Why was my public charging bill so much higher than expected?

Which network? Some of them charge per minute instead of per kWh in certain states, and some add a session fee on top. Also check if there were idle fees after the car finished.

Check the receipt in the app not the screen... the screen price and the app price aren't always the same thing Also a lot of them are .60-.79 now and the 'posted' number is sometimes the member rate

It was an EVgo station. The screen said something like 56 cents per kWh. I was there maybe 40 minutes and got charged a little over $31. I didn't see anything about per minute but honestly I wasn't looking that hard.

40 minutes and $31 at $0.56 works out to roughly 55 kWh if it were straight per-kWh. Depending on the car and starting SOC that might not be crazy - a big pack from low SOC can take that much in 40 minutes. Before assuming you got overcharged, look at the kWh delivered on the receipt. If it says something like 35 kWh then there's a session fee or something else added on. Also EVgo's posted rate can change by time of day, so the rate you saw at plug-in time isn't necessarily the whole session. I DC fast charge maybe 3 times a month and stopped paying attention to the discount plans - not worth it for how little I use them, but without one you pay the full guest rate.

$31 for 40 minutes is wild. That's more than I spend on electricity for my commute in a month.

EVgo is all over the place on price... here in CT I've seen the same station be 49 cents at 6am and 69 cents at 5pm. The rate is set when you plug in? or not? I honestly still don't know for sure with them. I track this stuff for road trips and EVgo is usually near the top with Electrify America. Pilot Flying J is about the same now. Also what car? My Ioniq 5 will pull 50+ kWh in 40 minutes from 10% no problem, so $31 might be totally legit. That's the part that gets people... a big battery just eats a lot of electrons. That is roughly 200 miles of driving for me in summer, less in winter. Key thing is the kWh on the receipt like everyone said. If that number times the rate doesn't come close to $31, call them. I've gotten credits from EVgo before, they're not terrible about it.

This is a big reason I stick to Superchargers on trips. The price shows in the car before you get there and the receipt matches.

I pay $0.04 off-peak at home. Every time I fast charge on a trip it hurts a little.

It's a Mach E, was at maybe 15% when I got there. I'll dig through the app tonight, I deleted the email receipt like an idiot

The 200 miles part is how I'd look at it too. $31 for about 200 miles is roughly 26 mpg if gas is $4. So at 56 cents fast charging basically costs the same as an ordinary gas car. It's only cheap if most of your charging happens at home.

Heads up for anyone using a prepaid balance: it doesn't stop the session when the money runs out. I put $30 on my Blink account, charged a Mach-E from about 8% to 85%, and got billed $149.84 anyway. Now the account is sitting at -$119.84.

Petro Canada bills by the minute too. My first time at one worked out to around 94 cents a kWh because my car only pulls about 50 kW. Per-minute pricing really only works out if your car can charge at something close to 200 kW.

Shell in the UK did something similar to me. Electroverse showed 89p/kWh, but I paid £55 and only got about 90 miles of range out of it. The only thing I can think of is a holding charge added on. I only expect to need a rapid charger 2 or 3 times a year, so I'm not too bothered, but it's hard not to feel like the pricing is meant to keep people on petrol.

Mine came out worse than that. One Electrify America stop in my Kona worked out to about 47 cents a mile, which is more than my old Wrangler cost me in gas. To be fair, a chunk of that was idle fees, so part of it is on me.

Not always. Last time the Tesla app showed $0.33/kWh before I plugged in, and the receipt billed $0.47 for a 32 minute session. I was the only car there for about 25 of those minutes. I reported it through the app and never heard anything back.

Funny, it went the other way for me. A couple of Electrify America stations near me billed $0.29/min even though the app showed the per-kWh rate. On a session where I added about 30%, it came out roughly $4 cheaper than per-kWh would have. So now I honestly can't tell which one I should be hoping for.

Evie here in Victoria isn't much better. Their Melton site is 77c/kWh on a "75 kW" unit, but it load-shares, so with two other cars plugged in I was getting about 23 kW. A Supercharger would've been roughly five times faster for nearly half the price. Partly my own fault for not checking PlugShare before the trip, but it still felt like highway robbery.

Per-minute was a win for me too, but only because my car held 150 kW pretty much the whole stop. On EA in Texas it came out to around 11 cents a kWh. If it had tapered early I'd probably have been on the losing end, like the Petro Canada example above.

