In the future, you may be able to charge an electric vehicle anywhere you park it, but for now, charging is one of the biggest factors holding back EV adoption. Still, it isn’t nearly as bad as the doomers would have you believe. If it was, there’s no way I could have replaced my old Fiat 500e with a cheap lease on a new one despite living in a pretty rural area. Recently, though, our friends at Consumer Reports surveyed more than 1,200 EV owners to get a better idea of what the charging situation is really like. As you can probably imagine, the results weren’t exactly, “Everything is perfect!” but they weren’t, “No one outside of a few cities in California should buy an EV,” either.
For example, while using public chargers, EV owners reported running into a problem about a fifth of the time. Even if that means chargers work just fine nearly 80 percent of the time, that’s still not good. It’s also worse if you can’t use or have ethical issues with using Tesla chargers, since owners only reported running into issues about four percent of the time. DC fast chargers, meanwhile, had problems about 34 percent of the time, while Level 2 chargers were only somewhat better, coming in at 25 percent. Usually, those problems were either caused by payment issues or charging hardware, neither of which owners can do much about.
Not all chargers were created equal
EV owners reported the frequency of charging problems also depended on which brand of fast charger they used. For example, Shell’s Recharge network had problems 48 percent of the time, making it essentially a coin toss to stop at one. EVgo was a little more reliable, but even so, no one should brag about their product only having problems 43 percent of the time. The same goes for Blink and its reported 41 percent. If you find a Rivian charger, those only had problems five percent of the time and rival Tesla in reliability, even without a vocal ultra-far-right bigot as the CEO.
As far as charging hardware issues go, screen issues were the most common and caused 76 percent of the problems. Broken plugs, broken charge cables and other issues that stopped owners from physically plugging their cars in accounted for another 19 percent of the problems, while the charge cable being too short was a problem about five percent of the time. Considering you can usually just repark if you pulled into the space wrong, that makes sense. As for payment problems, the most common one was, sadly, chargers that let people pay but still didn’t work. In fact, 19 percent of payment problems were reportedly chargers that accepted a payment but never started charging. Not being able to pay, on the other hand, caused about a quarter of the payment problems.
Avoiding problems with EV chargers
The good news is, there are a few steps EV owners can take to minimize their charging issues. The bad news is, the best advice is to download a bunch of apps. Specifically, Consumer Reports recommends creating an account and adding a payment method for the most common charging apps. If you’re taking a road trip, be sure to also check to see if you need to download any additional apps. It’s incredibly annoying, but taking care of all that ahead of time will save you both time and frustration in the future. And while they can’t help with a damaged charge cable, paying through the right app should let you avoid the screen issues that cause so many payment problems.
Once you’ve got accounts on several charging apps, you should probably also download at least one route planning app such as A Better Route Planner, PlugShare or Chargeway. In addition to helping you plan your road trip with charging in mind, they’re also useful for avoiding broken chargers. Your EV’s built-in navigation system can probably do something similar, but those aren’t usually as up to date as the planning apps. Would it be so much more convenient if you didn’t have to deal with apps at all? Absolutely. Still, it’s one of those situations where a small headache now helps you avoid a massive headache in the future.
Don’t bother with a 100% charge
In the same way it’s easier to shove a few boxes into an empty closet than it is to find a place for those boxes in a closet full of stuff, charging speeds drop as you get closer to a full charge. Because of that, if you have the option, only charging to 80 percent and stopping a little more frequently will also save you time. For the sake of your battery, try to avoid letting the charge get too low.
It can also help to add a Level 2 charger at home if that’s an option, since simply plugging into a wall outlet overnight may not give you as much range as you need the next day. There’s also a good chance your EV will let you precondition the cabin while plugged in to avoid draining the battery, and you should be able to precondition your battery before you pull up to a charger. And, of course, if you’re really worried about road trips, you can just spring for an EV that offers more than 300 miles of range. No amount of prep can take 100 percent of the risk out of driving an EV, but if you at least take a little time to prepare, you can at least guarantee your charging experience will be better than it is for those who don’t.
