I’ve seen a lot of Sheetz’ with EV charging on the East Coast. Decent coffee and Made To Order food. That’s worked pretty well.
It will be interesting to see how well it holds up now that I’ve traded my Tesla in for an Ioniq5. I didn’t realize that a lot of Superchargers don’t actually support non-Teslas, even with a NACS to CCS1 adapter.
Teslas hang a significant amount of their MCU functionality on the built-in SIM. Assuming the system doesn’t glitch out completely, you’re going to be staring at an arrow on a big gray box in the middle of a big tablet screen while it fails to load map data. They explicitly did not build Android Auto or Apple CarPlay into their vehicles because they wanted you to drive everything from the MCU itself. It would occasionally pop up reminders at me when I switched to Bluetooth Audio because I was using it to stream an app that was already native to the car (Audible kept glitching out and losing my place when I resumed on different devices).
I’m sure there are other auto makers that are happy to follow suit. I just switched from a Model 3 to a Hyundai Ioniq5 and it feels like much of the user interface was locked down until I subscribed to BlueLink.
I’m starting to get way more interested in the concept of a super basic, modular vehicle with only doodads you build onto it attached. I hope the Slate truck can make good on what it’s promised so far.
Emergency call system
So this is mandating SIMs and tracking in cars? Don’t love that. I’m sure the manufacturers will ensure that the infotainment system will be mostly useless if you go in and disable the tracker
I think the issue is that I know where all the old Superchargers are around me and just assumed they would work. I bought my Ioniq used and they only gave me 20% when I rolled off the lot, so when the first couple chargers I tried didn’t work, I had some range anxiety that I hadn’t experienced in a long time after 7 years of EV ownership.
Luckily I found a level 3 CCS1 charger and got enough to get me home. Back to overnight level 2 charging and daily driving is a breeze again.