I also recently had a very poor experience with an EVgo charger, when with my Bolt almost completely depleted, and the weather extremely cold, I drove to a mall where PlugShare reported that fast chargers were present. They turned out to be EVgo, which I'd never used before, but I figured to give a try.
The EVgo's cable was lying in the snow, which puzzled me at first. I picked up the cable, plugged it into my Bolt, and attempted to use the EVgo charger -- unsuccessfully, because there was no credit card reader. I don't know whether it could take an RFID or not, and in any case I don't have one for EVgo. So I had to call a phone number listed on the charger. After a pause, a service rep picked up, who was friendly and helpful -- she turned out to be the only positive thing about my EVgo experience.
After reading off a credit card number to her -- my hands shaking in the cold -- I waited for her to activate the charger. After a pause, she said that the charger was now activated. Nothing happened. I double-checked that the charger cable was plugged into my Bolt, and it was, but still nothing happened. She tried several more times, unsuccessfully, while the minutes passed, and I became colder and colder. We were both puzzled and frustrated, and I was freezing. After perhaps 5 minutes of failed activation attempts, I told her to stop, and that I would move my car to a different EVgo charger instead.
When I tried to hang up the first charger's EVgo cable back into its receptacle, I found to my surprise that it wouldn't fit; I had to leave the cable lying on the ground. Now I understood why it had been there in the first place. I drove my Bolt to the next-in-line EVgo charger. When the rep asked me for the ID of that charger, I had to hunt-and-seek for it. It turned out to be on a different sticker, and in a different place, then the first charger. When I finally located it, we were both surprised to find out that it displayed the same ID as the charger that I'd just left. Indeed, both chargers had the same ID listed on their stickers -- and we now realized that all this time, the rep had been repeatedly activating the second charger, at a distance from the first charger that I'd originally parked at.
About 10 minutes after I had first pulled up at my first-ever EVgo charger, with my fingers painfully numb from the cold, my Bolt finally began charging. I went into the mall, figuring that I'd return an hour later to find that the car was charged to almost full. But to my astonishment, and as other people on this thread have reported, when I got back I discovered that the charger had shut off far earlier than expected -- and without any warning -- so that my Bolt was charged only about 25% of the way back to full, rather than the 100% that I'd expected.
I departed without making any further attempts to charge, and had to again leave the cable on the ground because it didn't fit into the charger receptacle.
The experience was so frustrating that, like others here, I now just avoid EVgo chargers altogether.
Plus, my wife will be out of town that week so I'll have the golden hall-pass. Too bad Chumash doesn't have a DCFC lol. Does it?
