Say it Ain't So, EVgo!
This one has been bugging me for months. Tried to ignore, but I cannot take it anymore.
Here in Los Angeles, I often drive down Robertson Blvd to my favorite family-owned (since the 1970’s) Chinese restaurant Hu’s. (Get the Szechuan Wontons.)
As I drive up to the critical I-10 freeway (LA’s main west to east artery; it can take you from Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean all the way across the country to Jacksonville FL and the Atlantic) I’ve watched EVgo build a very large DC fast charging station. With 8 brand-new Delta Electronics 350 kW dispensers (made in Plano Texas by a Taiwan based company), this is the biggest EVgo fast charging station I’ve ever seen. It is sitting in a perfect location, right off that busy I-10 freeway on Robertson Blvd, a major artery here in Los Angeles.
But as month after month after month slipped by, the chain link construction fence surrounding this new-build station has never been removed. It’s now been there for well over a year.
I never see any construction work going on. Ever. Why?
The station has never opened. And now, after years of sitting there complete, it is rotting away. Without ever having charged a single EV.
Today, my EVgo Dream Station looks like the for year another spin-off from the Walking Dead: Zombie EVs, the Real Charging Nightmare!
Weeds have grown through the concrete and have overgrown the never used charging dispensers. Don’t believe me? I took this picture a few weeks ago:
Soon, the weeds will be taller than the charging dispensers.
I drive by it a lot, and after patiently keeping quiet about it and telling myself any day, week, year now it’ll be open… I finally snapped about two months ago.
I emailed EVGO’s press office politely asking… WTF? As a friend of the EV cause, it drives me crazy that (according to City figures) hundreds of thousands of people drive past this nightmare picture of fast charging failure every week! We might as well have EVgo put up a huge “EV Charging Sucks!” billboard.
If California were a swing state and I was still doing partisan GOP politics as I was before my wild-eyed EV awakening, I’d hold a press conference right there to bash EVs, Joe Biden, NEVI funding, the metric system, fluoridated water and all the rest. My big finish? EV’s cause weeds! Why? Electric Cars run on Devil Juice!
I’d be featured on Fox News for a full week, let alone tons of other media. EVgo’s Zombie station is picture perfect in an awful way; telling as it does such a terrible visual story.
Here we are in the middle of a highly polarized Presidential campaign where EVs are being routinely bashed, often with stupid if catchy myths. Our own EV Politics Project polling shows that charging fears and vehicle costs are the two biggest barriers to EV adoption among all consumers regardless of their political persuasion.
The CPOs need to better understand how important they are to front line EV messaging.
No, Not That CPO…
Charge Point Operators, or CPOs as they like to be called, are on the front lines of the EV Hearts and Minds battle, interacting with customers on a large, DAILY scale. This gives them an enormous impact on attitudes people have about EVs. Not just current EV owners, but the EV curious as well. As the gasoline retail industry knows, fuel stations are important retail points of sale. The fuel retailers spend a lot of money putting very smart people to work on what those stations look like because they make an important visual presentation every day.
Those stations, are advertising.
EVgo’s awful Zombie apocalypse charging station is the opposite: a highly effective billboard for the anti-EV cause. Literally millions of people have now seen it. That would drive a pro fuel marketer totally nuts.
After I emailed EVgo’s press folks, I eventually got this answer back from a nice PR flack:
“The EV charging station on Robertson Blvd near the I-10 in LA is still under construction and expected to be operational early next year. This site has required extensive interagency coordination compared to other sites, which has resulted in a lengthier timeline. While EVgo is actively engaged with stakeholders across the EV charging ecosystem to accelerate the deployment of fast charging infrastructure, the current deployment timeline of a new fast charging station —from site host interest through utility planning and permitting to utility interconnection — takes an average of ~18 months. Over the last few years, we have seen positive improvements in deployment timelines, especially in LA, resulting in a more streamlined process.”
In other words, it’s those damn idiots in Los Angeles Municipal Government and the utilities!
I get it. The City of Los Angeles runs like a British Steel Mill in the UK’s militant union era of the 1970’s.
I feel for EVgo. I do. I want them to succeed. I want their beaten down stock to rise above $4.00 a share. I use EVgo stations (alas with mixed results).
And I know that the Fast Charging business is, well, lousy. It’s hard to make any money: big capex costs and painfully thin margins due to high electricity costs from the utilities. Nightmare local regulations, especially in many deep blue states like CA.
I get it.
But, with respect, I still have a note for them…
Cut the f*cking weeds at your highly visible Zombie fast charging station!
Listen EVgo, the slow moving city bureaucracy isn’t your fault. But those awful images of your site are. That’s your brand on the machines. Your logo, your image, and your responsibility. CPOs really, really count in front-line Electrification messaging. So please, give a damn about the details.
I tried to handle this embarrassing little problem inside the EV family. Months before I emailed the EVgo PR flack, I pinged the EVgo CEO pitching a meeting to talk about what we are doing at EVPolitics.org and to brief their team on all our polling data on the EV partisan divide and how to overcome it. No answer for months, then a nice and capable member of EVgo’s government relations staff pinged us back, asking on behalf of the CEO what I wanted to talk about. Joe and I set up a Zoom and we all had a nice conversation. I pitched just giving them the same data briefing I’ve been giving various OEM CEOs at the auto companies. No meeting yet (or at Electrify America where’ve also tried and failed for months to get their comms executives to return an email). As the Zoom ended, I brought up the weed covered mega-station in the middle of Los Angeles to the staffer and suggested that perhaps a quick email to the facilities side of the company could get the contractor out there to… wait for it… CUT THE DAMN WEEDS.
I even half-joking volunteered to do it myself if I could get a key to the padlock on the chain link fence. (In fact, if any member of SoCal’s vibrant EV community owns a bolt-cutter and a weed whacker and feels a need to take Ninja style weed cutting action, I will contribute heavily to your legal defense fund. But don’t worry, the odds are a thousand to one that our “jail is the problem with crime” county DA will ever prosecute you, even if you pull off a tidy smash and grab robbery on the way home. But I digress…)
It’s now been months since our Zoom and the weeds are still there as of yesterday. Just a little taller now.
So, having failed the polite way, I’m writing this rant.
The real point I’m trying make here is the CPOs are too important to have bad messaging and such poor communications savvy. I’ve been lucky during my career, I worked closely with a bunch of really gifted CEOs. Any of them would see a picture of that weed covered station featuring their brand all over it… and go completely berserk. The station would look like a million bucks within a few hours. They know that in the consumer world – be it in business or politics – brand counts. Brands are messages. They tell a story. And that weedy station on a hugely busy street in the biggest EV county in America tells a bad story for both EVgo and for the entire EV category. That sort of bad mojo is brand cancer and never to be tolerated.
To be clear, I know both EVgo and Electrify America are chock full of good, very dedicated people working really hard because they are believers in electrification. I use both outfits and I really want both of them to succeed. (I do find EA is getting better. I’m driving back across the country next week in an EV and will report on my charging findings.)
CPOs and the work they do is important, even when dabbling in flash mob musical theater.
But if we want really move the positive EV needle with consumers — and we must — we need the CPO industry to take messaging a lot more seriously. The folks making the new electric cars totally get this. The folks managing the millions of weekly and monthly interactions with EV drivers as they fast charge?
Not so much. And it’s in the way.
Now EVgo, please… cut those damn weeds!