PowerFlex 4+

Pricing deception

You don’t find out about the two dollar charging fee until you download the app and start charging for the first time. By then they’ve got your credit card and your time invested.

The other really annoying part, is it you can’t simply ask for a dollar amount… “just put $20 in” (must pick KWH or MILES).

At LAX, you pay $2.00 + $0.45/kWh.

Pretty responsive

I would give them credit for what they are trying to do - combining power management infrastructure with an app. Pretty complex, considering the different environments they operate.
Every company at that early stage will experience issues and hiccups; the question is how they deal with them. The app is not flawless, they have misses every now and then when they release a new version, but I find them super responsive. My issues are usually resolved within a day, even during the weekends. Maybe because I use to contact them via the app? I don’t know but I am pretty happy with this service so far.

Worst design ever

This app is close to useless and the chargers themselves are unreliable and don’t communicate with the app well.

Here are a few examples:

- before you charge you have to enter how much kWh or miles you want to charge, similar to paying cash at a gas station. Why do I have to manually calculate how much kWh I need for a full charge? That’s ridiculous. Just charge until full.
- The PowerFlex hardware stopped a charging session, but the app didn’t notify me. Apparently you have to manually check your car’s app to see it’s still charging.
- if you change a setting (like how much you want to charge, see first point) you’ll see a popup asking if you only want to change the settings one time or for all future settings. Dunno. Maybe just keep the setting by default or ask after I changed the settings instead of before. Again, a really odd UX choice.
- the app doesn’t communicate well with the hardware. At one point the app still thought I was charging while I wasn’t. What will happen if someone else plugs in? It looks like I might pay for their session. Great for them. Not so great for me.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, we're sorry to hear about your frustrating experiences. I have a few quick tips for some of the issues you reported:
-If you simply want to fully charge, set your energy requested value to a large number to ensure you get the charge you need.
-If you'd like to receive notifications about the status of your charge session, you can enable push notifications under 'Settings'.

We hear your feedback loud and clear that our UX has room for improvement. I'm pleased to share that we are actively working on sweeping improvements to our mobile application. If you have any other feedback for us, we'd love to hear it at support@powerflex.com.