Problems with charging stations threaten adoption of EVs

EV charging stations (Photo by Andrew Hawkins, The Verge)

The effort to shift Americans to electric vehicles has a big obstacle: unreliable charging stations. In rural areas, that's a bigger problem, because rural stations are in short supply. More than one in five EV users report that they have been unable to find a station at one time or another, and the number is rising as EVs become more common, according to surveys by J.D. Power.

"Parts break, information screens freeze, payment systems malfunction. Copper thieves steal the cords. Vandals damage charging plugs or, in one infamous instance, stuff them with ground meat," reports David Baker of Bloomberg News. "Nascent networks mean that if the machines at one station aren’t working, there may not be another nearby."

"A decade ago, early EV adopters were willing to put up with unreliable public chargers," Baker writes. "Now, however, the problem threatens President Joe Biden’s EV ambitions. Biden has made electric cars a cornerstone of his climate and economic policies, devoting $5 billion to the buildout of a charging network along major roads and $2.5 billion to charging within communities. The goal is convincing every American driver to go electric. But it’s a leap of faith for many — one they may not be willing to make if they don’t trust that public chargers will work."

“We have to address these issues before we get further along in EV adoption,” Brent Gruber, who oversees automotive research for J.D. Power, told Baker. “The mindset is changing, from the early adopters who expected some bumps in the road, to the mainstream consumer who is not willing to overlook those problems.”

To complicate things, Baker reports, "The precise scope of the problem isn’t known. EV drivers face a complex landscape of competing charging companies, each with its own stations and app, and there is no central repository of data on station performance." Charging companies "acknowledge that the first few waves of public chargers installed over the past 10 years weren’t as dependable as they needed to be" but now "insist they are getting more reliable, not less. Property owners who buy chargers from companies like Blink Charging and ChargePoint often sign service contracts for those companies to maintain or replace the chargers as needed. Gruber said some site owners let those agreements lapse over time, allowing the machines to fall into disrepair."