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.
