Glad I could help

[Les burrows]

Arrived at Tesco chap there with a Tesla m3 had been stuck there for around 45 minutes so I pulled up to plug in my car in the same dual charging post and he said to me stop don’t plug in to that its faulty what’s wrong I asked well he said I have finished my charge plug out of the car but the cable won’t plug out of that charger I’m on the phone trying to get some help but nobody is answering very strange I said I then said let’s try something he at first was a bit reluctant when I said plug your cable back into your car and start a charge again anyhow reluctantly he did after a minute I said now stop the charge and see if it unplugs I thought he was going to give me a kiss when it worked.
So good deed of the day completed.
Les

 

[Gadget Geek]

Pod-Point advise plugging back in and locking - unlocking the car 5 times. That worked for someone in an ID3 I was helping at Tesco a while back.

It's always nice to share experiences with new EV drivers.

 

[GaryMG4]

Had a chat with a lad delivering a Corsa-E at a Gridserve, advised him to leave and top up again later as waiting over an hour to try to get 100% charge was a waste of time. I returned to my car on my local free charger and noticed a couple of girls sitting plugged in but the charger was flashing red/blue, i.e not connected, turns out they hadn't pushed the type 2 all the way in.

 

[Shrink Proof]

I've encountered a couple of folk having problems at chargers with hired EVs. Neither had ever used an EV before, and in both cases they were given the car instead of the ICE vehicle they'd booked. Seems both times the hire company failed to come up with the requested vehicle and this was the offer, on a take it or leave it basis. No instructions or advice from the hire company staff.

In one case the guy was puzzled as to how he could connect the car (he hadn't realised there was a cable in a bag in the boot - thought it was a tool kit or something). The other folk (visitors from Australia on holiday) couldn't connect the DC charger and hadn't been told and/or hadn't figured out that you have to remove both covers for it to fit in the socket.

Happy to help...

 

[Gadget Geek]

My most recent act of being a knight in shining armour, was in May, when I was with my son taking his first long motorway drive up the M5. We stopped off at Blackpole, Worcester and went into the pub to get a couple of coffees. We watched an Open Reach van pull up next to my ZS and the driver got out, seemingly totally clueless as how to charge the van. When we had finished our coffees, we went back to the car and asked if he needed any help. It turned out he was delivering the new van to the Open Reach depot and had never actually driven an EV before. We gave him a crash course in how to charge an EV.

 

[ph79]

It's mad how many people seem to be given EV's as company cars with little or no instruction re charging. On sat we helped a guy at shell who had an mg4 with 10% charge left. We had pulled in to a shell garage on the off chance and he flagged us down. He hadn't pulled cover off charger so was trying to plug his type 2 into the rapid!!. Gave some guidance but as all other chargers were out of order we left to try a fastned we had identified earlier. This is 3rd time someone has said ive just got this what do i do!! Always happy to help but does show how little knowledge is out there at times.

 

[Rolfe]

A group of friends of mine were in a borrowed EV minibus on Saturday and ran out of charge. It's a community asset belonging to a nearby village. As far as I can make out, nobody in the party had experience with EVs. The problem started when they were given the vehicle not at 100% charge. I presume the bus has a wall-box where it lives, so why the hell not? The event they were going to was less than 50 miles away so it should have been a completely trouble-free trip if they'd started with enough charge.

Lots of post-hoc bleating about the GOM and if it said 50 miles it should have done 50 miles! It was a cold evening, but worse than that, our village is at 800 feet elevation, and the event was near sea level. So of course the GOM looked good after the outward journey! (Anyway, the GOM on my old VW Golf used to reduce its projected range dramatically as I went up the hill they expired on. What were they thinking?)

I heard some story about them trying to get a charge but being connected to a type 2 so they didn't get much. I don't know what that was all about.

What should have happened is that, realising the bus had been supplied with potentially problematic range, someone should have gone off to find a rapid charger during the event they were attending and given the bus half an hour of 50 Kw. It would have been easy. If I'd been there I'd have done my nut until somebody did that. But they trusted what the GOM said after the downhill outward journey at a milder time of day and became unstuck.

The trouble is, that is now an entire bus-load of people who have had a negative experience with an EV, and will be negatively disposed to adopting the technology themselves.