GCC: J.D. Power: public charging issues may short-circuit EV growth

[GRA]

J.D. Power: public charging issues may short-circuit EV growth; Volta, Tesla Supercharger rank highest in respective segments

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2023/0 ... 7-jdp.html

While automakers continue to introduce new electric vehicles (EVs) and experience growth in market share, the beleaguered public vehicle charging infrastructure has not kept pace. If anything, it is falling further behind. The recent move to open Tesla Superchargers to non-Tesla owners could improve the situation, but such effort might not be the answer that some suggest, as overall satisfaction continues to decline, according to the J.D. Power 2023 US Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Public Charging Study.

Despite the increase in public charging stations across the United States, customer satisfaction with public Level 2 charging has declined to 617 (on a 1,000-point scale), 16 points lower than a year ago and the lowest level since the study began in 2021. Though purported to be the wave of the future, satisfaction with DC (direct current) fast chargers has declined even further, dropping 20 points to 654.

More troubling is that satisfaction in both charging station segments has declined in nearly every attribute measured in the study. Since consumer skepticism regarding public charging availability is the primary reason vehicle shoppers reject EVs, this performance could prove to be a further hindrance to EV acceptance.. . .

Following are key findings of the 2023 study:

Satisfaction with charging speed declines: EV owners are increasingly dissatisfied with the amount of time it takes to charge their vehicles. The attribute for speed of charging has the most significant negative effect on overall Level 2 satisfaction, decreasing 36 points year over year to 455. Interestingly, those using DC fast chargers don’t fare much better as satisfaction with the speed of charging declines 30 points to 588.

Public chargers must be placed in appropriate locations: The reasons EV owners cite for choosing a Level 2 or a DC fast charger and the time they spend at the charger clearly indicate that public chargers should be located where they will most effectively serve their customers. Convenience is desired by both Level 2 and DC fast charger users, but DC fast charger users indicate a planned road trip is also a key reason for selection. DC fast charger users spend approximately 30 minutes charging their vehicle, preferring to get back on the road as soon as possible. . . .

Non-charge visits remain an issue, and results differ by geographic location: The study finds that 20% of all users say they visited a charger but did not charge their vehicle. Reasons range from the charger being inoperable to long lines to use the charger. EV owners in the Miami-Port St. Lucie-Ft. Lauderdale Combined Statistical Area (CSA) had the worst experience in this regard, with 35% of visits failing to result in charging. The CSAs in Seattle-Tacoma, Denver-Aurora and Dallas-Ft. Worth each had 29% of visits failing to result in a charge. The Cleveland-Akron-Canton CSA had the lowest percentage of failed visits with a charging failure rate of 12%. . . .

Study Rankings. Volta ranks highest among Level 2 charging stations, with a score of 665. Tesla Destination (661) ranks second and ChargePoint (618) ranks third.

Tesla Supercharger ranks highest among DC fast chargers for a third consecutive year, with a score of 739. It is the only DC fast charger brand to rank above segment average.

The study, now in its third year, measures EV owners’ satisfaction with two types of public charge point operators: Level 2 charging stations and DC fast charger stations. Satisfaction is measured across 10 factors (in order of importance): ease of charging; speed of charging; physical condition of charging station; availability of chargers; convenience of this location; things to do while charging; how safe you feel at this location; ease of finding this location; cost of charging; and ease of payment.

The 2023 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience (EVX) Public Charging Study is driven by a collaboration with PlugShare, the leading EV driver app maker and research firm. The study examines consumer attitudes, behaviors and satisfaction, setting the standard for benchmarking the overall experience of public EV charging. Respondents included 15,079 owners of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The study was fielded from January through June 2023.

[WetEV]

I've answered this JD Power survey 4 times now. You will get sent a link when you put in a review on Plugshare.

The results, if I'm typical, are misleading. I put in reviews when either recent checkins had a problem, and I did't, or I had a problem not recently noted in the checkins. Sometimes I'll put in a review because there has not been one for a while.

I've put in two critical reports to JDP, and two nice reports to JDP. This is out of over 70 mostly sucessful public charges. The critical ones were not that critical. One was "switched to second cable because the power was lower, likely due to cooling failure". The second was "EA app showed no power restriction, screen showed 50kW max, used a different station".

Far more people charge than leave reviews in Plugshare. I can't even guess what fraction of go on to answer the JDP survey.

