Elderly Couple Gets Trapped For 10 Hours After An EV Charging Station Welds Itself To Their Car

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.

Stranded and cannot unplug
byu/hshfkrjwjjwkritjfi inMachE

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 Jonathan Hair, an electric vehicle powertrain systems engineer for Ford, 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.

Jonathan 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.