Originally published at: Home EV charger JuiceBox abruptly stops service in North America - Boing Boing
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…the Enel Group’s strategic approach to e-mobility that pursues further growth by providing bundled offers, including private charging solutions, to its electricity customers as well as by developing public charging infrastructure in countries where it has an electricity retail business.
I assume (naively) that this wretched sentence of corporate-speak does have a verb somewhere in the missing bit that precedes it.
I wonder what that verb is?
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It’s really hard to tell with that PR/management doublespeak but I’d reckon that verb starts with the letter “F” and rhymes with “duck.”
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I’m surprised they didn’t just send out a kill command to all their chargers before pulling the plug on their apps. Unless they forgot to build-in that capability in the first place, which would be a far more logical explanation here in 2024.
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Since this announcement they have backpedaled and emailed this update:
Dear Enel X Way USA, LLC Stakeholder,
Enel X Way USA continues to engage with a third-party firm to manage the closure of the business on October 11, 2024. After further technical evaluation, the firm has entered into an agreement with the current provider to continue to operate the EV charging software in the US and Canada for an extended period. This interim measure will enable the firm to seek a long-term solution for the EV charging platform, with the ultimate goal of maintaining operational continuity for Enel X Way USA customers. While JuiceBox products will continue to operate with software connectivity after October 11, 2024, customer service will not be available during this interim period. The third-party firm will manage claims and communication with stakeholders after October 11, 2024. For more information, please visit: www.LiquidAP.com/currentprojects/juicebox
Enel X Way-related questions and claims should be directed to www.juiceboxnorthamerica.com.
Even without app support the units will still charge vehicles like a typical dumb charger, but we would lose features like scheduling, which most cars can do themselves now anyway, and voltage/current/power/energy monitoring, which already took a big step down in quality when they forced users to switch to a different app a couple of years ago that was much more focused on their commercial charging offerings rather than their home chargers.
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Another reason why the world of interconnected appliances is a terrible world.
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There’s already a collective effort to try to salvage something from the whole mess, called Juice Rescue.
The company I work for does remote management of connected devices, including JuiceBox chargers. The latest update from the head of the team working with those was that we’ll still be able to control them for now, but that we shouldn’t expect anyone at Enel X to answer the phone if we run into a problem.
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We bought something like this a few years back. I wired up a 240V plug in the garage for it. True, it is a dumb charger, but that’s all we needed.
My Juicebox just died, at 12:30 am EST while charging my brand new Equinox. Who says they didn’t just pull the plug? Wtfffff
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Original Juice box devices were actual open source.
Ours used an open source board (you could even buy the bare board, or the populated one, etc). If you wanted the logging/control, plug in an arduino, and compile the provided sketch. We got ours in their case, but sans cable (wanted one longer than they sold) without any issue. Add one of a bunch of third party WiFi cards if you wanted it to IOT.
After about 6 years and 4 Mwh of charging, the contactor decided to have pitted contacts. Getting a replacement part was possible, even cheap.
My how things have changed.
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This is what’s known as rapid enshittifaction
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Yep, there are multiple brands of dumb chargers that will do the job (and when I got an EV I decided to get a dumb charger, the smarts are already in the car, and the real shenanigans happen when you hook up two “smart” devices both expecting to be the “smart one” and only talk to “dumb” things). I’m personally a fan of the Grizzl-E classic, it is more weather resistant then many. Or at least the one that the classic is pretending to be was pretty resistant. Grizzl-E also has a much more costly “smart” model which again I think is basically just a chance to spend extra money on features that either don’t help or will actually get in your way.
The people that bought JuiceBox chargers bought them for extra features (scheduling, and reports mostly). Extra features which will stop working making the 2x to 4x more they paid no longer anything vaguely resembling a good deal.
(as I said the scheduling most cars do at least as well as the chargers, and I doubt anyone that buys one of these things looks at the reports past a month or two…if they do I’m sorry they lost the chance to geek out over whatever they got told)
Cool! Sorry they did a pivot from open to closed with the endpoint of dead…
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