Ten years after its first Supercharger site opened, Tesla is undeniably the gold standard for EV fast charging. Drive up, plug in, then stay only as long as your car suggests to gain another 200-plus miles of range. It’s easy, seamless, and now all but ubiquitous in the United States.
Drivers of any other EV brand face a very different landscape because no other automaker has invested in building a dedicated charging infrastructure network for its customers as Tesla has. They’ve done nothing to install significant public charging infrastructure; instead, they outsourced that responsibility to a mishmash of public charging networks and sites. Most offer slower Level 2 charging, providing eight to 25 miles per charging hour, which won’t get you far on a road trip. Only Electrify America and EVgo offer substantial numbers of DC fast-charging stations—and the reliability of those sites themselves is disturbingly variable. But, as automakers ramp up to build and sell vastly more electric cars, one has finally started to focus on public charging unreliability—because it understands shoddy networks threaten its plan to build and sell EVs at a profit. The public charging grievances number far and wide—a few of which will be examined here—but things aren’t completely hopeless.
Over the last year, Ford has publicly recognized that bad on-road charging experiences (and the resulting social media) are a significant headwind to EV acceptance among the public at large. It’s made several aggressive moves to address the frustration of its EV buyers, including the painstaking task of locating problems in a charging network’s chargers one by one and leaning hard on the network to fix them. Whether its efforts will permanently improve things remains to be seen, but it’s good to see a legacy automaker finally step up and focus on the real problem.
More EV buyers, less familiarity
If you haven’t yet experienced it, charging anywhere outside of your home’s built-in charger or select parts of California can be pretty bleak. Public chargers are still hit-or-miss. I spend a good part of my professional life around EVs, public chargers, and talking to EV drivers about both, and I’ve noticed the problem seems to be exacerbated by newer EVs that boast longer range and whose drivers largely charge at home overnight. Paradoxically, unfamiliarity with on-road charging may have worsened as these longer-range EVs hit the market.
A Nissan Leaf driver, for example, with 74 or 107 available miles might regularly opt for a few hours of opportunistic public charging while shopping to boost the car’s range. And they would be less likely to undertake a 300-mile road trip in such a low-range EV to start with.
The driver of a newer 300-mile EV, however, might be more confident on a longer road trip, but that trip may be the only time they think about public charging. That’s because 80 percent of households that can afford a new car are able to charge at home, meaning the bulk of EV miles today come from overnight charging in a garage or driveway. So when these drivers finally do use public charging, it may be for that tense, time-critical family road trip to Grandma’s for the holidays. And that is absolutely not the time to learn how public charging works in the real world.
As things are today, almost every non-Tesla EV driver will sooner or later arrive at a charging station that’s dead, damaged, offline, or providing current at slower-than-advertised rates.
One cable in four won’t work
How bad is the problem? It’s hard to say definitively, as charging networks largely don’t release reliability data, but a new study from the University of California-Berkeley offered one glimpse of the problem. It looked at all 181 non-Tesla DC fast-charging sites in the San Francisco Bay Area, totaling 657 connectors. Overall, just 72.5 percent of those connectors worked, with this defined as being able to charge an EV for two minutes.
Cables didn’t work for a wide variety of reasons, including “unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors,” according to the study. Though some questions about methodology remain open, a random sample retested 10 days later found no improvement. As the study noted further, drily, “This level of functionality appears to conflict with the 95 to 98 [percent] uptime reported by the EV service providers.”
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