We have a Nissan Ariya and currently DON’T have a home charger (yet — waiting on solar which is another boondoggle for another post). As we live in a town with abundant EVGo chargers (and the Ariya came with 1 yr of free EVGo charging), we thought we could manage.
When it works, its amazing. But it doesn’t … a frustrating proportion of the time. And, as a result, we’ve become oddly superstitious about which chargers we go to and when.
I’m glad the charging companies are aware and are trying to address the problem. As someone who’s had to ship and support product, I also recognize that creating charging infrastructure in all kinds of settings which need to handle all kinds of electric vehicles is not trivial.
But, it’s damn frustrating to not be able to count on these (rest assured, we will be installing our own home charger soon), so I do hope that future Federal monies will have strict uptime requirements and penalties. Absent this, vehicle electrification becomes incredibly difficult outside of the surburban homeowner market.
J.D. Power reported in August that 20 percent of all non-Tesla EV drivers in its most recent study said they visited a charger but did not charge their vehicle, whether because the charger was inoperable or because of long wait times to use it, up from 15 percent in the first quarter of 2021.
Fear of inadequate public charging has now overtaken “range anxiety” as the chief concern about EVs among the car-buying public, according to J.D. Power. “Although the majority of EV charging occurs at home” — about 80 percent of it, according to industry data — “public charging needs to provide a much better experience across the board, not just for the users of today, but also to alleviate the concerns of skeptical future customers,” said Brent Gruber, executive director of J.D. Power’s global automotive practice.
EV chargers have a big reliability problem. Can the government fix it?
Jeff St. John | Canary Media