Over the whole year it evens out better than a single stop suggests. I've logged every kWh on my truck, public charging included, and a gas truck would need about 38 mpg to match what I've spent. That's even with winter and mountain driving killing my efficiency.

Going back to the per-minute stuff in Canada, does anyone know if the session cost in Tesla's Charge Stats is right for Canadian Superchargers? I know they bill in tiers based on kW draw up there, but I've never been sure the app's number actually reflects that.

Was that on a Tesla, or a non-Tesla using an adapter? I just bought a NACS adapter for my Bolt, mostly so I'd have something other than EVgo/EA on trips. Now I'm wondering whether the price the app shows is even what I'd actually pay.

Same conclusion on my end. I just did Las Cruces to Denver and back on Superchargers, about $170 total, and a 30 mpg gas car at $3.85 would've been around $160. Then add the 2-3 hours each way sitting at chargers. Fast charging on a road trip really isn't saving money anymore.

The sitting around is the part that got me more than the money. I did Quebec City and back in a Tesla and the stops over 30 minutes were miserable, and half the bathrooms near the Superchargers were dirty or broken. I'd take the gas car for a trip like that.

Same here. My Model Y trip in January was 29 Supercharger stops and $448 total, and a RAV4 Hybrid would've been maybe $240 for the same drive. I expected the cold to cost me some range, just not that much.

That's about where I landed too. I came from a 13 year old BMW that got 36 mpg on the highway, and on a long trip it was cheaper than fast charging at $0.48/kWh around here. The EV only wins if you're charging at home. Kind of makes me wonder where all that federal charger money went if the prices are still this high.

Same result on my 850 mile Florida to Virginia day. With the Electrify America subscription it came out about even with gas, and that was only because I started at 100% from cheap AC charging. Without that it would've been worse. It also added about an hour over what I'd do in an ICE car.

Same for me. I paid $8.09 for about 80 miles at a Supercharger recently, and my 32 mpg car at $3.40 gas would've been around $8.50 for that. Basically a wash, so I mostly stick to charging at work and home.

Honestly that sounds about right for what chargers cost now. I pay about 4 cents at home, and on a recent trip I kept seeing 40-60 cents/kWh. $68 for 45 kWh is $1.51 a kWh, though, so I'd be asking for an itemized receipt. That's well past normal pricing.

Same trend here. I did a Supercharging session from the Bay Area to the Central Valley recently at about $0.47/kWh, and I remember paying around $0.23 in early 2021. A full home charge costs me about $4 at $0.08, so it stings every time. I wouldn't be surprised if it keeps climbing toward $1/kWh and ends up near gas prices.

89p is higher than I usually see, I'd normally expect up to about 75p on a rapid. The gap is what gets me, since I charge overnight at my parents' for 7p and a full ID.4 charge is about £4.

Load sharing is the part I keep running into too. Here in Japan most of the older chargers are 50 kW with a 30 minute cap, and on the sites with more than one car plugged in the power drops well below what's on the label. My car can take 150 kW but I almost never see anything close.

Yeah, my numbers are worse than that right now. I just did 446 miles on public Tesla stations in my Ioniq 5 and paid $92.76, so about 20 cents a mile. My old CR-V on gas was around 9 cents a mile. It's been 0-10 degrees here in Michigan, so some of that is the cold eating range, but it still stings.

Per-minute worked out for me in Nebraska too, even in an R1S that doesn't hold peak speed. I got 459 kWh for $71 there, while Colorado was billed per kWh and cost $154 for 393 kWh. The 350 kW units never held top speed consistently for me, so I'd say I got lucky on the tapering.

Truck math is rough too. My Lightning does a bit over 2 mi/kWh, so at the 47 cents my local Tesla charger charges that's around 23 cents a mile. I converted it to a gallon equivalent at 34 kWh/gal and got almost $16, which looked so wrong I figured I'd botched something. Apparently not.

I'm in the same boat with a Leaf, no home charging, so CHAdeMO is basically all I have. I can't tell you whether it's priced higher than CCS, but the stations near me do seem to charge more than the CCS ones nearby.

I did almost two years on public charging only before I got home charging about a year ago, so it's doable. Whether it works comes down to how much you can tolerate having to go charge when you need it. It's not for everybody, and I wouldn't expect it to beat a hybrid on cost per mile. Home charging was the thing that made it feel easy for me.

Yeah $1.51/kWh is well outside what I've seen. The new ones on the NJ Turnpike were 58 cents when I looked. I don't have an EV, just a Civic hybrid, but I'd be asking for the itemized receipt too.