PowerFlex Reviews

I’ve used PowerFlex for both workplace charging and at the LAX parking garage, and it just doesn’t work consistently. I have wasted a lot of time trying to start a charge. Plus for some reason PowerFlex forces you to give location permissions even when PowerFlex is not open in order to charge. I don’t think it is currently a good use of money for institutions to use this company for their charging services

For some reason you have to both pre-load money and pre-specify how much you want to charge. So it becomes this really annoying guessing game of typing in different energy amounts until PowerFlex says you have enough credit. Insane. Just let me charge until my car is full like a normal charging station. I can’t believe LAX chose this vender.

Wow. Could they make this any worse? Before charging, you have to tell it how many miles you want to charge? Um…. Just charge it. Stop when I unplug it. Why do you need me to guess how much charge I’ll get? What a mess. What if I get to the charge level I “requested”… will it stop? I sure hope not. If I leave before reaching my predicted charge will you make me pay for it anyway? Hope not too.

Also:
* not integrated with iOS passwords
* verification e-mails don’t actually get sent
* verification e-mails are apparently only needed for fleet use, but they only say that after their painful signup process

If I had any choice I’d use any other system but this one.

I absolutely hate these niche apps that force you to load 100x more dollars than it costs to charge your car. I will never come to one of the charges again, so why am I forced to pay as if I’m going to keep using their app. After I leave, the random town I needed to charge at, I’m never going to use one of their chargers.

Developers/Owner: Just give us an option to “pay as you go” you can even charge a higher rate if it costs you guys money. ( Or decrease the minimum to 1$ and charge a %30 fee for under $10 fills.) You get the point. You can certainly make money without banking on people being forced to add more money than they need and then forget about it. It’s predatory and incredibly frustrating.

Account creation & login process takes longer than charging does, this app does not integrate with any networks so you are forced to use PowerFlex and once you find a charger it’s way too cumbersome to activate and activate your charger because the labels don’t match what’s in PowerFlex . This is why their chargers are always available- experienced EVers know it takes less time to drive to another network to “plug in & charge” than it does to activate a this app charger. Hard fail.

Same as everyone else. Attempted to charge my car at LAX and found myself having to calculate kWh or miles I wanted as if I had the time to do so. Finally thought I had it all down and it just refused to charge my vehicle. No other charging app is this difficult. Just charge my vehicle until full and charge the amount or simply charge until the funds I have added. Waste of time.

A couple of weeks ago, PowerFlex automatically updated. When i went to use it, I faced a radically different user interface. It went from being clear, efficient, bright and easy to read, to completely the opposite. I can’t find one area where the new version is better than the old one.

I used to walk up to the charging station and in to clicks I was ready to go with clear indication of the charging status and projected costs and charging times. Now it seems that my car’s defaults are not being used and I’m forced to enter the information every time. Several times I’ve returned to see that my car didn’t charge because of something I forgot to put in it who knows what. That never happened before.

Additionally, the new font used is small and the colors used are dark and hard to see in the sun ( specially with sun glasses on)

Bring brought the old app back, please!

PowerFlex doesn’t let you add funds. You just get an error page over and over again.

PowerFlex is misleading and charged me first to have a balance on my account. My account signed out, money is out of my account and no way for me do anything about it.

Terrible experience, they don’t have much of a electric charging network. I was duped at the LAX Airport location. Please beware!! Don’t lose your money.

This is such a user unfriendly interface. It requires you to select the exact kilowatts that you anticipate charging or time or money. Not an option to just plug-in and get billed when you complete your charging or control charging from your car. So over engineered and clunky, just bill us for kilowatts delivered and get out of the way!

PowerFlex gave me a list of chargers numbered 1-6 except the chargers have no numbers. Genius engineering. But the real ripoff is that they require an upfront balance that amounts to your whole battery and if oh don’t use it, you’re just out the money unless you come back to their charger. That’s a scam worthy of reporting to the state AG, which I intend to do. Also the legally required credit card reader doesn’t word any wait for this company to dry up and blow away.

