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| As part of signing up with various charging networks that I would likely encounter on roadtrips, I created a user login at Blink so I could order one of their RFID cards. I have found that these tap-cards are by far the easiest way to start a charge on a given network's unit, which only required a little advance work to sign up on their websites, add a payment method, and wait for cards to be mailed out. So by now I have a small fistful of those cards, neatly tucked into an RF-shielding folder so nothing can be read until I pull one out. Some networks don't just bill automatically, they suggest that drivers add funds to a sort of "buffer" that charging payment is drawn from later. Greenlots, for example, offers the choice of manual or automatic refreshing of that, which I inadvertently had set wrong and had to fix later, so I wouldn't wind up stuck at a charger with zero available funds. (*Ahem*, you can likely guess how I found out...) Blink was still one of the smaller networks, but I did find a few of their CCS locations listed in Plugshare close to where I would be traveling up and down the East Coast, so it seemed worth having one of their cards too. |
Most networks also encourage drivers to download their custom apps so that starting charges and payment can be done through a phone, but the apps have a number of serious disadvantages. First, they want us to to load yet more junkware onto our devices. The apps usually require the phone to be on the cellular data network to talk to the relevant infrastructure, which is never guaranteed at any charging location. The networks generally don't distribute the app install packages directly, but force people through the Google or Apple app-stores -- which makes them unavailable unless the device is tied to one of them with an account. That's not a given either; there are plenty of circumstances that preclude downloading apps at all, such as some prepaid or vendor-locked phones, operating system incompatibility, or whatever. It is also the user's choice to not tether their devices to some hulking corporate mothership, in the interest of a little better privacy.
So, charging apps need many additional pieces to be in place and functional on the user's part, or they won't work. Any charging network therefore has to provide workable alternatives, such as the RFID cards or generic credit/debit card readers on the chargers that can bill for sessions directly, or in a pinch, taking payment details over a phone conversation with support and remote-starting a charge. Failing to provide *some* mechanism other than the app is flat-out discrimination.
Over the summer of 2022, Blink began sending out a bunch of promotional email about their acquisition and expansion status, including some rah-rah about an updated app.
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2022 20:37:44 +0000 Subject: Exciting Announcement | June Member Newsletter From: <Blinkie@blinkcharging.com<Blinkie@BlinkCharging.com>> Download the app to be able to charge..... https://www.blinkcharging.com?mc_cid=a0d402d80e&mc_eid=UNIQID This Is Only The Beginning! Did You Hear? We're Expanding! We are ecstatic to announce our acquisition of the EV charging leader Sema Connect. Together we are building range confidence for EV drivers and creating a dynamic force in the EV charging market. Learn about the acquisition here (https://blinkcharging.com/news/blink-charging-acquires-SemaConnect/?mc_cid =15f90f180&mc_eid=UNIQID) . Stay tuned, there is so much to come! New Features, Smart Home Charging & More Introducing the new Blink Mobile App, made specially for you. We are making it more convenient and seamless to charge. Whether you are charging at home or your favorite public charger, your charging experience has been upgraded. Here are some features we know you'll love: * Save your favorite charger locations * Find nearby amenities * Monitor and manage home charging activity * Get details on charging sessions and estimated miles in real time * Search for chargers by zip code, city, business, category, or address ... etc ... more marketing fluff after that ...Later in the year, they began warning about a cutover to the new app, which I mostly ignored because I already had their tap-card. They were apparently going to take a lot of stuff down over one particular weekend, similar to the "network upgrade" weekend that Electrify America had done earlier in the year. [The super-nice perk about that was that charging was temporarily FREE across all of EA's network, and I *happened* to be traveling that weekend!] But Blink apparently couldn't be that accomodating.
