Over the course of more than a century, the fueling infrastructure for gasoline cars has matured to a point where drivers rarely have to think about it. Find a gas station, swipe a credit card, and fill up the tank. We’ve come a long way from buying gasoline from a barrel at the pharmacy to fill up the Model T.
While electric vehicle charging stations are more common, it is still an infrastructure in its infancy. And even though electricity is more or less universal, it is the chargers themselves – and how people use them – that are proving to be the sticking point.
CNN journalist Peter Valdes-Dapena experienced this first-hand recently, on a relatively short road trip on the I-95 corridor between New York and Philadelphia. While Valdes-Dapena had no problem locating a high-speed charging station, he was stuck waiting in line for several hours behind other drivers taking a long time to charge up.
What’s taking so long? Fast-charging beyond a certain capacity, say, 80%, can damage EV batteries. So, many cars are programmed to stop fast-charging at that point and charge more slowly to top off the battery. That means drivers, accustomed to filling up the tank as they would a gasoline car, can cause delays as they stay plugged in until the battery reaches 100%.
Electrify America has a solution for these so-called “charger hogs” – cutting drivers off at 85% and charging an additional fee to remain at the charger, potentially cutting wait times in half.
While that particular problem has a relatively simple solution, drivers are also encountering chargers that don’t work at all, eroding trust in public charging infrastructure and, in turn, electric vehicles themselves, as recently reported by Canary Media.
That problem is compounded by a patchwork of chargers developed and operated by different companies. Which means collaboration will be key.
“When drivers say the charger doesn’t work, there’s a complex set of reasons why the charger doesn’t work,” ChargerHelp’s CEO Kameale Terry told Canary Media. “It’s not as simple as a gas station. And to fix something that complex, we need to take a more collaborative approach.”
Part of that collaborative approach is standardizing and sharing data – so that common issues can be identified and technicians trained to fix them.
“The car experience is great — people like electric vehicles,” Terry said. “We have a gap in infrastructure, and now we have to come together to figure out what to do about it.”
More clean energy news
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