Commercial EVSEs: Is there a reliability/viability problem?

I live in Atlanta, and I couldn't be happier with public EVSE availability: 30+ DC/QCs around town, and more newly installed every month.
Long term, however, I see a problem: Some units have a high failure rate, or maintenance is poor, or the companies running them have serious performance problems.

This is purely anecdotal, but I have seen these issues first hand:
- Several NRG eVgo Level 3 units seem to fail when temperatures raise to the 90s, as in the last few days.
- The Level 2 ChargePoint dual unit at my workplace has had one of the two heads malfunctioning 90% of the time since it was installed, three months ago. Chargepoint keeps remotely resetting it and claiming it is fixed, but after one or two uses it is down again.
- I have had a couple of billing discrepancies with Blink and SemaConnect units. I report the issue, and I get a reply that it has been solved, even though nothing was done.

Is it only me, or are more of you experiencing similar problems? I suspect commercial EVSE companies are not doing well, and that reflects in installation quality, maintenance and customer support.

What do you think?

It's an expensive business that does not have good revenue streams. Most of these companies are building their billing networks largely from scratch. I'm not surprised they've had problems.

It sounds like ChargePoint simply needs to physically fix that unit. They should probably have done so after the second or third reset failed to keep it online.

davewill said:

It's an expensive business that does not have good revenue streams. Most of these companies are building their billing networks largely from scratch. I'm not surprised they've had problems..

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Yep,
Similar to gas stations, in that they rarely sell just gas. The expense of the station setup and profit margin is too thin.
So you use the gas station to bring people in, and sell them an $0.80 soda and a $1.50 tiny bag of chips. ;-)

I think these networks are going to "need" to partner with someone (or provide the extra services themselves) to be able to make money.
(or continue to get lots of subsidies.. ;-) )

Just the other day, I needed some plumbing stuff, and heard that Walmart had a charger. So I swung by. Both units were dead. Either down or maybe not working yet.. (I'd never been there, so maybe they were new and not finished?)
I could have still bought my supplies there, I didn't "need" the charge, but I drove to Freddy's (that has a working charger) and got my plumbing stuff there, and charged..

desiv

You are lucky you have 30 L3s around. We have 1 here and one there and half the time they are broken- so basically, chademo seems like a useless dinosaur here that might be a fossil with Tesla 3 comes in with supercharging...

Love my leaf, wishing I could love chademo too...

Between being blocked by an ICE, being vandalized, having maintenance issues, having a long line of EVs ahead of you, having an EV finished charging still parked in the way, being bad for EV battery life, and costing too much, I don't see commercial EVSEs being viable and I have never gone anywhere where I had to rely on them. As range increases I think the model should be local commuter car charged at home. How many EV owners don't have something else for long trips?

SteveInSeattle said:

, being bad for EV battery life

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This is looking more and more to be a non-issue..

Did you see the taxi in the UK? 100,000 miles, still 12 bars, and GOBS AND GOBS of QCs...

desiv
(Not that it can't work together on the bigger issue, heat (as QCs raise heat). But, in a cool area, might not be an issue.)

While I am very new in the electric vehicle thing, I tend to agree with the OP. Just look at the EZ Charge app on your phone, open up almost any balloon for a charge station and look at the comments. Even the dealer units both L2 and L3 many times have comments that they are inop.

I scoped out a pair of blink stations at a Kroger. Its a poorer area where I suspect that there are few EV's and the chargers are on the first two parking spaces up front, with no "Electric Vehicle Charging Only" signs so why would you expect the folks that park their junker cars there to know what those are for or if they did, to care enough to not park there. Quite frankly, the L2 stations at stores such as Kroger and Walmart need to be in some of the worst possible parking spaces, so that others will not be inclined to park there. We have thousands of sorry folks around here running around with handicapped hang tags for their grandmother, their aunt, their parents, etc, and they abuse the you know what out of them by parking in handicapped spaces when grandma is at home or in the nursing home, so why should we expect them to care about some guy in an EV who desperately needs to get a charge. We live in an "all about me" society, and something EV people have discovered is that they have to work together and care about the others enough to not hog the EV spaces when they are not charging, and keep people posted on units that are not working so the next guy won't get stuck.

