As you guys traversed the US, do you find any specific fast charging companies that worked best for charging the Pebble, like Rivian Adventure Networks or Electrify America, EV Connect, etc?
Some of the Pebble engineers are former Rivian engineers, so it wouldn't surprise me a bit if conforming to Rivian protocol has been prioritized. I have no experience with the Rivian Adventure Network, other than I thought they had all opened to all brands and I was unable to charge at one. (I was wrong.)
I just want to make one charging stop for both vehicles at the same time, and I'd like that charge to be 250 kW or faster. AND I want to know what will work. Driving around to a half a dozen chargers to unsuccessfully charge in extreme heat is not my ideal road trip.
Sorry about that — the team is investigating your data and retesting with similar charging stations. This shouldn't happen, and we'll share an update as soon as we know more.
And yes, we validated with major charging providers, including EVgo, ChargePoint, Electrify America, and RAN.
Thank you — I can provide locations and charge attempt details, if needed. Some of the chargers would connect, start to charge, and disconnect after a few seconds. We may take it to some local chargers to see what we can get to work.
Sorry for the rant. Still love my Pebble, showed it off and gave lots of tours both at the campground and at various chargers.
"... we validated with major charging providers, including EVgo..." Did you validate EVgo on a slow (100 kW) or fast charger (350 kW) or both? We had no luck with an EVgo 350, but could charge on an EVgo 100.
We tested both 100kW and 350kW. Reg. IONNA, indeed some stations are confirmed to have issues and we are actively working on enabling them. The service team will reach out to you about next steps.
Thank you so much for the follow-up! We're prepared for some challenges and happy to help with the development.
We camped at a KOA and they were not happy about charging the truck, which I understand is the case with most KOAs. So we charged the Pebble from the pedestal and the truck from the Pebble. Overnight both were fully charged.
Yeah, that would have been nice except, we didn't have the battery to run the AC. We were headed to a campsite with no services. Our battery was very low from a long "Easy Tow", we were worried the fridge would shut down if the battery got lower, and we couldn't find a charger that would work with the Pebble.
How do you do it?
Pebble Team - we've increasingly seen these comments. Please respond with a (current - not what is 'coming') list of the commercial charge companies where the Pebble can absolutely be charged today. Thanks.
I suspect it may be a kW limit more than brand? Or old vs. new charger? Maybe new chargers have logic that doesn't interface with the Pebble? I suspect this because we were able to charge at a very old EVgo 100 kW charger but not able to charge at a new EVgo 350 kW charger.
Don't think it is that simple since the Rivian Adventure Network chargers, which are all relatively new and fairly high powered, seem to work with the Pebble.
A note about CPOs from my point of view- ChargePoint- We rarely find a ChargePoint that is very fast. They tend to be way less than 250 kW. That's okay for the Pebble, but not for our Silverado EV. The SEV needs a 250+ kW charger for its big battery and 800 volt architecture. Slower charging adds hours to the journey. ☹️ RAN- I am not sure if these are all open to GM vehicles yet, but the ones that are seem to be expensive for non-Rivians.
We'd love to see connectivity with:
We will be in Canada in August-October, so we will also need Flo, Petro-Canada and Electrify Canada.
So far we have had success charging at both RAN and Tesla. We have had to unhitch to charge both at once. Sorry to hear your issues with charging.
You charged your Pebble at a Tesla Supercharger? Last we heard from Pebble, they were in-house testing at Tesla and were not approved yet for Pebble customers. This would alleviate a lot of headaches for me as my tow vehicle is a Rivian and they are approved to charge there.
Yes, but just the Rivian. Only charge the Pebble at a RAN charger. We've been fortunate to make it to a campground without having to charge the Pebble. Apologies for any confusion!
I got excited for a second there that Tesla charging was approved! Some day soon hopefully.
FYI the RAN chargers in Phoenix were in a garage and max height was 8' — ugh.
I did the same thing a couple times so far, plugged the Pebble into the camp pedestal (using the Rivian mobile charger since it was shorter but could reach the pedestal) and then used the Pebble charging cable to plug the Rivian into the Pebble since it is longer and able to reach the Rivian parked in front of the Pebble. I did turn the current down on the Pebble charger to 24 amps when charging the Rivian to make sure the Pebble still had plenty of power to run the water heater, microwave, HVAC etc. Even though Pebble says the NEMA 14-50 outlet can output up to 12 kW, I'm not sure if that would be a good idea to charge a tow vehicle while also using the Pebble's appliances and HVAC. Still great to fully charge both the trailer and TV overnight or at least over the weekend. Another piece of advice for Rivian owners: put your Rivian in camp mode when doing this daisy chain charging so it deactivates your huge green charging lights to make it less obvious that you are charging, so as not to draw attention from campground staff. Also, it's nice to your neighbors since it turns off the owl hoots and bird chirps when locking/unlocking.
So no issues using my Rivian Mobile Charger to charge the Pebble? That had not occurred to me to try.
Not so far, and I assume as long as you have a 50 amp outlet it should work. I have successfully used the Rivian mobile charger twice to charge the Pebble from a campground 50 amp pedestal so that I could use the longer Pebble cable to reach my Rivian. I would be reluctant to try to use it on a 30 amp or below outlet though, since the Rivian cable does not have a way to reduce the current the way the Pebble cable does. Rivian relies on the in-vehicle screen to manually turn down current, whereas Pebble relies on the charging cable controls to regulate that when connecting to a lower amp outlet. I have also successfully charged Level 2 the Pebble at home using a Tesla wall charger (on a 60 amp breaker) with both TeslaTap and A2Z NACS to J1772 adapters. In this case, I assume the Pebble just maxes out at 32 amps charging, which is more than enough for the size of the battery.
I want to hear the answer to this too. On our second weekend road trip, we had a lot of difficulty charging the Pebble. We want to charge our Silverado EV at 350 kW or higher chargers, but the Pebble would not charge on any of those.
Because we couldn't find a charger that would work after many attempts and different locations, we arrived at camp 3 hours later than planned, grumpy and overheated, with about 10 or 12% battery in the Pebble. We ended up charging it from the truck, very slowly. On the way home, we finally were able to charge it (after multiple attempts at other chargers) at a really old EVgo 100 kW charger.
We tried to charge at BP Pulse with Alpitronic 400 kW, GM Energy/Flying J 350 kW, and a newer EVgo that only had 350 kW chargers. None of them worked.
The charger that finally did work, on the way home, after trying at multiple locations, was an old EVgo 100 kW charger, behind a creepy, derelict bar. There's no way we could charge both vehicles there. It would have taken 4.5 hours to charge the truck instead of 30 minutes at a 350 kW!
I really feel like this has been misrepresented. It seemed like you could take a road trip, charge both vehicles at the same time, and be back on the road. But if we have to charge the Pebble at a different charger than the truck every time, that's a HUGE time suck and double the unhitching and maneuvering.
Also, it would have been nice to know that the Pebble can only charge at certain chargers before we were on our trip. We stood in the 100° sun, multiple times, wasting hours, trying to charge the Pebble after unhitching it, maneuvering it into tight charging bays, moving it again to try a different handle, dealing with the iPad overheating because it was out in the sun with us. It would have saved us a lot of time, frustration, heat exhaustion, and ill will if it had been disclosed ahead of time what chargers do and do not work.
Yes, Pebble, I'm a little angry about this. 😡