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Drivers may be less worried about EV battery range than before, but they remain concerned about the ways charging can go awry.
A new study spanning 20,000 chargers and 19 million data points homes in on some of the biggest issues with the public charging experience in the US—and, crucially for speeding up EV adoption, how to fix them.
The analysis was conducted by ChargerHelp, an EV equipment company that provides charging station repairs and maintenance.
The findings indicate that actual charger uptime is often lower than reported; that there’s significant variation in charger reliability by state and charging network; and that standardized reliability metrics are “crucial for improving uptime,” among other conclusions.
ChargerHelp conducted a point-in-time assessment of more than 4,800 charge points to see if reported uptime matched drivers’ actual experience. The company found that 26.3% of test charges failed. The report also cites external data indicating that actual uptime averages about 84%—lower than the 92% that stations report.
“The biggest [takeaway] for us was continuing to see the disparity between what the stations say about themselves…versus the reality on the ground when our technicians or when drivers are interacting with the stations in person,” Walter Thorn, ChargerHelp’s SVP of product and strategy, told Tech Brew.
Needless to say, these types of discrepancies can create a frustrating experience for drivers—especially those who are about to run out of juice.
The report also identified the lack of interoperability as “the overarching threat to system reliability and broader EV adoption in the United States.” In other words, it’s nowhere near as seamless as it should be to charge on different networks, with different types of connectors, or to pay on one network’s app but charge on a different one.
The number of public EV charging ports is growing quickly, the report notes, having doubled in the last three years to more than 175,000 as of April. EV sales, too, are growing; they were up more than 50% YoY in 2023.
To help accelerate the clean-energy transition, ChargerHelp advocates for better data accessibility and standardized data reporting protocols, among other steps.
“For the EV market to continue to flourish,” Kameale Terry, ChargerHelp’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement, “we need to work to ensure true uptime is the norm through a standardized and more synchronized approach to data, maintenance, and communication networks.”