Alot of these units were installed with federal grant money, and the companies don't care if they work or not, they got their money. I'm just trying to figure out how some many of them get broke and stay broken for so long. Whoever designed these stations for companies like Blink didn't understand that displays need to be readable in bright sunlight (try recessing the darn things) and that LCD displays are destroyed by direct sunlight. It apparent that the companies such as Blink or Charge Point don't actually have employees traveling around checking on and inspecting the units. Give the service guy a Nissan electric minivan and a territory and see if he keeps them working! betcha if he needs them working to get around, he will.

Charles

CharlesinGA said:

Alot of these units were installed with federal grant money, and the companies don't care if they work or not, they got their money. I'm just trying to figure out how some many of them get broke and stay broken for so long.

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I believe this is the key point to the issue. #1 installation due to a grant - i.e. someone (government or utility company) is paying to have the unit installed; the actual location and installer really don't care if anyone uses it, they get their grant money either way. #2 these "grants" do not generally include maintenance or have the payout tied to actual availability or use.

Bottom line really is that public L2 or DC charging is not (yet) a viable business model. I submit that there would be almost no public L2 stations if it were not for the grant money. The question is, will it ever be viable? I have stated it before (sorry folks who have read it multiple times already) that the ONLY viable long term 'public' charging business model will likely be for "quick" charging that is located along major routes. Local driving energy will come from home based charging. Those in apartments or condos or otherwise who park in garages/lots will have to get those locations to provide EVSEs to charge. There could be a good business model in providing solutions in these locations, but I expect those will be 'semi-private' meaning for residents only.

The driving factor for this 'vision' of mine is that I believe the majority of drivers on the road will be willing to plug in nightly at home in exchange for not visiting gas stations. I do not believe that the majority of drivers are willing to put up with the 'hassle' of public charging on a daily basis. Given this, BEVs won't likely 'take off' until sufficient range is there for buyers to only charge at night for all routine driving - road trips etc would then be done by DCQC stations en-route as needed. Once this range is 'normal' there is no need for L2 public charging. Nobody wants to wait for L2 when they have somewhere to go; if they have a full day's charge on board to start with then why charge away from home? IF the public charging is subsidized then maybe (i.e. I charge at free stations when I find them) but that will never be a viable long-term business.

To to circle back to OP - Yes, there is a reliability/viability problem. The stations you are finding were put there for someone to benefit from the install, but are not getting enough revenue to pay for maintenance or create sufficient incentive to keep them functional. I suspect that the decisions on which unit to install are driven more by cost (i.e. they get the same grant $'s if they install a cheap unit as they do from install a high quality unit and make more profit from the cheap model).

I also believe that the cost benefit of driving electric is posed to evaporate. I mean, many EV drivers have other reasons for driving electric, but surely $ savings is on average in the top 3 reasons.

I believe that the lagging road infrastructure in Canada and the US and the falling revenue to maintain this will soon be revamped with BEVs paying their fair share or more than their fair share- maybe a tax on public L2 and L3 stations or taxes on road miles travel which will take us back closer to gas driving costs.

I hope oil gets much more expensive by then or BEVs may never reach their hayday....

vwDavid said:

I also believe that the cost benefit of driving electric is posed to evaporate. I mean, many EV drivers have other reasons for driving electric, but surely $ savings is on average in the top 3 reasons.

I believe that the lagging road infrastructure in Canada and the US and the falling revenue to maintain this will soon be revamped with BEVs paying their fair share or more than their fair share- maybe a tax on public L2 and L3 stations or taxes on road miles travel which will take us back closer to gas driving costs.

I hope oil gets much more expensive by then or BEVs may never reach their hayday....