The sample is wildly biased by the way it is selected. Happy people don't leave nearly as many reviews as often as unhappy people. I'd bet that happy people answer fewer surveys as well. Garbage in, garbage out.

Is charging station reliability truely worse? I'd say so, mostly due to the bad batch of chargers that EA got. They were failing, so EA turned the power down to 50kW to prevent them from failing. This seems to be resolving, power is getting turned back up. Yesterday I did't use a charger because the app showed it power restricted. Used the one next to it. Someone plugged in, and was getting 130kW, the max the car would take.

A biased survey, misleading results.

[WetEV]

Oh, and out of 70 plus public charges, I have not once failed to get a charge at a location. Once I had to wait for someone to finish.

Sure, I've had to switch cables and switch to a different charger multiple times.

This survey is wildly pessimistic.

[GRA]

I've answered this JD Power survey 4 times now. You will get sent a link when you put in a review on Plugshare.

The results, if I'm typical, are misleading. I put in reviews when either recent checkins had a problem, and I did't, or I had a problem not recently noted in the checkins. Sometimes I'll put in a review because there has not been one for a while.

When you say you "put in a review", do you mean when you checked in? I've checked in a fair number of times and often go beyond just the basic charged/didn't charge, leaving comments, but I've never gotten any such link.

I've put in two critical reports to JDP, and two nice reports to JDP. This is out of over 70 mostly sucessful public charges. The critical ones were not that critical. One was "switched to second cable because the power was lower, likely due to cooling failure". The second was "EA app showed no power restriction, screen showed 50kW max, used a different station".

Far more people charge than leave reviews in Plugshare. I can't even guess what fraction of go on to answer the JDP survey.

The sample is wildly biased by the way it is selected. Happy people don't leave nearly as many reviews as often as unhappy people. I'd bet that happy people answer fewer surveys as well. Garbage in, garbage out.

Sure, that's true of any self-selected review. Doesn't change the fact that the percentage of satisfied customers is decreasing.. There are far more people with PEVs now and experience of using public chargers. Whether the lower scores are due to the chargers themselves being more likely to be down or busy, people are more experienced now and so it's not an adventure anymore and they're less willing to put up with poor service/waiting, and/or some other factor, I couldn't say.

Is charging station reliability truely worse? I'd say so, mostly due to the bad batch of chargers that EA got. They were failing, so EA turned the power down to 50kW to prevent them from failing. This seems to be resolving, power is getting turned back up. Yesterday I did't use a charger because the app showed it power restricted. Used the one next to it. Someone plugged in, and was getting 130kW, the max the car would take.

A biased survey, misleading results.

See above. I think another factor is that chargers are aging, so lots of older ones are failing. Combine that with slow or no maintenance on many of them, even when problems have been reported to the network or site owner, and it's not surprising that people are losing patience. Add to that there are more PEVs with bigger packs that can charge far faster now than the many 50-62.5kW DCFCs (including most CP chargers) allow. Those chargers are still out there, especially in rural areas with fewer sites and fewer chargers per site.

[GRA]

Oh, and out of 70 plus public charges, I have not once failed to get a charge at a location. Once I had to wait for someone to finish.

Sure, I've had to switch cables and switch to a different charger multiple times.

This survey is wildly pessimistic.

Your average is better than mine, perhaps because most of my pay charging has been in more rural areas with both fewer sites and fewer chargers/site, likely to be exposed to more extreme weather and also to receive less maintenance. I've used paid chargers 20-30 times now, and have had the following issues: connector refused to unlatch from car for 20 minutes after charge finished (EA); No cell or wireless signal, none of CC readers at site would recognize my CC even though it was the same one I'd registered for payment when I joined (EA); app not showing charging station I was at even though it was showing others further away, and CS couldn't start any of the chargers either (EA); charger U/S, was able to use the only other one at site (CP); Single L2 was occupied so had to go elsewhere (CP); 2 of 4 chargers completely down, one with blank screen, spotty Wi-Fi and cell service, one fully working but had to wait and activating took several tries (same EA station as second listed above); 2 down, 2 occupied with others waiting ahead of me, other nearby site showing all occupied (EA); CC reader on only FC in area refused to read, only way to activate charger, site down for almost a month per Plugshare check-ins before repair despite numerous complaints to site owner, who had issues getting the charging company to respond, no CS number shown (Tritum Veefil?). That doesn't include the number of times I've tried to help others at chargers who were having trouble getting a charge, with maybe 50% success.

