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israndy

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This section of the board should be renamed, as Greenlots is now Shell Recharge
 
And a woeful network it is, at least in these parts. The only one I knew about seems to have been deleted. It was a $15/session charger at the Kia dealership in Lake Forest. It was in a horrible spot in their lot too. I will see if it's still even there when I get the chance, but I seldom visit dealer sites, they are almost always the worst.

Also, to remind me if nothing else, for purposes of this site I will only speak of DCFCs unless I specifically say otherwise.
 
Dealer sites are a mixed bag. Sometimes the dealers are fairly helpful and welcoming (at least for awhile). But over time (and sometimes right off the bat) they grow apathetic if not outright hostile towards their charging station. And many of them have puny little 24kW units anyway, which are really only useful to help them keep their own lot vehicles and vehicles in for service charged.

In a sense, I can't say that I altogether blame them. They were probably mandated by the manufacturer to install the thing in the first place and now they are responsible for maintaining it, and as we know, a lot of these aren't real reliable. Plus, a dealership is not exactly a hot destination for people needing a charge. I wish they would just be honest about the intentions of the charging station and not declare it as public if they don't have any interest in providing charging as a service. And at this point, I don't think there is a huge need for dealers to provide that service.

The manufacturers need to get their heads out of their butts and understand that having their dealer network install one or two fast chargers at their dealerships does not mean they have a network. Is that what Tesla did? No! They created separate sites close to highways and amenities and they sized them appropriately.

Now maybe it's not the place of manufacturers to provide a charging network at all. Tesla was pretty much forced to do it to generate business. Legacy automakers aren't necessarily interested in generating business for their electric lines (or at least they weren't--maybe that is changing now). Probably the win/win here is for manufacturers to stop mandating public stations at dealers and simply provide their own funding towards public networks. Well, of course now the government has stepped in, so they lost that motivation as well.

But back to Shell. Yes, they do have some dealership presence, along with EV Connect and ChargePoint who are much bigger in that space, but they do have their own standalone presence as well. One of their big problems though is that they were born out of the Greenlots network, which was really horrible. Take the worst aspects of ChargePoint's station ownership model and combine it with crappy hardware, poor siting, and an overall crappy network and that's what they started with.

In their defense, it looks like their new stations might actually be pretty good. But I think they have a long way to go to dispel the old Greenlots reputation.
 
I've seen some old Greenlots L2 stations that were never updated/maintained and just left to rot. It was ugly. Old, faded stickers too. I didn't realize it was modeled after ChargePoint, but now it make more sense why they rotted.

I found out the connection when I tried to scan a QR code on Greenlots and eventually found it was now Shell Recharge.
 
It's not that the hardware or even the business model was specifically modeled after ChargePoint, but what I meant by that is that ChargePoint, and even moreso, Greenlots come in and install a station and then it becomes the host's problem. They are entirely responsible for maintaining it, including the expense of getting repairs done, and performing any necessary upgrades. And this is the point where many hosts decide that the "green cred" they were after is no longer worth it to them (what, it actually costs money to provide a service to our customers?)

Greenlots was even worse (at least in my area) because they literally only managed the back-end billing part of things. The actual hardware was managed by another third party, that in my area ended up either going out of business or refocusing their energy on other projects, so the machines were effectively orphaned. And if you had a problem with one of the machines, there was a whole lot of finger pointing going on as to whose responsibility it was. Really sad state of affairs, but that's to be expected in the early days.
 
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