In a lot of ways, an electric car seems an ideal choice for people who have been in the being alive business for a long time. Maintenance is less complex, the cars are quiet and easy to drive, and they can be charged right at home. EVs and older people seem like a great match, and generally they are. That’s part of why the choice of a Volkswagen ID.4 seems great for the Martins, a couple in their 70s who recently made a road trip in their EV to take 79-year-old Mr.Martin to a hospital for some medical appointments. Along the way, they stopped at an Electrify America (EA) charging station, and that was the start of a long ordeal that revealed a significant problem with EV charging.
The Electrify America charging station was in Athens, Alabama, the only one in that town of 30,000 or so, and was situated, as many of these charging stations are, behind a Walmart. The station was about 165 miles from where the Martins started, and they still had a way to go to get to their hotel near the hospital. They pulled into the charging station about 10:30 in the morning, planning on staying there the 30 to 45 minutes or so it would take to charge up their car using one of the station’s three “ultra” or “hyper-fast” DC chargers.
Things seemed to go wrong pretty much from the very start. As Javene Martin told me, when they plugged in the charging cable, the charging status light on her ID.4 “went from green to red right after we plugged it in,” and charging stopped pretty much before it could even start. Realizing something was amiss, Javene called Electrify America support, who rebooted the charger, but to no avail.
Javene decided to try a different charger, so she attempted to unplug the cable from her car, but it wouldn’t release.
“I found the emergency release in the back of the car,” she told me, “but it wouldn’t budge. I thought maybe because I was a 73-year-old woman and just not able to pull it hard enough, but it just wouldn’t release.” Javene told me she tried “pulling, prying, and cussing” but could not get the charger out of the socket.
The issue wasn’t Javene’s pulling ability. That cable was well and truly stuck. She kept calling Electrify America support for help, eventually calling them every hour on the hour (“Bless their little hearts,” she added) but they proved to be of little actual help, despite cycling power on the charger remotely. She reached out to the Volkswagen dealership she got the car from, but they proved to be no help at all, saying the issue was with the charger and it wasn’t their problem. While they may be technically correct, Javene did note that “a little sympathy would have gone a long way.”
A shocking amount of time had passed with the Martins’ car stuck to this cable. Electrify America eventually escalated their support to reach out to a technician to go there in person, but the only one they could get on a Saturday was about four hours away in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mrs. Matin told me EA gave them an estimate of 5 pm for the tech’s arrival – seven hours since this all began – but he didn’t actually arrive until around 8 pm because of issues getting a proper work order number from EA, without which, the tech could not get paid, again according to Javene’s talk with the tech.
Mr. Martin took an Uber to the hotel, as he was not in a condition to remain waiting with the car. Javene stayed to wait for the technician, who finally arrived about 9 pm, and she told me that the tech solved the problem with a very sophisticated, high-tech tool: a crowbar.
Yes, that’s the solution to how to deal with these cutting-edge electric car and fast-charging DC charger issues: you crowbar the crap out of them. Once the cable was finally freed from the car, what happened was pretty visually evident, as you can see here:
The charger had welded itself to the car.
And yes, that’s literally welded, as in arc welded, where an arc of electricity melts metals together. In this case, it looks like the heavy DC+ pin was welded into its corresponding socket, which makes sense as the DC pins are the ones that carry all the current on a fast DC charger.
Based on Javene’s description of events, this likely happened almost immediately upon plugging the charger in, when that light went from green to red. Something happened that caused the pin and socket to arc and get so hot they literally melted together, which is also why the emergency release did nothing: the cable and connector were welded together.
Interestingly, the damage to the ID.4’s charging and electrical systems seem to be limited to the physical damage at the charging port; once freed, the car was able to be driven to a slower Level 2 charger at a hotel, which uses AC power and a different set of pins, so it was able to charge. Eventually, the Martins got the car to their son in Chattanooga, who was able to charge it alongside his own VW ID.4.
So, the big question here is how does this happen, and why, and why aren’t there better safeguards in place to prevent this? Checking EV forums, it becomes clear that this wasn’t an isolated incident; similar situations of cables welding themselves to ports have definitely occurred before. There are forum posts of a Ford Mach-e owner who had their car get welded via the DC+ pin, just like the Martins.
In the case of the Mach-e, there was some telltale smoke, which the Martins didn’t encounter. There’s another post about a Mercedes-Benz EQS 450 at an Electrify America charger that, while it wasn’t stuck as such, had their charging port ruined from melted metal slag left on the pins. Here’s another similar example with a Volvo XC40 and an Electrify America charger, again on the DC+ pin. Here’s yet another incident with an Electrify America charger, this time melting the pins on a Kia EV9.