I don't mean to single out EA as especially bad, I just use them more often than others because they happen to be available/better positioned along the routes I normally use, and they usually have more chargers per site thus improving my odds of finding an available/working one. Plus, they can charge at higher rates than the typical CP charger (which I normally rely on along these routes as backups. Those are also currently higher priced @$.50/kWh, $.58/kWh peak) if I'm renting a car that can benefit from that, which nowadays is everything but a Bolt/EUV/LEAF although the difference is fairly marginal for a Kona/Niro. At least until now EA's usually been cheaper - I'll have to see what happens with per kW site prices on the ones I commonly use on August 17th, and I already know that I'll have to pay $7 instead of $4/month for Pass+ membership, which means the break-even point for a $0.12/kWh price difference e.g. $0.36/kWh vs. $0.48/kWh increased from 33.33 to 58.33 kWh/month. My typical 3-day trip uses more than that (two recent ones: 78 and 114 kWh at EA chargers, plus a lot of free L2 elsewhere) so I still come out ahead paying for Pass+, but not as much.

I've only charged at an EVgo site once using a CC, and that was just recently to show newbie friends how to use a pay charger. As EVgo stations are normally clustered around metro areas and are generally non-existent outside of them they have little utility for me, plus at least until EA raised their rates and membership fees they were more expensive to use (although as an AAA member I wouldn't have to pay monthly EVgo membership or per charge fees, just for the electricity). From looking at Plugshare, EV Connect and Shell Recharge (formerly Greenlots)/Shell Sky tend to be pretty bad, exactly the sort of limited # of chargers/limited speed/limited maintenance sites in rural areas that I'm most likely to have to rely on when off the interstates. Can't say for EVCS/EvGateway as they tend to be in Oregon/Washington or along N/S routes I've so far had no need to use as I'm usually going east, and the only Volta chargers I've used have been free L2s at a local shopping mall. So far, I'd say my Chargepoint card has the highest activation reliability closely followed by using the EA app, and with CCs ranking last.

[GRA]

Got an email report from my BEV newbie friends who just bought a Bolt last week and jumped right into the deep end by driving it from the Bay Area over to the east side of the Sierra Wednesday (where they rent a place for a month while hiking etc.) after I was only able to show/let them do a single public DCFC (and that at an EVgo, which there aren't any on this trip). Here's the husband's (slightly edited in brackets [ ] for privacy and my comments) account of their charging:

We just used Chargepoint in Groveland [using my CP card, which I'd showed them how to use at an L2]. Failed on the first unit but second try was flawless. First try said charge complete, like the EVgo in [their home town], and cycled thru that 3 times. Its as if the car tells the charger that it is full. Is there some setting we need to make to set the car up for charging? So we got to 87% in an hour, now down to 48% at [the town they're renting a place for a month]. With gas at 6.24/gal, 15 cents/mile for my Honda [CR-V hybrid, 38-40 mpg], it seems EV is about equal tho in no way as convenient. We do have an outlet in the garage but [his wife; the Bolt's hers] doesn't want to use it because the realtor told us there wasn't one--translation, we don't want you to recharge an EV at the owner's expense (we could pay her, but how much?). We looked at Lee V. [ining; town on the way with 2 free L2s] but both plugs were in use so we know nothing about how fast [told them], but you get 3 hours [posted charge limit, often ignored] and that's not long enough to hike up Lundy so I don't see that as an option. I think the car will be parked until we get back. But the L2 plug was installed [at their home] in our absence, so we can charge the car when we get home. I think it will be years before travel even as we did it yesterday is a viable option; EV is great for local trips with charging at home. We checked out Buck Mdws [EA DCFC site, the one I normally use on the way and 11 miles closer to the destination than the CP in Groveland] --all 4 empty--included "hypercharge". Since we were climbing, range seemed 20% less than in town. That's about it. We'll see if our landlady will say yes. Should we, in that case, change the car setting to 12 amps?

