The team discovered only 73% of the charging equipment worked. Problems included non-working screens, payment system failures, network failures and broken connectors. Surprisingly they didn’t find any cut cables.
Eight days later they did a random evaluation of ten percent of the same charging stations. They still weren’t working. E-V industry analyst Loren McDonald admits there’s room for improvement.
Source: Charging station crisis in California
Many Youtubers who review EVs frequently encounter non-working charging stations. This is a problem that needs solutions – with more efforts put into reliability and fault tolerance.
Municipal run EV chargers in Fresno are suffering from people stealing the charging cables, leaving their city-run chargers inoperative. That, they think, might be solved by locating chargers in safer, well lit, high traffic areas. I suppose another solution would be to put them behind a gate, with an access card required for entry. People who work in security tell me even little steps can stop up to 99% of burglars and thieves.
