Matt Hirsch has He’s long loved the idea of electric vehicles and first rented his Hyundai Ioniq in 2020. He even installed a charger right next to the driveway of his suburban Boston home, where he does most of his recharging. But lately, the relationship has been on the rocks.
Sometimes he takes longer trips, requiring him to use multiple apps and websites to accurately map out charging stations during his trip so he doesn’t get caught without charge. A frequent drive, to a brother’s New York home, often takes him to a station run by Electrify America in the Massachusetts town of Chicopee — where he often finds some, if not all, four available plugs broken.
It’s an upsetting situation for Hirsch, and he’s concerned about the effects broken and slow chargers will have on the country’s wider electrification project. “It’s hard to convince someone to change their behavior unless [the alternative] is much easier and much cheaper,” he says. At the moment, this does not always apply to electric cars. Range anxiety, the fear of being stuck somewhere without a charge, has kept some Americans from seriously considering electric cars as a viable option. They fear that a charging blunder will leave them stranded on the side of the road.
More than a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector. Policymakers argue that mass adoption of electric cars will be vital to combating climate change. Last summer, the Biden administration made it a national goal to have electric vehicles represent 40 percent of all car sales by 2030. many more charging stations. The vast majority of electric vehicle drivers today charge at home and the country has nearly 46,500 public fast chargers, which can typically charge a battery in 20 to 30 minutes to fill the gaps. But by 2030, it will take 180,000 to cover more of the US, the International Council on Clean Transportation predicts. Plus 856,000 additional Level 2 chargers, which are cheaper to install but take longer to charge a car.
US governments – states, municipalities and especially the federal government – seem willing to spend a lot of money to get there. California, whose governor has promised to phase out sales of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building its charging network. New York has pledged nearly a billion dollars for the effort. A federal infrastructure law passed last year spent $5 billion on a network of half a million chargers along highways.
But based on their track record, it’s not clear whether any of those new chargers will last as long as they need to. It is difficult to find definitive data on the maintenance of public electric vehicle chargers, or how current chargers perform in the wild. Chargers companies tend to say they have a nationwide “uptime” of 95 to 98 percent, an industry term that means the technology is charging or ready to charge. But talk to an electric vehicle owner for a while and you’ll likely hear complaints about slow or broken chargers.
A recent survey of 181 public charging stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, funded in part by the nonprofit Cool the Earth, suggests that 23 percent of them may be “non-functioning” at some point, hampered by broken screens, bad credit card credit. or payment systems, network connection errors or damaged plugs. Only half of the functional chargers tested by the research team completed a payment transaction with just one swipe of a credit card. “A 50 percent success rate in any other retail transaction wouldn’t be considered acceptable, and it shouldn’t be happening here,” Patty Monahan, a California Energy Commission commissioner, said at an industry meeting earlier this month. A survey of EV drivers by a California agency found that more than a third of them, and nearly 60 percent of those who said they used public chargers, had encountered non-functioning chargers. Sixteen percent had run into payment problems. Nearly half should have called customer service for a charger issue.