So what is going on here? Don’t these cables and ports have ways of checking if things are actually melting together?
There actually are a number of safeguards that are designed to protect this. I reached out to an electric vehicle powertrain systems engineer for a major OEM, and he told me about some of the safeguards:
The PP (proximity) pin on the J1772 is supposed to be “last to make, first to break” in connection. It makes sure the connector is fully seated. if that breaks it should stop charging immediately to prevent an arc.
Also, there is a reason most cars have little flappy doors to protect the DCFC contacts. They want to keep them clean. some high impedance connection, that forms over time, will make it hot and could drive a failure like this.
The engineer also mentioned that many automakers use thermistors in their pins to monitor the temperature, and if it goes higher than is safe, derate the power draw. I reached out to Volkswagen to see if they use such thermistors, and was told that yes, VWs have two thermistors, one for each DC pin, and it was noted that both the car and the charger are monitoring temperature and will stop the charging session if an overtemperature situation is occurring or if the temperature differential between the DC pins is too great.
Volkswagen is looking into this as we speak, and Electrify America is in the loop as well. So far, VW nor EA has a final answer, but I do have this statement from Volkswagen:
“We are fully committed to the safety of our customers. We are continuing to investigate the details of this incident.”
For what it’s worth, this does seem more like a charging/Electrify America issue than a Volkswagen issue specifically, especially because there are a number of reports of extremely similar events happening at EA stations with other makes of car.
Whatever is happening here, this is a big deal, and the Martins’ situation really couldn’t have made that more clear. A couple in their 70s, in the process of taking one of them to a hospital for medical appointments, is trapped at a charger for over 10 hours with no way to get their car free? That’s just not acceptable in any context. This isn’t even an EV issue, really; if a gas station pump trapped a combustion car for 10 hours, that’d be just as big a deal.
EV chargers take a lot of abuse and are subject to challenging conditions of weather and use. DC fast chargers are pumping a hell of a lot of energy through those cables, and wear and tear on those plugs and cables can have some pretty severe consequences, as we see here.
This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. There’s not always a crowbar around to save the day, after all.
As promised, I want to provide an update to the story.
The car was able to be charged via AC since those pins were not broken. My brother took the car to the VW dealer in Chattanooga and my parents opened a claim with Electrify America. To make a long, convoluted story short I will summarize:
– VW quarantined the car pending an investigation.
– Electrify America denied the claim and referred my parents to the Terms and Conditions which basically say, that EA is not responsible for anything more than $10 worth of damage.
– VW corporate agreed to cover the cost of replacing the parts of the car that were damaged because of this incident.
– Repairs were completed today.
Thank you Jason and the Autopian staff for bringing attention to this. I don’t know that the resolution would have been the same without it.
Also, I want address some of the comments saying that Jason’s use of the word “Trapped” was inappropriate. While they weren’t trapped in their car, they were told that they could not leave the car because, if they were not present when the techs got there, they would not be able to help them.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, “plug ins” aka engine heaters are essential on cold nights. To make connecting and disconnecting extension cords easier, and to prevent water intrusion and corrosion, I use a little dielectric tune up grease.
Dielectric tune up grease is an electrically conductive product like vaseline, and yes, it works for more than just spark plugs. I think a little grease would have prevented this charger problem. It would be a very simple preventative maintenance solution for the charger company.
I’ve also found a little dielectric grease makes inserting and removing breakers much easier in household service panels.
Pain in the ass, but no-one was “trapped”. This year alone 27 million EVs have been sold – there will be a tiny percentage of incidents. Myself and millions of others have had nothing but smooth sailing in wonderful, turbine smooth, silently powerful cars.
The other day I was filling my motorcycle with gas, and that little lock mechanism was loose and swung into place. Gas was spraying everywhere until I figured out what had happened. That stuff sure flows fast!!!!!Fortunately no one was having a smoke so we didn’t die in a blazing inferno!!!!!!!! I’ll write an article about it one day.
What a dumb design. It’s obviously not failure proof, and having something with that sort of failure mode be unattended seems like the sort of bad idea that it will take lawyers to resolve.
A little dirt on a contact can make enough resistance to melt copper and weld the whole thing solid. I had that happen on an electric saw a couple of weeks ago where it welded itself to the extension cord.
Any studio photographer that used strobes in the film days has stories about what happens when you have a faulty connection on a cable that’s carrying 2,400,000 watts for a thousandth of a second. That can be extremely exciting, not to mention loud.
