Man Pays €360 for a 44-Minute Charge of His Electric Car—Mistake Was Trusting a Charging App

One of the most oft-cited advantages of the electric car is that recharging it is cheaper than refueling a gasoline-powered vehicle. This comes with nuances: it depends on the battery, how much we charge, and the type of charging post, whether the trip is urban or on the highway… In any case, paying €360 to charge the battery for 44 minutes is not the price anyone expects.

It was precisely the bill that arrived to a driver who had rented an electric car and charged at a point that, in theory, was public. Twenty times the average price per energy at charging points. The fault lay with the charging app.

Almost $420 for three-quarters of an hour of charging

Stanley Kpenkann, a resident of Macomb Township (Michigan), was the outraged driver who received such a bill. It isn’t surprising that he ended up sharing his case on a local television station. But let’s start from the beginning. Kpenkann had rented a Chevrolet Bolt, took a friend to the airport, and, when he checked the charge level, realized he wouldn’t make it home. “I’ve got only 20 minutes of battery left,” he told WXYZ Detroit.

So he searched for the nearest charging point with the EVgo app. It’s a charging network and works much like, for instance, the Iberdrola or Endesa networks: you look in their app for the closest station and, normally, you also use it to activate the charging point. If you’re a customer, charging is usually cheaper. The one shown to Kpenkann was at a Hyundai dealership.

To clarify, as The Drive explains, in the United States it’s common for dealerships to offer public-use charging points, not exclusive to customers. This one was identified by the app as ChargePoint, precisely another public charging network whose points are associated with EVgo.

Kpenkann plugged the Bolt into the post, and left it charging for 44 minutes. The car had a 65 kWh battery, so in that time it gathered more than enough energy to reach home. So far so good. But then, he received the EVgo bill: he had to pay $418 (about €360 at the exchange rate) for that charging session of barely three-quarters of an hour.

“It doesn’t make sense for it to be in the app: if it’s private it cannot appear as public”

The first thing he thought was that it was a mistake. But the EV charging firm corroborated the amount. He could hardly believe it, of course. “I was stunned; never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be billed $418 for a charging session.” 

So Kpenkann called EVgo’s customer service, which in turn contacted the dealer. The Hyundai center indicated that the charging point where he had charged charged $5 per minute of charging and another $5 per kWh. They also noted that such exorbitant prices appeared on the charger’s screen. Kpenkann says he did not see them. In any case the bill broke down as: $220 for plugged time (44 minutes) and the remaining $198 for the charge (39.6 kWh).

As noted by WXYZ Detroit, the problem was that this charger was not public after all, but for exclusive use by the dealership’s customers. Such tariffs were “deterrent” prices meant to deter anyone else from using it. But the EVgo app showed it as public. “It makes no sense that it’s in the app; if they don’t want anyone to use it, and it’s private, then make it private, not public,” the driver rightly complained.

Twenty times more expensive. Kpenkann continued to insist that it was an EVgo error, in addition to telling his case to WXYZ, which did not reflect well on the charging company. In the end they relented: they refunded $405. The remaining $13.27 corresponded to the usual rate. A much more logical amount when you consider that the average price at public chargers in the US is about $0.50 per kWh. The $418 represented paying 20 times the normal amount.

And to put it in context, for instance, Repsol charges €0.48 per kWh at its fast chargers and €0.56 per kWh at ultra-fast charging. If we apply that to the 39.6 kWh charged by this driver, the cost would have been about €19 and €22, respectively. In Iberdrola’s most expensive option (200 kW ultra-fast points), which are €0.67 per kWh, he would have paid around €26.

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