While this is a bold statement, this past week proved that Pasadena PWP EV DC Fast Charging is 100% unreliable and something has to change.

If you are one of the users who showed up to Victory Park attempting to charge, your experience was 100% unreliable.  We have heard months and years of excuses why the DC Fast chargers purchased by the city don’t work. But the excuses wear thin on those experiencing the city pushing EV adoption and then failing miserably with EV infrastructure and for the most part not encouraging any competition and using Tesla to building out the infrastructure in most of the locations that PWP has installed chargers.

The issues are clear and the city fails to take corrective action and in fact doubling down on the mistakes of the past.

The questions remain:

`1. Why is Pasadena PWP still in the EV charging business, something that is has failed at?

2. Why doesn’t Pasadena PWP fix the DC Fast Chargers?

3. Why is Pasadena PWP using the Powerflex platform which has horrible support and had a recent outage that would not return available chargers for almost 2 days.

4. Why doesn’t anyone at Pasadena PWP engage a third party like EVCS?  EVCS has an install in Pasadena at the LA Fitness and their uptime and support is significantly better than anything from Pasadena PWP and Powerflex.

5. Where is the full time technician that was contracted to repair and maintain all the EV chargers?

6. Pasadena PWP has failed with the implemented 2 hour parking on DC Fast charging. And there is no explanation given as to the rationale on this.  Missteps like this not only hurt user adoption but are frustrating to users trying to use the facilities.  The industry best practice is 30min for DC Fast Charging.  Even given that the Pasadena PWP DC Fast chargers most run at 50kW, even if we doubled the time to 1 hour, that should be more than enough. With a 150kW, there’s no reasonable explanation as to why there would be a 2 hour posted limit.   The only way 2 hours should be allowed is that if 100% of the DC Fast Chargers worked.  Perhaps at a location like Marengo Plaza 2 hours would make sense, since the usage there is minimal.  And the city claims there are 17 of 20 fast chargers typically available, but are counting chargers double and including new chargers that had been recently installed that include the Tesla NACS connector that are being counted as Chademo capable chargers.

7. Shoppers Lane has zero Chademo chargers which again, makes no sense, why remove Chademo chargers?

8. The Arroyo Glenarm location with four 175kW chargers all unavailable is what greets those entering the city from the 110 Freeway.  The entry to Pasadena at the Glenarm Power Plant, is an indication of what awaits visitors looking to DC Fast charge.

Unless you own a Tesla and or can use the Tesla Superchargers, you are in serious trouble relying on Pasadena PWP DC Fast Charging will lead to frustration and possible driving around looking for a working charger that you may not find.   Be sure to have a backup plan as Pasadena PWP DC Fast Charging is 100% UNRELIABLE.

City officials and representatives for the city have an obligation to the residents and community to respond to the community in a timely manner.   Many times they are busy and there may be a delay.

Emails is usually a good alternative, but many officials in Pasadena in higher positions like the general manager of PWP and the City Manager for Pasadena have repeatedly been ignored request for phone call.  Leaving messages with their staff or with what appears to their direct number but no greeting or announcement of whom the mailbox belongs to.

Leaving voice mail messages in a mailbox and then following up with an email and not getting a response, is just plain rude, disrespectful and unacceptable.

Is it unreasonable that as a community member and resident should expect a phone call?   Some would say yes, some would say no.   Regardless a response of some sort is essential and that is becoming less common.

How are those who work for the city and are responsible for getting things done able to think that not returning a constituents phone call is ok?    Are they that busy that they don’t have time to return a phone call?  Are they that busy that they cannot facilitate a staff member to coordinate a response that is an actionable response to the inquiry being made?

The bottom line is city government officials and employees should be returning phone calls and emails in a timely manner.

City government is different than say a company like Apple with 164,000 employees compared to Pasadena with 2,000 employees.  The city manager and general managers for Pasadena need to be responsible and return calls.

I challenge city officials to return calls, and I also encourage the community to call their elected and city staff when there is a need and request a call back.  Usually emails are better for much communication, but sometimes a phone call goes a long way to emphasize the importance of an issue.

For instance the state of EV charging in Pasadena is in shambles, with most DC Fast charging not operational many units on and do not work.

It has been years and the situation gets worse not better.  Millions have spent and the situation doesn’t appear to improve.   The situation with the PWP City of Pasadena EV DC Fast Charging is just one example of the chronic issues with the city.

Just today I spoke with two individuals attempting to charge at the Victory Park DC Fast Chargers, unable to charge, they both left frustrated and angry at the state of charging in Pasadena.

I encouraged them to reach out to their council member and express the dire situation with charging.

My councilperson already knows how bad the situation is.