Almost 1/3 of San Francisco charging stations are duds

A study released earlier this week showed that over 27% of all EV charging stations in the San Francisco Bay area are non-functioning. Failures are manifold, and the shortcomings many.

22.7% of connectors had unresponsive or unavailable screens, payment system failures, charge initiation failures, network failures, or broken connectors; another 4.9% of chargers had cables too short to reach the car charging port.

In turn, this means 77.3% of chargers were working. Still, this is far from the CPOs’ claims that 95- 98% of the network was in well-working order, so the study’s initiators.

The survey ‘Reliability of Open Public Electric Vehicle Direct Current Fast Chargers’ was headed by UC Berkeley bioengineering professor David Rempel and the environmental non-profit group Cool the Earth. They tested the functionality of 657 charging connectors at all 181 public charging stations in the Bay area, Tesla chargers excluded.

The testers were also not alone in their findings. A CARB survey published in February found that 44% of electric vehicle drivers have experienced issues at charging stations and considered operability and payment major issues to charging.

californiaglobe.com, arxiv.org (PDF), arb.ca.gov (CARB survey)