Owners of the popular home EV chargers made by Juicebox are about to lose a whole lot of features. Its owner, the energy company Enel X, has just announced that it is leaving the North American market entirely as of October 11.
Enel X says its strategy will be to pursue “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.” And since it does not have an electricity business in the US, merely a charging hardware and software one, it makes little sense to remain active here.
The company also blames high interest rates and a cooling EV market as reasons for its exit.
Enel X says Juicebox residential hardware will continue to work, so if you’ve been using one to charge at home, you can keep plugging it in. But Enel X is ending all software support—there will be no updates, and it’s removing its apps, so online functions like scheduling a charge will no longer work.
Commercial charging stations will be worse affected—according to Enel X, these “will lose functionality in the absence of software continuity.” The company also says its customer support is no longer available, effective immediately, and any questions or claims should be directed to juiceboxnorthamerica.com.
There is actually a lot to unpack here. Their app it atrocious and losing it is not a terrible loss for me (actually the useless notifications: "charging is about to start" immediately followed by "charging" will be nice to lose).
BUT there are some critical functions that are software tied. The biggest one is if your charger can potentially deliver more power than the branch circuit to which it is attached (i.e. if you have a 48 amp charger on a 40 amp circuit) you need to use the software to derate the charger so that it limits charging to an amount valid for your circuit. My car, at least, doesn't offer a way to do that for L2 charging (although oddly it does for L1).
Additionally, when I bought it, it was advertised that you could place two of them on a single branch circuit and they would negotiate in a way to prevent exceeding the circuit capacity. This was done via the cloud rather than peer-to-peer, so I imaging that will be completely broken and any owner relying on that is out of luck.
As someone else mentioned: time of day charging will be broken unless you can set that up in your car, which would likely be much less convenient (as in that would affect all chargers, not just your one at home)