@ChargingtheRoad) to see what actually happened to cause all of the recent negative EV news coverage in Chicago. Here are our takeaways from the trip…
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0:00 – Hello & Welcome
1:49 – What’s The Problem
3:49 – What Happens To EVs In Cold Weather
6:48 – How You As A Driver Can Optimize Your EV In Cold Weather
12:07 – Charging Station Problems
17:49 – Clogged Up Charging Station w/ Lines
19:09 – Mercy’s On The Ground Experience
23:10 – EVgo Problem / Fix!
23:57 – 3 Days Waiting To Charge A Bolt!
25:15 – Tesla Seems To Have Recovered But CCS Stations Still Crazy
29:09 – Final Summary Of Problems
32:42 – Rideshare Companies Need Their Own Chargers
If you liked this video, we recommend checking out some of our other channels!
Out of Spec Motoring: http://youtube.com/outofspecmotoring
Out of Spec Reviews: https://www.youtube.com/outofspecreviews
#tesla #ev #cold
