Study finds EV chargers unusable more than advertised - Article

[Tooney]

A University of California, Berkley study of EV chargers in California found that they are unusable more often than advertised. Fast charger companies say that they have over 95 percent uptime. The study showed the number to be around 77 percent.

Electric Vehicle Charger Study 'Flawed', Says Electrify America

https://www.newsweek.com/electric-vehicle-charger-study-flawed-says-electrify-america-1714818

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[Jhenson29]

@nickmdp time to drop your clip again.

 

[nickmdp]

@nickmdp time to drop your clip again.

Ha, it would seem to apply here as well.



That said, I took a look at the study itself, and EA at the very least doesn't seem that bad:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4077554

In short, 73.9% of chargers were working, 7.1% of cables weren't long enough, and 10.6% of cases had payment or charge initialization errors. I suspect that most of us won't have trouble with short cables, but the bigger problem I had is that plug and charge was explicitly not used for some reason. Hard to say if it would actually make much difference, but it seems silly to not even try to use it.

 

[FrozenRobert]

In my city (around 1.1 million people) here in Canada, there are 100+ L2 chargers, varying from 50kW to 250kW -- including the usual culprits (FLO, ChargePoint, SunCity, Tesla, etc.) ... I have informally visited many of them and found about 50% probability that any particular site will work when I arrive,

The local Porsche dealer is too far away on the other side of town for me to use their charger -- plus, the local VW dealer has a L3 charger that is eternally broken.

Hence I plug in at home 99% of the time. My fixed electricity rate is cheaper anyway, unless I happen upon a free charger (I secretly know where these are and frequently grab a few kWh when I can ... such satisfaction of getting $0.70 of free juice!)

 

[whitex]

A University of California, Berkley study of EV chargers in California found that they are unusable more often than advertised. Fast charger companies say that they have over 95 percent uptime. The study showed the number to be around 77 percent.

Electric Vehicle Charger Study 'Flawed', Says Electrify America

https://www.newsweek.com/electric-vehicle-charger-study-flawed-says-electrify-america-1714818

"Fast charger companies say over 95% uptime" usually means some PR or marketing guy pulled a number out of thin air because it looks good. Do you think it is a coincidence that Twitter claims less than 5% bots (therefore over 95% human users)? 95% is a marketing number which is used when they obviously know average users will encounter the problem, therefore saying 99% would be too easy to disprove. To disprove 100% uptime you just have to find one which doesn't work. To disprove prove 95% one would have to visit many chargers, which most average users will not do.

 

[TDinDC]

This reminds me of the conclusions of so many seemingly silly scientific studies: “Study finds that bunnies like to “back it up””

(just teasing about the title . . . This type of study should ultimately help all of us).

 

[porsche_coyote]

Ha, it would seem to apply here as well.



That said, I took a look at the study itself, and EA at the very least doesn't seem that bad:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4077554

In short, 73.9% of chargers were working, 7.1% of cables weren't long enough, and 10.6% of cases had payment or charge initialization errors. I suspect that most of us won't have trouble with short cables, but the bigger problem I had is that plug and charge was explicitly not used for some reason. Hard to say if it would actually make much difference, but it seems silly to not even try to use it.

As someone who participated in gathering data for the study, I can answer this question: most cars don't support Plug & Charge, including my 2020 Taycan Turbo which I used for all of my data collection for the study. The study required us to attempt using a credit card to pay because not every driver has an account with every charge network, and (not surprisingly) a lot of EV novices expect to use a DCFC much like they'd use a gas pump--with their credit card.

And you're right that EA was the 'least bad' of all of the providers. In my own experience, the EA chargers worked 100% of the time, while my worst experiences were with ChargePoint (100% failure rate).

It was eye-opening for me because I had been using a small set of chargers that I realized I had chosen based on reliability ratings. For a driver who is just trusting their nav system to guide them to a working charger, the experience could be quite a bit different.

The real motivation behind the study is to try and push for better performance standards as more charging infrastructure is expected to be built with public funds over the next couple of years. I believe that this is a worthy goal, as the 'uptime' stat is basically useless BS.

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