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I disagree with this. Road taxes certainly need to be collected and BEV's should carry part of that burden - but that same tax will apply to ICE vehicles in some way. I don't see BEV's being taxed at an effective rate that exceeds the ICE rates (in terms of $/mile or whatever measure one chooses). I'd be thrilled to see a road tax system moved off the fuels entirely and onto a miles driven/ton of vehicle or some such (makes too much sense so won't happen I'm sure).

As to just the fuel costs - electric is still well under 1/2 the cost/mile compared to my ICE even when removing the taxes out of the gasoline costs. I think there will continue to be benefit here. Secondary appeal is ability to control costs - those who are moving to solar PV can at least control their future costs more (but that likely is not a significant part of the long-term market so perhaps it doesn't matter).

Overall maintenance on BEV's looks to be lower than ICE. I expect this will only improve with improved batter technology reducing/removing the need to replace batteries during normal duty cycles. There is savings to be had here for those who pay attention.

I do agree that cost reductions do not (in most cases) justify the BEV today. However the American public as a whole doesn't seem to put cost or TCO high on their list of reasons to choose one vehicle over another. Performance, reliability, safety, and styling all seem to rank higher. Get BEVs to compete in these areas (Tesla sure seems to be going there) and get the acquisition costs comparable to ICE and BEVs will be a viable market segment.

The government is quite desirous of a mileage tax, but implementing it is difficult and I suspect the government is "not willing to go there". Cars have the information stored in them, its quite easy to extract. You take your car in each year and have the miles extracted from it by the government and they bill you on this amount. But they they want their money more frequently, so they have you do it every month, but soon that is not enough, so they mount boxes next to the road that interrogates the transponder in cars as they pass, gaining the information they want........

Oh, by the way, the current gas taxes won't go away when they do that............

Road infrastructure is failing because politicians want to spend the money on pet projects and not on what needs to be done.

Grants and projects such as EV charging stations reminds me of the electric generating windmills scattered about the country. Many or most of them were built with government grant money. I understand that when one breaks, and I mean, self destructs and needs major repairs or maintenance, they just lock it down and forget it, its cheaper to get a government grant to build another one.

I can fully understand the issues of cost of installing an maintaining a EV charging station vs the income derived from them. I have been doing the math.......... could I get into the business? lets see, L3 chargers are coming down in price, but even the lower power units are still in the $25K or better range, (its almost like the dollars and kilowatts output run hand in hand) and then the cost of electric service and installations, monthly commercial rates for electricity, possibly demand fees from the power company.......... permits, business licenses, property taxes on the equipment.... it goes on and on, for a fairly small return.

CharlesinGA said:

... could I get into the business? lets see, L3 chargers are coming down in price, but even the lower power units are still in the $25K or better range, (its almost like the dollars and kilowatts output run hand in hand) and then the cost of electric service and installations, monthly commercial rates for electricity, possibly demand fees from the power company.......... permits, business licenses, property taxes on the equipment.... it goes on and on, for a fairly small return.

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Exactly - so with all those costs, you can NEVER provide the power to BEVs anywhere near what someone can get at home. Thus, unless one MUST charge away from home there will be a strong financial (and hassle) incentive to only charge at home. That leaves the long-distance travelers (those going farther than their single charge range) as your only potential market. Most folks have said they would gladly pay a premium to have these units available when needed and that makes sense.

Build a business plan that services long-distance travelers with high speed charging stations (and traveler friendly locations) and I would look to invest in it. Second viable business plan may be turn-key charging solutions for apartment complexes/condos to use to charge back the expense to their tenants - I'd be willing to consider that investment too. Any business plan that relies on L2 chargers scattered about local areas for 'convenience' charging I wouldn't invest a dime in - and frankly I don't believe that our government should be either.

here in Canada most L2's are attached to hard ware stores and hotels, which makes good sense, back in my old home town the sunshine coast they are at the mall complex and at coffe shops.