Tricky Chargers

Yesterday, in the pouring rain I succeeded in failing to get an Osprey charger to work. The routine seemed fairly straightforward, tap your payment card, choose which connector to use, and hey presto, the connector is locked into the charger, and won't budge...£25 down as they lock that until the charge is paid. I see another driver could not work the bloonmin' thing either. It is my second charge failure with Osprey within the month. Osprey used to work just fine.

I had 60 miles left in the tank, so I motored onto St Clears on the A40. A brand new charging station with 6 chargers, food, drink, toilets, and most of all, just a tap with the payment card, and the kW flowed without hassle.

In general the charging infrastructure is pretty good, but these older chargers need to be sorted

I think the one near St Clears is MFG ?

If you took no power then the precharge amount will be refunded/released immediately.

5teep said:

If you took no power then the precharge amount will be refunded/released immediately.

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It certainly wasn't when the same thing happened to me at an Applegreen charger. Took the best part of a week. £90 locked up.

The whole precharge amount is strange. Why do some companies, e.g. Instavolt, precharge and others, e.g. Gridserve, do not?

I have no app or account with Gridserve I just tap my credit card.

Andrew Sinclair said:

Why do some companies, e.g. Instavolt, precharge and others, e.g. Gridserve, do not?

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Gridserve do have pre-authorization charges, they just do it in a cleverer way where they (probably - technically speaking I don't have direct insight into how Gridserve do things but this is the general way you make this work) initially reserve £1 and then increment that as the charge continues to make sure they've always got a pre-auth that is more than the cost of the charge so that the final confirm is guaranteed to go through.

The problem with this approach is that not all payment providers support modifying a pre-auth amount without the customer presenting their card again (presumably why Gridserve still do things the old fashioned way with a £40 pre-auth and charge limit at their Rugby services) and I can tell you from experience that it's not trivial to link up your charger backend to a payment provider (or worse, multiple payment providers - it's not like there's a standardised API for this stuff) to increment the pre-auth and stop the charge if it fails and do all this without anything breaking and either losing the company money or stopping a customer from charging.

Especially in a market where consumers are fairly used to the idea of a pre-auth (even if they moan about it a bit) and where competition is still mostly around how many chargers you have and where they're located rather than customer experience, I can see why most charging companies haven't seen it as worth the investment to set up such a system...

Andrew Sinclair said:

The whole precharge amount is strange. Why do some companies, e.g. Instavolt, precharge and others, e.g. Gridserve, do not?

I have no app or account with Gridserve I just tap my credit card.

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Last time I used Gridserve they put a £1 holding charge on my card ... which is OK

It's no different to the self-serve ICE fuel pumps ... insert your DC or CC and a pre-auth charge of £100+ is applied, and is then adjusted to the actual amount once you've finished filling.

The thing is though, that it's very unlikely you'll get no petrol after you've authorised your card. So it won't matter at all in practice. It's not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that you won't get a charge after authorising your card at a charger. Then the authorisation amount is locked in your account for several days. I had £90 locked up for almost a week after I failed to get a charge after three tries on an Applegreen charger. As it happened it didn't cause me any inconvenience, but I could easily see circumstances where it might.

Ahh, now I have a better understanding - thank you.

Just used up some legacy credit from Bonnet on an Osprey in Leeds... no problems whatsoever...

Using the Applegreen app instead of credit card tap to pay, and no amount was reserved in advance.

I bought my MG5 LR with the intention (when electric charging was reasonable) to charge at home.
The few times I get a charge away from home, I ponder if I should have kept my 65mpg Citroen Berlingo.
It has to be a really special trip to go beyond the 100 (winter) and 130 (summer) max each way trip, generally drive to fit i.e. about 10/20 miles (at least) slower than IC cars.
Longer trips by 45mpg (yes correct) Ford /Chausson diesel 2.4 tonne motorhome.

Try looking at it another way...

I can easily drive for 2 hours on a full battery in winter in my LR... re-charge to 85% while having a coffee and a toilet break, drive a further 2 hours, rinse and repeat...

RogerWill said:

I bought my MG5 LR with the intention (when electric charging was reasonable) to charge at home.
The few times I get a charge away from home, I ponder if I should have kept my 65mpg Citroen Berlingo.
It has to be a really special trip to go beyond the 100 (winter) and 130 (summer) max each way trip, generally drive to fit i.e. about 10/20 miles (at least) slower than IC cars.
Longer trips by 45mpg (yes correct) Ford /Chausson diesel 2.4 tonne motorhome.

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I'm not sure I understand your thinking. I charge at home mostly and the few times I charge away from home I think oh dear 'That's my average cost of charging gone up from 9p/kWh to 9.5p /kWh. this year'
The amount of home charging vastly outweighs the occasional cost of an enroute top up.