Skipping the rest of the comments and answers in my reply, as I've mentioned elsewhere this couple is strongly environmentally motivated to get off fossil-fuels (they've had PV for about a decade), far more so than the typical car owner, so while his opinions are undoubtedly heavily weighted by the minimal public (or home FTM) charging experience they had prior to embarking on the trip, I think his initial impressions and concerns do accurately reflect that of the general public. Given a few more DCFC locations nearby (one's planned in Lee Vining by Rivian, another is an SC site which will hopefully be opened up to CCS cars), much of their angst and hopefully a lot of the extra time and hassle should be relieved, but given the high rate of PEV adoption in California (25.4% of new sales in Q2 vs. 21.1% in Q1, with the Bay Area having the highest regional sales % in the state), it's going to be tough in the next few years to build all the essential DCFC sites plus all the destination charging needed to meet the demand.

[cwerdna]

I've answered this JD Power survey 4 times now. You will get sent a link when you put in a review on Plugshare.

The results, if I'm typical, are misleading. I put in reviews when either recent checkins had a problem, and I did't, or I had a problem not recently noted in the checkins. Sometimes I'll put in a review because there has not been one for a while.

When you say you "put in a review", do you mean when you checked in? I've checked in a fair number of times and often go beyond just the basic charged/didn't charge, leaving comments, but I've never gotten any such link.

I have gotten JD Power's survey within Plugshare many times after having checked in. It shows up as a push notification and since both my Android and iPhone are logged in, I get it in two places.

Usually, my check-ins are on EA sites where I posted an observation (e.g. saw cars successfully charging or spotted a broken plug or station). It asks if I visited there, did I charge there, if not, why not, etc. I answer that I didn't and usually check boxes like "too expensive", "didn't intend to charge there", etc.

I can't think of a single time I've EVER used a CC on any public charging station. Just don't do it. My last semi-extensive use of EA was in Dec 2022 thru early Jan 2023. All paid sessions were started thru their app (not using NFC at all). Many were complimentary session, so it literally was "plug and charge" on my '22 Niro EV which doesn't support P & C.

[Toby]

What puzzles me is that Chambers of Commerce and the tourism businesses have shown little to no interest in EV charging. Between here and Vancouver there are fast chargers that have been broken down for months and nobody does anything about it. The Town of Hope is a disaster for EV charging. The town is at a junction of four highways and an obvious place to charge up which creates lineups for the few working chargers. It's not just a Chademo problem. Where are all those promoters who want travelers' dollars? They don't get ours; we have learned to charge up elsewhere.

[GRA]

I've answered this JD Power survey 4 times now. You will get sent a link when you put in a review on Plugshare.

The results, if I'm typical, are misleading. I put in reviews when either recent checkins had a problem, and I did't, or I had a problem not recently noted in the checkins. Sometimes I'll put in a review because there has not been one for a while.

When you say you "put in a review", do you mean when you checked in? I've checked in a fair number of times and often go beyond just the basic charged/didn't charge, leaving comments, but I've never gotten any such link.

I have gotten JD Power's survey within Plugshare many times after having checked in. It shows up as a push notification and since both my Android and iPhone are logged in, I get it in two places.

Usually, my check-ins are on EA sites where I posted an observation (e.g. saw cars successfully charging or spotted a broken plug or station). It asks if I visited there, did I charge there, if not, why not, etc. I answer that I didn't and usually check boxes like "too expensive", "didn't intend to charge there", etc.

I can't think of a single time I've EVER used a CC on any public charging station. Just don't do it. My last semi-extensive use of EA was in Dec 2022 thru early Jan 2023. All paid sessions were started thru their app (not using NFC at all). Many were complimentary session, so it literally was "plug and charge" on my '22 Niro EV which doesn't support P & C.

Interesting. I wonder why I haven't gotten one. Maybe they only do it at a certain time of the year, and I'm normally taking my trips and checking-in at a different time? Who knows.

[GRA]

What puzzles me is that Chambers of Commerce and the tourism businesses have shown little to no interest in EV charging. Between here and Vancouver there are fast chargers that have been broken down for months and nobody does anything about it. The Town of Hope is a disaster for EV charging. The town is at a junction of four highways and an obvious place to charge up which creates lineups for the few working chargers. It's not just a Chademo problem. Where are all those promoters who want travelers' dollars? They don't get ours; we have learned to charge up elsewhere.

Indeed. I'd written a longish post detailing the lack of public L2 and DCFCs in obvious high tourist visit locations on U.S. 395 along the eastern slope of the Sierra but it got eaten, and I'm too tired to retype it.