That design of plug doesn’t look very good,. Obviously you can’t have contactless DC charging, and just as obviously contacts are going to fail. I am surprised that they aren’t designed to fail more gracefully. For example treating the pins and sockets as the wear items that they are and let them pull out when they weld themselves together.
Just out of curiosity, if that were to happen , and the driver decided to drive away still connected, is there a designed in safe fail weak spot ?
That was one brand of strobe pucks – can’t remember the name – they were cheap and powerful, but arced if misused. Electricity is powerful.
I had a first generation Norman that had a rather complicated make before break and break before make switch that would eventually malfunction and arc 2000 joules when you turned it off.
When the safer Normans came out all the studios dumped them. I had one and used a broom handle to turn it off until I could afford a new one. When the switch blew up, it was like a shotgun going off in a pine booth loud, and I decided I could afford a new one.
I’ve used EA chargers 4 times and two times worked as advertised but once it was glacially slow like 10kw on a Ford lightning. The other time, just did not work at all.
Do chargers have any maintenance requirements or standards? Seems like something with so much power going thru it and people coming and going would have scheduled periodic maint, cleaning, tests, etc.?
Electrify America was VW’s penance for the the dieselgate fiasco.
Once VW funded all the new EA charging stations they pretty much ignored them for a few years. I’ve used an EA charger exactly once and it sort of worked.
I try to stay on the ChargePoint network when possible.
Now it makes sense, did their “community service” no back to whatever they do… I have used plug share recently when driving an EV and it seems to be better, more helpful.
They were at a Walmart…
I, personally, would not be overly keen on going near an electric car’s faulty charging port while holding a large, highly-conductive metal rod.
I’m not saying whether it’s a good idea or not, just that crowbars weren’t far away.
Not specifically because of this issue, nor due to the occassional ‘runaway thermal event’ seen on social media, but if I had to use public chargers regularly instead of mostly charging at home, I’d probably not opt to buy an electric car. I haven’t owned an EV yet, but probably will before too long… something used and costing under $10K I hope. I don’t drive every day, so I expect to charge it off of regular 110VAC in the carport… slow is fine.
Mazda’s MX-30s ought to get below the $10K mark before too long: their limited range and extreme rarity don’t bother me. But I’ve made plenty of ill-advised decisions in my life, so who knows how it might go? 😉
Convenient charging access is going to be the key factor in EV adoption. I’m an apartment dweller currently. I’m also a perfect user for an EV with a short daily commute and not being a frequent taker of long road trips. I didn’t even consider an EV when I replaced my car 2 years ago because I’d have no choice but to find and use a public charger.
While I’d save in maintenance costs, the opportunity costs are high enough to just not make it worth it.
I use public charging exclusively. But I live in the UK, where public chargers seem both more plentiful and reliable. I street park now and there are a bank of 4 22kW AC chargers that are often closer to my apartment than where I can find a space, along with plenty of similar alternatives that are a short walk away.
The UK is hardly the best place for EV charging, but the US really does need to catch up.
This may have been a dirt/debris/oxidation etc. issue. If this was a not fully or not properly inserted issue, it’s notable that the the connector could have been designed to be more robust if there were a proximity pin both above and below the charge pins, which would be centered between.
Plastic may degrade over time too.
I have had 110 splitters arc, and it’s hard to tell if dirt became a pathway, or the arc left a path.
I’m the person that started recommending dielectric grease over conductive grease for DC connections and it’s proven more reliable.
My take was that if the connection wasn’t solid enough, any other paths would only make it worse.
Dang. A crowbar, made of conductive metal. And how many volts of DC power? Even if the tech turned off the power from the charger, the vehicle batteries still have plenty of power. I would worry about the crowbar touching the wrong thing and me going POW.
There are insulated tools.
and gloves, and…
In fairness, the 800V+ that some of the chargers operate is getting into the lower end of the range where “insulator” starts to become a little bit fuzzier of a term. Not as bad as 20kV+, but still in “make sure it’s rated for that voltage and not damp or dirty” territory instead of just “Eh, separate it with some sort of rubber, plastic, leather, or cloth and you’re good” like 120V. And that might be harder to find at Walmart.
The only time the charge port is energized is when actively charging. If there’s an error such as this situation where both the charging station and vehicle report no connection, there’s no high voltage at the port.
That said, don’t jam a pry bar into the charge port unless you actually know what you’re doing. Arc flash isn’t fun, and electrocution is a terrible way to die.
>The only time the charge port is energized is when actively charging
Personally I would not mess with that sort of voltage based on that assumption, but you do you.
I work for a major automaker integrating electrical systems on EVs. It’s literally how they work, at least on my employer’s vehicles. Hence the disclaimer below it.
