Not a road trip person exactly, but I think I've hit the same wall from a different angle. I help my parents with their 2015 first gen Leaf and their home charging, and it's basically a grocery getter. They charge on the Level 2 I put in their garage and it almost never leaves its range. Then one day it did, and they ended up electrically beached pretty far from home. Not shocking, it's a 2015, and honestly it's impressive it's handled the Colorado climate this well with no real battery conditioning.
So I find a DC charger on PlugShare (which, side note, takes way longer than it should to filter for just CHAdeMO) and we go to a Walmart with an EA station. The payment terminal on the charger would not take anything. I tried six different cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, and nothing worked. My dad called the number on the station while I downloaded their 62mb app on dogshit parking lot reception. The app wants you to sign up for a membership (free, fine), and then you can't just pay for the session, you have to load money into your account. $10 minimum, and it auto-reloads $10 whenever your balance drops below $5. The agent my dad got said the terminals mostly won't take a card unless you call and read them the number, so I guess they're just decorative.
I loaded the $10 so the car would start charging. The Leaf's tiny battery only needed $5.61 worth, which dropped the balance under $5 and triggered a second $10 charge. So now I've got $14.39 sitting in an EA account for a car that almost never needs DCFC. And the same card I'd just used to pay for gas on the way over was dead at their terminal.
This made me want to ask the whole thread: is this just how public charging is right now? Is every network its own app, its own account, and its own prepaid balance scheme, with card readers that may or may not work? Are some networks actually more reliable than others about just letting you tap a card and get power? I'd happily use whoever has a terminal that works, and I'm not planning to dispute the charge and risk getting locked out of EA, since I'd like to keep them as an option.
For people who do this regularly, do you keep accounts set up on every network ahead of time, or have you found a few you trust so you can ignore the rest? And does anyone know whether there's any way to get that leftover balance back out of EA, or do I just wait until my parents' Leaf eventually drinks it down?