If I need to plug in my car, I want to charge it. It’s as simple as that. this app concept is not user or driver friendly. It throttles your speed for no apparent reason or benefit. The two major music venues in Los Angeles use these chargers. In the four hours I am parked and at an opera, I should attain a fairly full charge. Not with this app. There are questions a vehicle engineer would know, but not an ordinary driver. How many kilowatts do I want? How should I know. How many miles do I want? Oops, guess that’s not attainable without loading $10. How long will I park there? *That* I can answer, but not until this app refuses to alter or sometimes does alter my two previous responses, only an app developer could tell me why. The future of charging is user friendly, plug in and power. The charging systems that will get ahead in our EV future are the ones that benefit the driver—this app will not be part of that green revolution.

PowerFlex is close to useless and the chargers themselves are unreliable and don’t communicate with PowerFlex 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 this app hardware stopped a charging session, but PowerFlex 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.
- PowerFlex doesn’t communicate well with the hardware. At one point PowerFlex 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.

PowerFlex upgraded automatically a couple of days ago. When I started using it this morning, the charge station didn’t work. I tried to restart app , log out login and add fund to the account. I also changed a few parking spots but never worked. I called the support number. The support engineer can’t resolve the problem. He saw my session in the backend and station was ready to deliver power. We ended up with the conclusion that my car could have some issue.

I drove to supercharge and charged successfully. Apparently my car is ok. Then, I drove to a different this app station and tried again. I saw similar issue. The session seemed established but my car still reported charging equipment was not ready. I clicked ending session button and started answering a call. Surprisingly, the station started delivering power without a session. I was charging for free.

It is apparently an app bug introduced by the upgrade. I highly suspect that there are not enough tests before release.

It’s a huge hassle to set PowerFlex up. I don’t want to answer multiple screens of questions or give you my personal details just to charge my car for an hour or two. Why do you need to know what year my car is or my email address? If it were just payment via Apple Pay and entering how many kWh I need, we’d collectively save so much time.

This is not a standard ChargePoint or Supercharger port. PowerFlex forces you to register, predetermine how much time and electricity you want, AND prepay before you even plug in. The minimum $10 preload may not be enough, so it then asks you to preload more a second time. By the time you discover the plug doesn't fit and you don't have an adapter, you may already be out $60. Ridiculous.

Old version works fine without any issues, 3.x update made PowerFlex stuck at loading screen forever.

Incredibly clunky app that takes forever to start up, scan and start charging. PowerFlex will inevitably ask for more money. Then you have to start over. And money increments 10/25? Obviously that will allow them to have at least $20 of your money as a cushion. Of course you can’t just pay at the end of each session as if it’s a normal transaction like Uber or any other normal app.

Yet another addition to my folder of EV charging apps that just waste my time. Found a charger, and had 15 minutes before an event to set up an account and start a charge session. Could not complete this in time. How is it so difficult to do this? How does it make any sense to ask me how much charge I want, and then not allow me to charge because I set too many miles for the $10 I just loaded into my account? Why not just start charging? Why are so many chargers that require internet access in garages with no cell reception? Finally I managed to extract $1 of electricity and now I have 9 bucks tied up with this stupid app.

Please, EV apps, get it together

Extremely annoying to use. Used the stupid wallet based system to extract more money out of you.
Chargers are way overpriced. The worst part is you set your preferences to charge and if you’re going to go over your wallet limit can’t just charge you have to jump through some dumb hoops to edit your “charging preferences”. IT WONT LET YOU START OTHERWISE. ITS TOO DUMB TO JUST STOP CHARGING AT THE LIMIT. Its 2022 and PowerFlex is the worst. Just let me plug in you dumb app.

All my info including my vehicle make and model are in PowerFlex . I have a plug-in hybrid that only needs about 17 kW of energy to be fully charged. No matter how I set PowerFlex following their FAQs I can never get a full charge on one session. I called up helpline and the people there are responsive, but they bottom line, can’t tell me anyway to get this thing to charge my car and half a day. Every other charger charges my car at fastest rate it provides but this thing tries to be more clever than it needs to be. The people at Support have all kinds of reasons why this doesn’t work the way it should but,bottom line it, doesn’t work the way a car charger should.

By far the worst EV charging experience I’ve ever had for the reasons below.