Ever increasing battery voltage and charging speed demand makes me nervous. I know these are isolated incidents but inadvertently melting steel is a crap-ton of heat/power in the hands of the general public, usually unattended. Gas is just as dangerous but I’ve never seen a station with pumps on but no attendant/owner, even if a paid idiot. There definitely needs to be a support infrastructure for reasonably rapid response to issues.
To be fair, the same can happen if you bridge the terminals in a 12V battery. I once helped someone whose battery cable had broken by holding it in place while they started the car so they could drive home. The current draw of starting welded the connector back on, at least partially.
Impressive!
Ah classic Electrify America making everyones life worse
Ironically Electrify America was funded with $2 billion from VW as part of its emissions scam settlement with the U.S. and California.
If Vehicle_Attached == “VAG”
goto Weld
I know theres many reasons for EA chargers sucking(contracting out engineering to ABB and sometime the cheapest company possible) resulting in a lot of their issues, but seeing all these welding issues originate only from EA chargers is hilarious.
Not if they’re the charger available. I’ve used them plenty. Main issue is not enough of them.
I got stuck for 20 minutes once because the diesel fuel nozzle was stuck in my truck. I had no idea what happened but it was something with one of the flaps catching on something on the nozzle. I can understand how they felt because that is a frustrating and helpless feeling experience.
I had something similar happen on my motorhome. The nozzle handle somehow got jammed under a lip in the filler inset. It was my first trip out with the rig and didn’t have a decent tool set along. Luckily the gas station manager had a prybar and we wrestled free. I make sure I have a full set of tools along nowadays.
If you have ever seen the level of abuse a simple air chuck on a public air compressor takes you can imagine the level of abuse these charging plugs experience. Seems like regular inspection and maintenance(i.e. Time and money) are in order. Looks like the cost of charging is gonna go up.
Absolutely, anyone with any experience with outdoor electrical connections that frequently get connected/disconnected know about the constant cleaning and maintenance thats required that clearly isn’t being done on EV chargers. It seems EA worries more about the credit card readers working than the high current connectors that are constantly used and abused by people who just don’t care.
As much as I hate idea that the free market will cure all ills, in this case, being literally the only option in town probably isn’t helping someone at EA be concerned about charger uptime and lost sales.
The Martin’s had a Mercedes Streeter kind of day.
Underrated Comment Of The Day (UCOTD)!
Two thoughts came to me.
Add a crowbar to my cars.
I saw PP and turned into a 3rd grader.
If you’re getting one for this specifically, might want to make sure it’s insulation-rated to 1000V and/or toss in a pair of 1000V gloves.
I will give a guy 10 bucks and record him flying through the air. Instant viral video.
Nthing “trapped” is inappropriate in the headline – certainly not comporting with the nuanced (ie twisted) understanding of the language we expect from Torch. Prob an intern on the loose.
From the headline, I also thought they were sealed in the carand unable to exit. This was not the case.
That is exactly what I thought. One can quibble over the dictionary meaning, but I would have to believe that most people would assume they were stuck inside the car.
Agree, “stuck” would have been a better word to describe what happened.
This is one of the advantages of inductive chargers. These pin and sleeve type plugs are easily damaged. Insufficient connection pressure results in high resistance, high heat and permanent damage. Debris in the plug or socket can also cause this. The designers have to think of all the stupid things people do to try and avoid these kinds of problem.
“These pin and sleeve type plugs are easily damaged.”
40+ million cars are charged using this method every day.
The odds of this happening is so low that you will have been killed 7 times by a shark, in a desert, before this occurs 🙂
Inductive chargers however, first of all do not do 350 kw, and secondly, requires very precise parking to work at all.
Correct on the speed (unless you’re a commercial vehicle, they can accommodate up to 500kW as they can fit larger coils), incorrect on the “very precise”.
If you can park in a parking space, that is accurate enough. The SAE J2954 standard lays it all out, and real-world testing has shown up to 94% grid-to-battery efficiency with 10″ of clearance between the pad and charger. (I had to go dig through my notes for specifics, I recently completed my EV Technician certificate).
Perhaps a regular maintenance thing for these chargers should include lubrication of the connector pins with carbon-based electrically conductive silicone. Cheap and easy and also waterproofs the connectors and prevents arcing by filling gaps.
Thank you Jason for how you presented this story. This happened to my parents and was quite frustrating for everyone involved.
I sent a message to the tip line and got an unexpectedly quick response from Jason. I have been following the work of the Autopian staff since the days of the old lighting site and am happy that they picked it up.