Date: Mon, 3 Oct 2022 21:36:38 +0000 Subject: Maintenance Alert | Blink Charging From: <Blinkie@blinkcharging.com> Your app is almost ready for an update but first.... https://blinkcharging.com?mc_cid=15e7db446&mc_eid=UNIQID Hi The Countdown Starts Now We Are Getting Ready For Major Improvements! All Blink chargers, the Blink Charging mobile app, and the Blink Network host portal will be down for improvements and updates starting Friday, October 7th at 9pm PT. During this time, charging will only be available using an RFID Blink Member Card. We will be back online with a new and improved Blink Charging mobile app and host portal no later than Monday, October 10th. We will let you know as soon as the equipment comes back online and you can charge again. When we do come back online, don't forget to download the new Blink Charging mobile app (https://onelink.to/5kcvhw?mc_cid=158e6b486&mc_eid=UNIQID) . Your current Blink mobile app will not longer work and can b e deleted from your phone. We apologize for the inconvenience. This is the first of many updates, we are on a mission to improve your experience with more control and information at your fingertips! A New Mobile App Full of Amazing Features Is Coming Your Way.Not that it mattered, really -- Plugshare still listed almost all of Blink's relevant locations as offline, down, unavailable, or whatever, and they had been that way for *months* without any hint that they'd be repaired. I sent their support a sharp little reminder of this, as well as encouragement to keep the alternative methods alive.
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 2022 14:35:34 -0500 Subject: Re: Maintenance Alert | Blink Charging To: support@blinkcharging.com I hope that your CCS infrastructure will become far more reliable, where so far about every location I've looked up is reported down/broken. Thus, I've had to conclude that your public rapid-charging network has hitherto been well-named, and thus basically not an option on my own roadtrips. Just please *never* get rid of the RFID tap-cards. Those are far easier to deal with than messing with apps. And until you make the app install packages directly available from your own website as alternatives to the google/apple stores, they are not even an option here. _H*Blink support replied, but "Roberto" apparently mistook my meaning of "looked up" as being related to a particular charger, rather than purely theoretical in the sense of trip-planning.
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2022 20:56:19 +0000 From: Blink Charging Customer Support <support@blinkcharging.com> Subject: [Blink Charging] Re: Re: Maintenance Alert | Blink Charging --------------------------------------------- Roberto Ramirez, Oct 4, 2022, 1:56 PM MST Good afternoon, If you could provide a location that you might be visiting I can share near by stations to help you find some CCS locations. If you would like a refund on the account due to the trip already being over I can submit a request. We do have a new and improved app that will be released next week that is ready to make charging easier! Charge On! Roberto Blink Charging +1 (888) 998-2546Meanwhile, the network cutover warnings kept coming...
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2022 23:10:04 +0000 Subject: Maintenance Alert | Blink Charging From: <Blinkie@blinkcharging.com> Friday, October 7th at 9pm PT all Blink chargers are going offline https://blinkcharging.com?mc_cid=105e069c7&mc_eid=UNIQID Mark Your Calendar and Plan Ahead Your Improved Charging Experience Is Loading! ...etc...which I continued largely ignoring, figuring that if their units ever became functional at all, the RFID card would suffice. However, it seemed prudent to go make sure my account was set up correctly with auto-replenish from my payment details, so about a month later I went to sign back into Blink's website and check.
Except that now there was no way to log in there.
I called in to their support to ask about this, and received the slap in the face discussed earlier: they had apparently "consolidated" everything into the app, expecting all of their customers to be able to download and use it, and had disabled the old website where I could actually manage my own account.
WHAT. THE. FUCK.
I started pointing out several of the flaws in this approach, asking how the heck I was supposed to manage my account now, where their silly app was not on *my* table as a means to that. The support rep kept saying in broken English that the only choice was to download the app, refused to escalate my concern, and eventually hung up on me.
Then their system had the unmitigated gall to ask me for feedback on my "experience" on that call.
Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2022 20:02:22 +0000 From: Blink Charging Customer Support <support@blinkcharging.com> Subject: Feedback on your recent support experience with Blink Hello, Thanks for supporting electric transportation with Blink! We'd love to hear what you think of your recent experience with our team. Please take a moment to answer one simple question about your experience with our team member by clicking either link below: How would you rate the support you received? You can copy the following URL into your browser to rate: https://support.blinkcharging.com/requests/271087/satisfaction/new/CK2MuL Thank you in advance! Your review and feedback help us improve our service. Charge On!Now incensed, I let them have it:
Subject: Re: Feedback on your recent support experience with Blink To: Blink Charging Customer Support <support@blinkcharging.com> From: Hobbit Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2022 00:37:53 -0500 My "experience with your team member" ?! Are you simply JOKING? Your "team member" refused to listen to my 100% valid complaint about your recent changes, and HUNG UP on me. You make it impossible to obtain recourse for that kind of behavior, let alone reach the right people to discuss the serious original issues with, and then you have the flat-out BALLS to ask me to fill out some kind of dumb survey that means nothing. I can't understand how you intend to stay afloat in this business, with attitudes like that. _H*I found 305-521-0200 for their Miami corporate office, but that went to an inscrutable IVR that either failed on every option or sent me back to the generic support. I demanded escalation and a call back from their main headquarters, to discuss this stupidly sad state of things and ask what alternatives would enable me to deal with my account. Last I knew I had moved some bit of funding onto the "buffer" for the card, and now I couldn't even check the status of that. This started a bit of back-and-forth with support via email, presumably escalated somewhat, the essence of which follows.
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:18:34 +0000 From: Blink Charging Customer Support <support@blinkcharging.com> Subject: [Blink Charging] Re: Blink Charging Phone Call ---------------------------------------------- Yuri Espinal, Nov 8, 2022, 8:18 AM MST Thank you for your feedback. I empathize with your frustration on not being able to access and modify your account. After our update, the "member" portion of the Blink website has been moved over and is now available in app form only, as stated on the phone call. We do apologize that this has inconvenienced you and your charging experience. The overwhelming majority of our customer base use the app to view/modify their account, and based on our customer feedback, centralizing everything on the app was the best course of action to help our company propel in the right direction. Charge On! Yuri Blink Charging +1 (888) 998-2546 ## Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2022 15:01:04 -0500 From: Hobbit Subject: Re: Blink Charging Phone Call To: Blink Charging Customer Support <support@blinkcharging.com> If you actually "empathized", you would not be offering this kind of ingratiating non-answer, but rather carrying this entire issue back to your web developers and project leads as loud and immediate feedback that they made a bad decision. Ideally, everyone up and down the line would be gracious enough to acknowledge, "yes, we screwed up and will now work to fix it". There are many reasons why, and THEY NEED TO READ THIS. There are plenty of reasons a device, *IF* a person owns one in the first place, cannot interact with new apps. It may be some kind of pre-paid or very constrained phone environment that doesn't allow app download. Plenty of people have those. A device may not necessarily be tied to Google or Apple, depending on type -- it is not necessary to use a phone's inherent functionality, and I'm certainly not the only person who chooses not to chain a personal device to someone else's "mothership". That has the downside that apps are UNAVAILABLE from the Google or Apple stores, because they insist that someone be logged into one of their accounts to download ANY apps. Some apps can often be "sideloaded" from other sources, and some companies and app providers make the installation packages directly available from their own websites as alternative ways to solve that exact problem. Blink, of course, hasn't bothered to make THAT five-minute fix for this new app they're so proud of. Charging apps also generally need the user's phone to be successfully on cellular data, with its own connection to whatever backend the app talks to. That is frequently not even possible at some charging locations. So unless you provide a dedicated wi-fi that a customer can briefly hop onto at every charging location, even the people willing to throw away their own privacy may still be unable to charge their vehicles. This varies widely carrier to carrier, but personally when I go to "check in" on Plugshare's website, too often I have to wait until my next stop before I have enough cell-data to do it. [This is primarily why I favor RFID tap-cards for charging -- no network "device" needed at all once an account is set up.] The backend traffic from most of these apps usually works like a web browser in the first place, so there's very little reason a slightly reworked web front-end could not allow access to the same data from a regular browser. I should be able to log into the new infrastructure like I did the old one, manage my payment