Why are EV charging stations so problem prone?

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Mark W

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What is it about EV charging stations that makes them so prone to be not working? It seems that whenever I see a charging station with more that 2 plugs, at least one of them is not working. My daughter has been using a Nissan Leaf to commute to school. I identified one fast charger between us and school that she could use in case she couldn't get a charge at school. She calls me Friday from school asking about it. I look it up on plugshare and see reports from the past week that it's offline. The next closest one is a brand new EVGo station that just opened up in June. That one is under repair also.

Why are they so problematic?
 
I'd blame "cheap". Companies never learn the lesson that cheap labor is crappy labor, so they hire crappy contractors to do the installation and they do a shoddy job. Shoddy electrical work never lasts.
 
Mark W said:
What is it about EV charging stations that makes them so prone to be not working? It seems that whenever I see a charging station with more that 2 plugs, at least one of them is not working. My daughter has been using a Nissan Leaf to commute to school. I identified one fast charger between us and school that she could use in case she couldn't get a charge at school. She calls me Friday from school asking about it. I look it up on plugshare and see reports from the past week that it's offline. The next closest one is a brand new EVGo station that just opened up in June. That one is under repair also.

Why are they so problematic?
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When they're profitable and proximal, they'll be maintained. Gas stations make money from people using their pumps either directly (pennies per gallon) or indirectly (loyalty/repairs/convenience sales). With a charging station, there is no human who feels a need to maintain that device, many are very loosely connected to someone's profits; even when there's money being earned (and we complain about expensive ones), that person is almost always many miles away when the thing becomes inoperative.

Not sure when any of this will change, unless an app is engineered to really socially shame the EV charger's "operator".
 
Blink network of chargers is seemingly one of the most neglected networks out there (at least in So Cal). They seemed to be the first ones out there around here, so they had lots of stations installed. However, the materials used for the screen reacted badly to sunlight, and within a year many without shadinga were unreadable. One memorable outlet was in a parking garage on campus at SDSU. That one was not operational for more than a year. I know that more than a few people reported it and complained to parking services. Since repairing the charger was not the responsibility of the school, nothing ever happened. The university finally removed their Blink chargers and replaced them with ChargePoint chargers. Don't know what all was involved in that contract change. But it does seem that the newer chargers are far more reliable.

As noted above, the maintenance situation for many of these chargers is fairly unreliable. I have a feeling that many were purchased and placed - and whoever did so reaped some decent tax benefits. In Cali, businesses were paid/given financial incentives to put in many of these chargers. But after that, the chargers were pretty much left alone. Unfortunate, because for EV owners, these stations are essential. With a PHEV, they're nice, but the reason we bought them was because there's another fuel option besides electricity…
 
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