I'm probably just whining but just in case there is a genius out there with a fix to the problem... My son just moved to a condo and there is a Chargepoint station a block away. It has been vandalized -- the clip at the top is broken off so the charger does not know that it is connected to the car and does not charge. However, Tesla and Bolt owners charge there all the time. I think the e.g. Tesla internal locking mechanism satisfies the station that everything is good to go. Apparently there has been a long cycle of vandalism and fixing and re-vandalizing so that the owner has given up fixing it. I'm guessing some a-hole Tesla owner who lives near or works in that shopping center does it to monopolize the plug. (I'm also a Tesla owner, so I'm not saying they are all a-holes, just the ones who would do something like this.) I keep wondering if there is any way to "trick" the Chargepoint station into thinking the charger is locked when it is not. Is such a thing possible?
the clip is just so you won't pull the plug while power is on. when you push down with your thumb, it acivates a microswitch inside, along with releasing the clip. idk wht tesla does to accomplish that, i thought all evse's worked the same
Next time I'm at a chargepoint I'll take a photo. Bisco is spot on about that clip. You have to pull the clip up in a way to mimic it going over the locking clip in your vehicles charge port. When you unplug, you push down on the clip to mimic releasing that same clip. Then the chargeport knows to disconnect power before you unplug. Dumb design for the clips to snap off so easily.
It could also be that most of the EV supercharging is done by providing DC to batteries, bypassing the rectifiers in the car's battery charging module. I may be wrong, but I don't think the Prime provides that type of connection, even though it's on the J1772 plug. If the Chargeport station has a fault in the AC system, but the DC part is working that might explain why the EVs can charge where a Prius wouldn't. I'm not sure that an EV owner is to blame, but their charging would be less than an hour, where a Prius Prime (my 2019) has a 12 Amp charge acceptance rate, so I would need around 3 hours to charge with Level 2 AC. That would piss off an EV owner. If it's a vandalism issue, I'd think it would be more like a guy with a big ICE pickup all pissed off that it takes over $100 to fill up his monster pickup and thinks the world owes him a favor. Still a bit of a stretch though. From watching a few videos on YouTube, I think it's just how poorly Chargepoint manages their stations. Those guys are starting to give EVs a bad name. Especially when people are taking cross-country road trips and are depending on those things to actually - you know - charge their car.