1) You have to specify ahead of time how long you want to charge. They ask for so many details many of which I didn’t know. Complicated and time consuming.

2) You have to pre-pay for all of your charging. You cannot just have a card on file. This in my opinion is predatory. In reality you’re never going to perfectly charge to $10. They just want to keep you hooked with that remaining balance.

3) You have to pay through a web portal. Why?? It’s janky and likely less secure.

4) Going back to point one, they’re collecting an awful lot of data. Is it all necessary? I truthfully can’t say but it makes me suspicious. Why do they need to know so much about my vehicle?

I have used other non tesla stations before and never faced complications. Since we were traveling abroad on a vacation we were in a hurry. I preloaded PowerFlex with enough amount for single full charge and more. When I plugged the charger to my car it said the amount wasn't enough. We added some more $ to PowerFlex . We were in a hurry to catch the flight and couldn’t manage to get the charger working. When installing such systems in an airport, it needs to be taken into account that people might be in hurry. How can someone design a system which just blocks peoples money.

this app is fine and does its job, but it is so much more complex for no reason than others I’ve tried such as Electrify America and ChargePoint.

I just dislike that you have to outline every detail of charging to have access. Why do u need to tell PowerFlex that you want 100 miles added to my car when in reality I should just be able to tell it to fill it up and leave.

Really wish there was an option for that based on my make and model.

this app has the worst success rate of any charging network I have used over the past year. It also charges a service fee every time you plug in, which it doesn’t mention until you have already given them money. Bad business model and unreliable service - the latter being the biggest deal breaker. I suggest avoiding this network if at all possible.

After the new update it requires numerous steps to start charging 3-4 instead of 2 before. This makes things needlessly complex. Additionally, now it is more difficult the sync the connection to my car with charger activation. Had almost no issues before. Now, it is terrible. Just give up and go back to what worked. There is no need to keep bailing a sinking ship.

With the latest “upgrade” we now have to tell PowerFlex how much energy we want and how quickly. I get the spirit, but usually the answer is, fill me up as fast as possible, I need range to get home. And when I perform the calculations and give a time, I’m either told it will take more time than I have or that something went wrong. If you want us to do the math, we need to know the max power output of the charger (tell us!!) … but really there should be a fast-as-possible option. Grrrr.

Why does PowerFlex require all these settings to start a charge? Time of charge and every amount, just let me plug in and activate. Depending on the info you put the charge can purposely slow down so you only get 5 miles an hour instead of 27 miles. Then why does PowerFlex never show status after 9pm? I sometimes use CCS and with only one per location I prefer to know if it’s available before I leave. In terms of the chargers they are awesome but PowerFlex is honestly junk

So frustrating that I skipped charging. There is no pay as you go option. PowerFlex wanted me to estimate how much power I was going to use in advance and then preload credit to my account. Why not just charge a credit card based on actual usage? I don’t want to load up an account with more money than I need to spend because I have no idea how long it will be until I need to use PowerFlex again.

If you have to use it, you have to use it, but every step of using PowerFlex is either confusing or tedious. PowerFlex has one job, and that is to turn on the charger for my car and that should take a quick login and a couple taps. Instead it’s a serious of confusing steps that I have to read and guess about. Buttons that I’m supposed to tap are greyed out so they don’t look like they would work. It’s definitely in the bottom ranking of the various charging apps I have to use from time to time.

I do notice that they added faceid login so that’s probably gonna be better.

PowerFlex is hard to use, if you want to change the requested miles into be middle of a charging session, sometimes it won’t take your input and keep using a previous value, and complain you won’t have sufficient fund in your account

I’m not sure why the developers felt the need to update something that wasn’t broken. The update made PowerFlex worse. PowerFlex logs off more than usual now and when I’m charging, I can’t see how much has been spent so far. Also I’m not sure if it’s the apps fault but I had a charge stop which never happened before the update.

Parked at LAX for a 1 week trip. Why does PowerFlex require desired energy and charge duration? Configured to charge 31 kW and put in max charge duration of 24 hours and 59 minutes for my 1 week trip. After about 18 hours, I remotely paused the charging on my Tesla app. However after 24 hours, the this app app ended my charging session. I had no way to restart my charge session remotely, so i had to eventually turn off sentry. Why is the charge duration only limited to 24 hours? What about people who take 1-2 week vacations and park there for 2 weeks? For charge preferences, it should only be desired energy and let the tesla app control the starting and pausing the charge. Also, you guys need to allow restart of the charging session remotely.

