The Biden administration just unveiled a proposal for some of the most aggressive auto climate rules in the world — the latest step for a White House that has gone all-in on electric vehicles. But America’s EV transition faces a threat few are talking about — not because of high car costs or a lack of automaker support, but the country’s broken and dysfunctional public charging system.
Most EV drivers charge their vehicles at home. But as Americans buy EVs — to the tune of 7 percent of all new vehicle registrations in January — more and more people are finding that the public charging system is unreliable, inconvenient and simply confusing.
“I’ve seen people wait because there are only four chargers and two of them are out of service,” said Bill Ferro, the founder of EVSession, a software firm that tracks charger reliability. “Everything that I’ve seen shows that it’s driving away current and potential EV owners.”
Drivers might show up at a DC-fast charging station — which can fill a vehicle’s battery by 80 percent in about 20 minutes — to find that most of the chargers are broken. Or one might work, but only if the driver installs a particular app on their phone, creates an account and loads money onto it.
Last year, in a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and the climate advocacy group Cool the Earth, researchers tested every single fast charging station in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They found that more than a quarter of the 657 charging points didn’t function during a two-minute charging test. Sometimes the charging cable couldn’t reach the vehicle’s charging port; other times the payment system wouldn’t work; sometimes the charger’s screen was broken or the network was down. READ MORE...
