On a beautiful late summer Saturday morning, I’m off to review the newest EVgo stations in the Detroit area. GM and EVgo have announced several partnerships and part of that seems to be that EVgo has installed several new locations that GM would use in the southeast Michigan area. This includes 4 new sites at Meijer and peak charging capabilities at the GM Renaissance Facility in downtown Detroit. I am venturing out to see how EVgo has done with these new sites. The first of these became available in early 2022, and recently, the other Detroit station has finally opened, so these new sites are up and running for evaluation. I opted to visit the sites from north to south by starting in Rochester Hills and working my way steadily south to the GM “Ren Cen” location.
I started at the Meijer Rochester Hills. This site has the new standard EVgo station layout with two 350kW Signet units and two 100kW Delta units. The Signet units are named Arlene and Conrad, the Delta units are named Brittany and Crissandra. The layout works well with the current GM vehicle portfolio with the Delta units serving to charge the Chevrolet Bolt that peaks at 55kW charging, and the Signet units available to charge newer vehicles like the GMC Hummer EV, or the Cadillac Lyriq. This Meijer is located close to M-59, and major east/west route in the northern Detroit suburbs. Located close to the exit (number 42) makes this location potentially usable on a road trip.
The EVSE are located to the east of the Meijer, somewhat adjacent to the garden center. This places them well out of the way of most traffic, but very near the access road. The EVSE are relatively easy to find, but very unlikely to be blocked by other vehicles. This site is almost closer to the neighboring Woodspring Suites hotel than it is to the Meijer. I tested and confirmed all 4 units were working. One feature EVgo has added to the Delta units is a built-in adaptor from the CHAdeMO plug to a Tesla plug. While I was here evaluating the site, a Tesla driver stopped and used this functionality. This allows EVgo to serve all the EV drivers and Tesla owners don’t need to carry adaptors with them. The nearest Supercharger to this location is 10 miles north, making this site a potential to support the local Tesla drivers a potential quick charge, but I would not think it would be a preferred option being limited to 100kW. Overall, I was impressed with this new EVgo layout, 4 units are much better than the original single unit sites and they all worked.
I proceeded to the next stop south, to the Meijer in Royal Oak. While my previous stop was a wide open, pull up station, this new location seems to be crammed into the smallest space possible and in one of the highest traffic areas of the parking lot. The Signet units are named Dario and Viviene, the Delta units are named Piper and Boone. I think the nearest highway connection is I-75 at Big Beaver Road, exit 69. It’s 3 miles of complex city roads away, making this a very poor road trip stop, much better serving the local area. Site reliability was also lower at this site as Dario would not detect a vehicle connection. While the EVgo app did show this unit as unavailable, there was no indication on the station itself that there was a problem. One would think if the app is aware there is a problem that the station itself could show some type of error. Not all drivers are going to have the app and may waste time trying a station that is not working.
Due to the tight spacing and the high traffic area, I don’t find this a particularly compelling location. When I arrived, there was a Rivian R1T squeezed into the parking spot for the 350kW units, but it left soon after I arrived. Based on the front to back install on these units, it almost requires vehicles to back into at least 50% of the spaces, which is not ideal for a busy parking lot. This layout could support pull thru parking for when someone is pulling a trailer, but EVgo have installed posts at the end of each parking spot making this impossible. I think that there could have been much better places in this large parking lot to install these EVSE. While this is the only site on this trip that used this layout, I have seen pictures of other EVgo locations that are using this same layout, and I would suggest EVgo to NOT use this layout.
Moving on, I stopped at the Meijer in Warren. Two miles north of I-696 exit 22, not great access on a road trip that travels long this route. This location is right next to the GM Warren Technical Center, you’d think this would be a site to show GM employees how good a charging location can be, however that is not the case. EVgo made several strange decisions when laying out this station. The first and most odd decision is that the 100kW Delta chargers are facing away from the parking spots. This causes two problems; first drivers cannot see the name of the EVSE that they are parking near, so even if you know a unit is out from the app, drivers don’t know which one is which without getting out of their vehicle; second this means that drivers have to park such that they can drag the heavy cables from the front (facing away from the car) of the unit, around the EVSE and then manage to plug in the vehicle.
When I arrived, there was a woman trying to charge a Mach-E. I successfully plugged in on the end and checked out the site. After some time passed, I could tell she was not having any luck getting her car to charge. I offered to let her move to the EVSE I had been using. I found out that this was her daughter’s car, and she didn’t have any information about how to charge it. Even with my help the charging session failed 3 times before finally we got it to work. We did get it working without calling EVgo though. She went into Meijer, stating she was going to charge to 100%. While at this site I also stopped to check out the Level 2 units. There are 4 connection splits between two units. However, one of the two stands was not working, seeming to be in configuration mode.