methods, type in a charger ID that I'm at and start a charge, etc etc. That functionality is already written into the app, and a web front-end [possibly re-using some of the old site's code] could do much the same. If your developers know the first thing about "portability", the effort required is quite reasonable. Whoever thought placing all the eggs in the one "app" basket never took some of these things into account, and REMOVING the ability for good-faith users to manage their own accounts in some alternate way is not only incredibly inconvenient and irresponsible, it may actually be illegal. Right now Blink is in possession of my payment data in a manner than I cannot control. What do you suggest that I'm supposed to do about that?? Start calling lawyers, perhaps. You have created a huge problem for yourselves, and not only is your new practice flat-out discrimination, objections against it are not going to go away because some nebulous "overwhelming majority" doesn't KNOW how to complain about it. Marginalizing me like that is 100% disingenuous, and NO excuse. Your management needs to start paying attention, NOW, and have a real conversation about it. Other charging networks that have started to make the same mistake were quick to realize the problem, and offer workable alternatives. You are refusing even that much. So no, I don't feel like you're going to let me "charge on" at all. In fact, I don't believe I ever even used a Blink charger since signing up, because every site I happened to look up in Plugshare so far and considered trying was flagged as "down" or "offline". Real confidence-builder. _H*That full-on Karen barrage seemed to get someone's attention, and I was promised more escalation and return calls. But my cell or its nearby network had started acting up and garbling my voice over some inbound calls. A retry would generally fix it, but the Blink people apparently weren't smart enough or caring enough to even try that, simply giving up after one call. We went through a couple more cycles of these broken promises, with no worthwhile answers forthcoming.
Then I thought to look up just how meaningful this problem really was, i.e. how many rapid DC chargers Blink actually had in the field and if *any* of them were working yet. I filtered Plugshare down to just them and just the high-power locations, and realized that their "CCS network" is hardly extant at all.
All of 16 CCS stations at the time of this writing, with three obviously down and reports of non-functionality on several of the others. Big fucking deal. And most of those are wheezy old 50 kW units that Blink took over from EVGo, many of which were down for extended periods anyway because they still had 2G cell-data modems in them which didn't work anymore.
It is also worth noting that Blink's "new app" is total garbage, with mostly one-star-or-less reviews on the Google store. So even if people *try* to suck up to their misguided app-only nonsense, they still can't get their cars charged. Why so awful? Some strong evidence (read: red flag) is on the new website's contact page:
Software Development Center +91 120 3102120 B-1001 Tower B, Noida One, B-8, Sector-62 Noida, Uttar Pradesh IndiaIt has been my observation that some of the *worst* web and app development comes out of offshored groups in India. I have found no evidence that coders from there pay any attention to quality, good UX design, and least of all security; there seems to be a kind of cultural attitude of rush-to-market and simply not caring. They'll work for a pittance, but the resulting products are prime examples of "you get what you pay for".
A little more research into the company itself, partially in a continuing desperate effort to find workable contact points to get my problem resolved, turns up some fairly juicy bits about their management and a very sketchy history behind their founder/CEO:
https://ir.blinkcharging.com/company-information/management-team
and this Google search about Michael Farkas. Who frankly looks the part of the evil mastermind, like some kind of classic TV villain.
This is NO WAY to run a network. Idiotic, short-sighted, and potentially fraudulent corporate practices like this are not the way to encourage widespread adoption of electric vehicles. So, no thanks, I'll stick with the networks that actually give a shit, treat their subscribers fairly, and and manage to keep their assets mostly functional.
Next, I just needed to figure out how to recover the money that Blink had effectively stolen from me. I did file an FTC report on these clowns, but fat lot of good that's likely to ever bring. More effective, after failing about six times to get a callback from their leadership to have a reasoned, adult conversation about this app-only problem, was to ask support to simply refund whatever I had on the tap-card to my payment method, and then cancel the entire account. That much, at least, they were able to do. On that call, I selected option "2" for "site owners" just to see where it would go, and wound up talking to someone in support who was a bit more clueful than any of the other first-tier people I had talked to. And guess what, he agreed that the destruction of the old driver portal website and the move to app-only was stupid, and he had said so to his management at the time, and they were still unlikely to ever fix it. So I went ahead to request refund and cancellation.
Afterward, I was able to obtain the most satisfaction I ever got out of Blink, for all of eight seconds. Click the image to either watch or download how it happened.
Well done, Blink! Buh-bye, good riddance!