I’ve been driving an electric car since 2018. Tesla’s in-vehicle navigation system is pretty good, but there are a lot of things it could do better. Enter A Better Route Planner (ABRP). It’s a web app and mobile app that plans routes for EVs. It supports many more EVs than just Teslas. It lets you specify a lot of things about which chargers you’re willing to use, and it has a much broader database of chargers than Tesla’s internal app. It saves routes. It saves information about your drives and your energy use. It was fundamentally a really good route planner.
Until it wasn’t.
For its most important features to work, ABRP needs to connect with your EV. The connection is supposed to be persistent, but for the past couple of years, about half the time I go to use ABRP the connection with the car has been broken, which means it hasn’t been collecting data and it can’t do route planning. I have a paid subscription, and there was a time I could get tech support, though they just kept putting me off. I could disconnect the car and reconnect it, which would solve the problem for a day or three. I was really busy, and they kept telling me that they thought the problem was fixed but, a few days later, there it was again. Now, the button to unlink the car does absolutely nothing, and you can’t re-link it because it’s already linked. They’ve made the “contact support” interface impossible. The “Documentation” button leads to docs that were created long before the now-much-shittier user interface was revised, so none of the instructions actually work. Their “support” now consists of a public forum — that’s where all the rest of the buttons lead. It pops up a new pop-up window (“look how l337 and cool I am! I added a pop-up to our web site!!!!! I rock!!1!!”) but the pop-up lacks navigation elements, so it’s almost impossible to navigate the site. Oh, and there’s an AI chatbot of course, which echos the mistakes of the documentation and just repeats the same advice over and over, even when told that it isn’t working. And it allows about 80 characters of input before obscuring the text area so that you have to type blind. And when I posted my show-stopping bug? Four days later, my post is still held up in moderation. So first they punt support to their “community,” and then they have to heavily moderate it: no doubt because they get too many “your product is seriously broken, are you ever going to fix it?” posts that they don’t want the public to see.
So they just take your money, and when there product is unusable they just blow you off. I realize that handling customer support isn’t sexy, but did you really have to hire third-graders to do your interface?
It’s really sad, as it used to be a small project run by folks who actually seemed to give a damn.
—2p