Arriving at the Detroit Meijer location, I was happy to see the layout was back to the first site with all 4 units in a row with pull in parking. This site also hosts a brand-new Tesla Supercharger site with 12 stalls, that was just commissioned as well. While numbers of chargers and layout here is good, the highway access is not great. The Meijer is 1.5 miles west of I-75 along the very busy 8 Mile/M-102 corridor. I was here very soon after the site was shown as available and the two Signet units (Betty and Jalonne), while powered on, were not working. I was able to confirm that both Delta units, Smokey and Berry were working correctly. This site also offers the built-in Tesla charging feature, and I saw a Tesla driver stop and charge at Smokey. I asked why they were using EVgo when the Supercharger was directly adjacent. The answer was that the vehicle they were driving was a rental car and the rental company was charging very high rates for the Supercharger sessions. By using EVgo, they could directly control their charging costs. However, as with almost my experiences, when charging is collocated with a Supercharger, there are always 3-5 Tesla vehicles charging, and barely anyone using the other charging infrastructure.
The last stop at a new EVgo location was the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit. Given that this is the GM headquarters, this site should be a demonstration of the best of what is available from the GM and EVgo partnership. What I find amusing is that EVgo is now the parent company behind the PlugShare App and they have a partnership with GM, yet none of the pictures in PlugShare of this flagship location include a GM vehicle. GM electric vehicle marketing is missing out on a great opportunity to showcase the products at a flagship location.
Here I was able to charge using the second new, to me, type of EVSE on this trip. Before this trip I had never used the Delta 100kW units before and at this stop I was able to use the Delta 350kW units. These new units support charging two vehicles from one stand, with both vehicles able to get the claimed 350kW. These units should be charging monsters and provide all the voltage or current any electric vehicle could want. While these units are designed to charge two vehicles at a time the parking in this location is incredibly tight, making the small spacing of the Royal Oak station seem quite generous in comparison. I was able to successfully charge at both Barb and Rick.
Pricing structure update:
Last year when I did my trip, there were no pricing plans. Everything was fixed at $0.35 per minute. Since then, EVgo has implemented some pricing plans. They still have the $0.35 as the baseline cost, but now you can pay some monthly rates to reduce the per minute cost. EVgo lists the following plans, Basic, Plus, and PlusMax. Basic costs $0.99 per month and reduces rates to $0.32 per minute. Plus costs $6.99 per month and reduces rates to $0.28 per minute. Finally, PlusMax costs $12.99 per month and reduces rates to $0.26 per minute. The quick math breakeven points for each plan from the baseline, Basic is 33 minutes, Plus is 100 minutes, and PlusMax is 145 minutes. The Basic plan might be worth it if a single trip is scheduled. The PlusMax plan would probably work out very well for Uber drivers using a Tesla as the $0.26 per minute cost is likely much less than what they would be paying at a Supercharger, but drivers need to balance this against the extra time spent charging at a 100kW limit from the EVgo stations and the EVgo station reliability. Also of note, EVgo has started to roll out per kWh pricing to more states, so maybe by the next yearly update there will be kWh pricing in Michigan.
Summary:
Overall, this was a much better trip than last year’s EVgo review, but it’s clear EVgo is no longer focused on maintaining previous sites or is incapable of getting parts from BTC Power to keep them running. At the time of writing this review ,the following Detroit area original sites are down and have been for a month or longer: Dunkin Donuts – Ferndale, Dunkin Donuts – Dearborn Heights, Dunkin Donuts – Woodhaven, Shell – Novi (that counts as 50% of the original single unit sites being offline for more than one month (4 of 8), and I have yet to see the Dunkin Donuts – Dearborn Heights location online long enough to test in the entire last year. Combine the problems with the older locations, with the fact that EVgo is having difficulty keeping these new sites working (PlugShare scores: Meijer – Rochester Hills – 6.8, Meijer – Royal Oak – 5.8, Meijer – Warren – 4.9, Meijer – Detroit – 7.0, Renaissance Center – 10) and I cannot encourage people to use EVgo. With this kind of maintenance track record, I continue to suggest EV owners to NOT use EVgo stations. (That and the fact that they are crazy expensive and still using the per minute price strategy.) The only improvement with this year’s trip and these new sites is that even the slowest units are able to output 200A and charge Elektra the fastest. (Maybe EVgo will replace the standalone BTC power units with these new Delta units, and offer faster charging at all the sites; I can hope)
