https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/07...nt-get-better/
Electric cars are doomed if fast charger reliability doesn’t get better
If every driver has a horror story about charging, adoption is going to stall.
Jonathan M. Gitlin - 7/13/2022, 6:20 PM
In many regards, electric vehicles are clearly better than the internal combustion engine-powered relatives they will eventually replace. They're quieter, they rattle and vibrate less, they accelerate faster, and they're much more efficient because they can recover energy under braking. And their batteries should last for the life of the car as well as a gasoline engine does. But I'm increasingly convinced that EV adoption is going to run into real problems if we can't get a handle on charger reliability.
Even the biggest EV enthusiasts can't ignore the fact that it takes a lot longer to recharge a battery than fill a tank with liquid hydrocarbons—even when that battery is connected to a very high-voltage DC fast charger. For about two-thirds of American car buyers—those who have somewhere at home to charge overnight—this isn't a problem most of the time. On average, people only drive 29 miles a day, so even short-range EVs should actually meet the needs of most drivers.
That's the purely rational take, anyway.
But it's impossible to divorce oneself from the cultural context of the car, now tightly bound to the American sense of identity following decades of post-war construction that reshaped our built environment to prioritize the individual driver against all others. A car means freedom—being able to travel from coast to coast on a whim—and stopping to charge every 150–250 miles becomes an impediment to that freedom. And the fact remains that in 2022, if you want to travel far enough that you need to plug in during your trip, you're in for a headache.
Just plan first, right?
At this point, some of the more EV-comfortable readers might be thinking, "Nah, you just need to plan properly." Certainly, proper planning is essential, and often the most direct route is not possible due to charging station locations. Thankfully, there are some helpful apps like PlugShare and A Better Route Planner that make planning relatively simple—at least compared to the old days of paper road atlases—and most EVs' onboard navigation systems are aware of chargers. Many will also take your efficiency into account to route you most efficiently to your destination via charging stops.
Finding a charger isn't actually the problem, though, even if it adds another 50 miles to your road trip. According to the Department of Energy's Alternative Fueling Station Locator, there are 1,433 Tesla Supercharger locations and another 4,564 public DC fast charger locations that use the CCS plug, which will charge basically every EV on sale other than a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf.
Between networks like Electrify America and plans from the White House, as a nation, we're spending billions on expanding EV charging infrastructure.
No, the problem is whether or not any of the chargers will be working when you arrive. (Unless you're driving a Tesla, since Superchargers are painless to use and appear to be extremely reliable.)
Man plans, universe laughs
And at this point, I owe the universe an apology. A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published a piece about an EV road trip gone awry. The headline says it all: "I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping."
As a smug EV evangelist and self-proclaimed EV expert, I rolled my eyes. "They just didn't plan well enough," I thought to myself, not realizing I was merely hoisting myself on my own petard. A few weeks later, it was time to drive from DC to Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of New York, this time in a BMW iX. And despite plenty of planning, I still spent almost as much time stationary, arguing with charging machinery, as I did actually pulling electrons into the car's battery pack throughout the 600-mile journey.
At each charging stop, in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, I ran into problems. A five-minute wait to see if the car and charger would establish communications was invariably the case. Waiting 10 minutes was not uncommon. Even then, there was no time to relax; more than once, an error somewhere in the loop shut everything down after just a few kWh.
Only one of six charging stops was painless, and I found similar problems whether the station was operated by Electrify America or Shell Recharge. Frustration often got the better of me and I berated the white monoliths, channeling the spirit of Basil Fawlty to summon down all manner of ills upon them and their circuitry, to my shame. (But seriously, it's all just so opaque. Why don't they just bloody work?)
Then there was the problem of whether or not all of the chargers at a given location were even functional. At one EA station with a Plugshare rating of 9.8, two of four chargers were completely inoperable and a third was reduced to just 50 kW. Four days later, nothing had changed other than its Plugshare rating, which had increased by 0.2 points to the maximum score of 10, with a note in italics about the reduced-power machine.
If you're lucky, you get to the charger when no one else is around, and maybe you're recharging your battery before the third anxious EV arrives on the scene and joins the wait. More likely, you're on the phone with tech support. Hopefully you're not shouting at the gizmos.
Both Electrify America's and Shell Recharge's technical people are looking into their data to see if they can find anything specific about any or all of the problems. The most useful piece of technical advice came from the person on the other end of the EA support phone line.
The representative told me to hold the charging handle up once it was connected to the car rather than let the weight of the cable pull it down. The CCS cable and handle are hefty old things, much larger than the more elegant Supercharger plug. I'm beginning to think it's too heavy, or maybe carmakers are not making their charge ports robust enough, because I think a lot of these communication errors come from the plug weighing down and one or more pins losing their connection.
(Other drivers trying unsuccessfully to charge their own EVs at the same time received similar advice, which suggests it's not just a problem with the BMW's socket.)
These are all anecdotes, of course, but add in the WSJ's experience and the litany of stories cataloged in this piece at Autoweek, and it's obvious there's a real problem here.
97 percent uptime is the goal. I wonder what the current industry average is?
Ford is taking a proactive approach to the problem with its Charge Angels initiative. This involves a fleet of EVs that visit chargers that are part of the Ford Pass network (which combines 13,500 chargers from multiple operators) and show up in the navigation or mobile app for a Mustang Mach-E, F-150 Lightning, or E-Transit.
"What we have is a fleet of vehicles out in public, charging. We've got a couple of different vehicle data recorders on them and they're capturing data live. We're doing charge authentication for the Ford Pass app. We're doing it through plug-and-charge [also known as ISO 15118]. We're doing it through credit card, and we're doing it through the charge network's app—through all the authentication methods," said Matt Stover, Ford's director for charging and energy services.
Ford takes that data and combines it with information from all the Ford EVs already on the roads, allowing the company to give a reliability score to every charger that a Ford customer has used to recharge. If a score drops too low, Ford stops that charger from showing up in the Ford Pass network and has words with its operator to get things fixed. That's no doubt extremely useful if you drive a Ford EV but perhaps of less use to everyone who doesn't.
For its part, the New York Power Authority, which works with EA, Shell, and other networks to provide charging around the state under the Evolve NY program, told Ars that its current service agreements with those companies list a requirement for at least 95 percent uptime, but it's working to increase that to 97–98 percent over the long term. And 97 percent is the uptime requirement for chargers that will be built as part of the federal government's Interstate charging network.
I sincerely hope we achieve that because otherwise, the EV-curious are going to continue to be scared off by stories like mine. And the WSJ's. And the ones in that Autoweek article.
Electric cars are doomed if fast charger reliability doesn’t get better