My parents love their ID.4 as it fits their needs well. The majority of their trips are short so being able to charge at home is a huge plus. Hopefully VW and Electrify America can work together to fix their car. Yes, EA is owned by VW but you couldn’t tell from the experience they have had since the issue happened.
Sorry that happened to your parents and I hope your dad is doing ok. Make sure to keep us posted on if VW or EA step up and cover any of the repair expenses!
I will respond with any updates. Hopefully it will be resolved soon.
Are your mom and dad OK? Sounds like mom was a trooper.
Thank you for asking, they are doing great. It will take a lot more than this to get them down ????
“Bless their little hearts” tells me she was PISSED.
Oh is that the southern polite passive aggressive thing?
It 100% is. The sweeter the delivery of that line, the more acid is hiding just underneath. Also the addition of the optional “little” is an indicator of an elevated amount of disdain.
It’s not passive
Ha!
It’s basically southern speak for Go f**k yourself.
My give-a-damn is working. I’m sorry your parents had such an ordeal and I wish them all the best in life.
At a bare minimum these chargers should be inspected and serviced at least once a day. If it takes EA’s field service 5 hours to get there then clearly they don’t have enough technicians in the field. VW’s rollout of EA can only be described as disappointing, they obviously didn’t put enough capital behind this project.
They weren’t forced firmly enough. I don’t expect a company to show much zeal on a punishment. Somebody should have kept them accountable, e.g. with exponentially increasing fines if they fail to meet specific performance targets for reliability and coverage.
Unfortunately that was too many administrations ago.
Once a day is probably excessive, but a monthly to weekly schedule based on usage frequency would make sense. Likely better than the “never unless it’s broken” they’re likely currently getting.
I don’t think they need full servicing every day but I still think a daily inspection is not unreasonable. Something as little as grabbing the handle and looking inside it for obstructions or damage and taking it offline would have prevented this couple from being handcuffed to a charger for 10 hours.
They’re not manned like gas pumps, so you’d have to be paying techs to just constantly drive in a loop checking chargers.
It wouldn’t need to be a full tech, an entry level position that rides around and inspects them, bagging any and alerting the full techs about which ones have issues would do it. I’m not asking for a tech at every charging station just sitting there 24/7 like the Maytag man but one step above “wait until our customers alert us” is the bare minimum EA should be doing. It would go a long way towards improving their reputation.
Inspected daily? Gas pumps maybe get inspected once a month, and only get an actual gov inspection once a year.
This is a poor engineering through and through.
Gas pumps almost always have attendants on location. They may only get a technician inspecting them once a month but at the very least the guy emptying the trash cans every day can perform a quick visual inspection and report if any are bungled. That’s all the EV chargers need.
I appreciate the optimism, but the only visual inspection a pump gets on a regular basis is by customers. When the pump acts up they go inside and tell the cashier, who then marks the pump out of order and calls the repair line.
Customers with phones make this redundant, except for your car getting stuck to the charger (and car’s electronics preventing you from driving away).
Without tying charging stations to a manned business similar to a gas station convenience store/truck stop, there’s not enough money to pay for staff to be on site. Selling fuel, or electrons in this case, isn’t enough on it’s own.
Jason, a bit disappointed in your title for this article. “Trapped”? Not quite. Couldn’t drive away? Yep, that’s a bit closer to the truth. When I opened this article to read it, I was expecting a “I couldn’t get the door open because the charger bricked my vehicle and I had no idea there was a backup mechanical method to open the door” story, followed by yet another diatribe on how stupid electronic door handles are. But no, it was simply that the plug got stuck in the socket. Not quite “trapped”. But, bet it got a lot more clicks because of that. 🙂
Technically… If the operator is not physically capable of unplugging the charger cable because it got welded to the cars plug, it’s not going anywhere til the tech with the crowbar shows up…
Headline seems reasonable to me given the context, and this is coming from a 2 EV household evangelist.
I disagree. “Elderly couple gets trapped” means people are trapped. “Elderly couple’s car gets trapped” means the car is trapped, which is what happened.
I’m with you they were not trapped, their car was stuck and in fact one of them did make it to the destination while the other waited with the car.
Normally people use the term “trapped” when their car gets stuck in a spot outside of their doing. Like parking garages, “some asshole parked on an angle and trapped me for 6 hours!”
I find the headline is perfectly cromulent. The expectation window got shifted on EVs specifically thanks to Vinfast and Tesla with their stupid door release mechanisms.
I’d have gone with stranded. I agree that trapped sounds like they couldn’t get out of the car at all.
If it’s an Tesla, you might need a crowbar anyway, to get the doors open.
Might need a crowbar to defend your car from electric car hating extremists.
For many, it’s not the car they hate.