Electrify American ranked dead last

[RichJ]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/13/electrify-america-ev-charger-broken/

Article in Washington Post about Electrify America.

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[TXAG]

This doesn't surprise me.

 

[hifi239]

No surprise here. They were required to spend $2B on an electric charging network, but somehow, it appears there was no provision that the chargers in that network had to actually work. And the ones that DO work are clogged up with locals taking advantage of the free charging that many manufacturers offer. VW evidently had zero incentive to install and maintain a useful charging network and every incentive to throttle the kW availability they aren't getting paid for.

 

[ben1]

Looks like we are a few steps ahead on charging infrastructure in (western) Europe.

I was in the US 2 times the last 2 years, and I did see charging infrastructure but it did look like it was less extended compared to Europe.

Off course you have a similar Tesla superchargers network. But purely looking at non-Tesla, I did not see extended charging parks like you see with Ionity in France (For example a parking lot of a comercial center with 18 ionity chargers) or a fastcharger in almost every other highway fuel station (like Fastned in the Netherlands and Flanders).
Or car parks of companies with +20 AC chargers.

I hate to say it as a more right-wing oriented person, but it is maybe a good example where the government stimulated the free market by strict government rules. (like forcing tesla to use CCS, pushing EV's fiscally, setting targets on local governments to install chargers,....)

 

[FlyingPoint]

Perhaps EA can sell itself to Tesla (or more likely pay Tesla to take it off their hands) as Tesla has proven it can build and maintain their charging network.

 

[kort]

water is wet, almost all of us are aware of how bad EA can be

 

[Tooney]

I finally got access to the text of the WaPo article.
It refers to results from a study of chargers in SF Bay Area issued 20 months ago. And it shares anecdotes from a couple of users.
Old "news".
If you don't have access to this WaPo article, you haven't missed anything.

 

[Mamba_Green]

When traveling in the Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas area, EA is the only network available on the highways. I use it locally only because of the 3-year charging subsidy from Porsche. Generally works fine, but charging speed is low. Over several months of Aug thru Dec 2023 the average speed of charge is 85.5 kW. I typically charge from 45 to 85% SoC at EA in this time period. So ... while EA has good availably to me locally, I think the charge rate is underwhelming.

 

[gnop1950]

I finally got access to the text of the WaPo article.
It refers to results from a study of chargers in SF Bay Area issued 20 months ago. And it shares anecdotes from a couple of users.
Old "news".
If you don't have access to this WaPo article, you haven't missed anything.

I don't have access to the WaPo article, but if it quoted the study you posted EA actually had the best functionality rate of the top three service providers tested: 73.9% for EA versus 72.7% for EVgo and 47.7% for ChargePoint.

They also mentioned that if you considered both connectors at the EA chargers (you can only use one at a time) then EA's service rate would have gone up to 77.1%.

20 months is a long time in this business so I'm not sure I'd give much weight to the article and the additional anecdotal evidence I couldn't access.

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