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While there has been tremendous progress in charging networks over the past decade - both in the number of chargers and the maximum speeds of charge delivery available, there still is clearly more work to be done. The largest cities and heaviest travelled interstates have excellent coverage, but smaller cities and towns and rural states tend to have poor coverage - especially for DC fast chargers.
Moreover, issues with the reliability of public chargers has been persistently reported as a problem. Here is a UC Berkeley study of DC fast chargers in California. 657 individual chargers were tested and "72.5% were found to be functional, which is much lower than the 95% to 98% uptime reported by charging networks".
This "study" is commonly cited on by the anti's on facebook threads to jab at us and how we apparently can never find working chargers. Apparently San Fran has an issue. I've yet to hear that it's common anywhere else.
This "study" is commonly cited on by the anti's on facebook threads to jab at us and how we apparently can never find working chargers. Apparently San Fran has an issue. I've yet to hear that it's common anywhere else.
We don't have an issue with ours for sure! The Feds gave our city a grant to put two in, to this date never seen them used not one time!
While there has been tremendous progress in charging networks over the past decade - both in the number of chargers and the maximum speeds of charge delivery available, there still is clearly more work to be done. The largest cities and heaviest travelled interstates have excellent coverage, but smaller cities and towns and rural states tend to have poor coverage - especially for DC fast chargers.
It isn't economic to implement charging networks in smaller cities and towns and rural areas.
It isn't economic to implement charging networks in smaller cities and towns and rural areas.
For small towns along major thoroughfares it’s actually a great investment over gas that only takes 5 minutes. Small town restaurants off highways should be fighting over them.
I think these are part of the growing pains of the network though of course there's the point that most people who buy EVs will be a self-selecting group who are likely to have home charging where the majority of their charging is done at home. For CCS fast chargers, the growing pains are going to be with the charging network providers, the charging station providers, and automakers. Their first times at the rodeo is going to come with some issues, but ultimately the trend seems to be that things get figured out. This has been true with the Electrify America network, and likely others, where some equipment providers provided far more reliable chargers than others, and with having to build out a system to understand when chargers go down and the response time for dealing with such. Tesla's been great as an automaker that also supplies its own charging equipment and its own network and so there's far better integration, but the others in time will likely do fine. EA definitely had a lot more issues, but in recent times seems to have resolved a good deal of their issues
Quote:
Originally Posted by moguldreamer
It isn't economic to implement charging networks in smaller cities and towns and rural areas.
I'd say it's more that it's unclear how economic it is since the larger cost is in the permitting and then installation of chargers rather than the operating costs of them. Once installed, there's a period before there's a payback and that's partly reliant on how the EV adoption rate both locally and for people passing through is. I think it's pretty murky where the greatest returns on charging networks are. There's generally a very low setup cost for level 2 public charging and those can be great for places where people are sticking around for a while. The cost of both the installation and charging is so low that it may actually be more economical to have them be "complimentary" as a loss leader to get people to stick around spend more time. DC fast chargers are more costly, though still less costly than gas stations, and would make more sense for people just passing through but given that most vehicles can't do sustained charging at the highest rates these fast chargers allow, they still provide a lot of incentive for people to stick around though that's not necessarily always going to be the case. That's the part where it's most like gas stations where people do rest stops and supposedly a lot of gas station profits aren't made through the sales of gas but other associated sales during the stop.
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