PowerFlex takes way to ling to communicate with the server, even at some of their flagship locations. You can’t count on connecting when you really need to charge. The concept is great, and if they improve the networking issues 4 stars would be easy to give.

I parked my car in a spot and it says free just use PowerFlex. It’s not charging and they keep trying to charge my Credit card $50. I called support and they were friendly and they fixed the issue.

App response says the put hold on credit card till charging done. But it’s free - should know not to charge -Period.

What is this fleet mode and why is it automatically turning on every time I launch PowerFlex ? It does nothing and just gives a red x next to my car. Can’t turn off this default action??

1) Why do I have a notification icon on PowerFlex all the time?
2) Why does PowerFlex not tell me that the charge is finished (when I use “continue charge” but the vehicle is 100% charges)? As a result, coworkers don’t move their car because they don’t know it’s done.

First used PowerFlex /chargers at LAX. Didn’t know ahead of time what charging vendor the airport used. Took a while to download and set up then add funds then tell PowerFlex how much energy I wanted to use. Very confusing and time consuming. Now they have them at my work, replaced perfectly fine Blink chargers, though to PF credit, a bit less expensive to charge compared to Blink. Still though confusing to start charging as it asks you how much energy, miles or duration you want to charge. I just want to plug in and go and let it stop charging when the car is full(Tesla set to 90%). Please fix this.

You don’t find out about the two dollar charging fee until you download PowerFlex 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.

I had a few hiccups when I first started using it and initially gave a negative review. I have since been pleasantly surprised by their responsiveness and help to explain what happened and even provide a solution to overcome a problem with my phone. I actually got a call back and spoke with someone.

My complaints about the Mar ‘24 update have been addressed via operational changes at this app. So I’ve upgraded my star rating.

this app is the most economical option to charge a car in Bay Area! Mine is a hybrid so it takes almost 3 hrs to charge and it costs only $1.50 max..
prefer this app to any other charging service operator like ChargePoint, EVgo, etc

I always use PowerFlex for my changing needs.

Love the new app. The prior one was fine but this one checks all the boxes. I am huge fan of this app’s unique approach to load balancing, which is good for the grid.

I made a mistake setting up my charge session and desperately needed fast help to get home. The support person was able to find my charger and get it going to save me. Super helpful.

I use the chargers at Egan frequently. Could be more streamlined but does its job.

Upgrades over time have improved PowerFlex tremendously and it’s a way to interact with the charging stations on their network.

The new app is a great improvement. I’ve been able to initiate charging sessions in under 30s while other apps tend to make it more painful and time-consuming for first-time drivers.

PowerFlex does what it needs to do. The interface is clean and aesthetically pleasing. I’m looking forward to the pay-as-you-go feature. The this app team is very responsive and constantly updating PowerFlex , which is a great sign!

UPDATE: PowerFlex is back to normal again. I no longer have any complaints.

PowerFlex was perfectly fine then there was an update and can no longer use this to scan charger port. Can’t add funds or initiate anything for charging. Kinda wish they just change it back.

I was having an issue with my phone and I thought it was PowerFlex . I called the this app customer service line and they quickly helped me set up my phone correctly, and I was charging within a minute.

The new app is a huge improvement. this app is different than the rest of the charging companies out there and that’s reflected a little in the complexity of their app. The upgrades on this new version make the charging preferences and such optional and way more intuitive. Really looking forward to the pay as you go payment option.

While I’m glad the new UI looks great - the charging sites where I’m eligible for a discounted rate per kWh now just shows regular price - have to test if it even charges regular rate old app use to show the discounted rate

Very quick response from developers - Changing to 5 stars for promptly fixing the issue.

App could definitely use a facelift, the design is outdated. But it always works well for me and the stations are reliable, which I can’t say about most of the other EV charging companies

Worked

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. PowerFlex 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 PowerFlex ? I don’t know but I am pretty happy with this service so far.