Rising EV charging failure rates now 1 in 5 as broken chargers and glitches abound

One in five electric vehicle charging attempts resulted in failure last year, up from just 15% in 2021, according to a new J.D. Power report. The research firm teased the next edition of its Electric Vehicle Experience Public Charging Study which shows that EV owners across the 50 states are having an increasingly frustrating experience when charging their vehicles, with a whopping 20% failure rate.

The diminishing EV charging success cases are predominantly due to chargers which are being out of service - three quarters of the failures - while the rest are due to good ol' station vandalism, software glitches, or payment processing issues. J.D. Power teases that there was one charging network which showed very good reliability with only a 3% failure rate last year, but didn't disclose which one and left us guessing whether that's Tesla's Supercharger network which is usually the most reliable out there.

Granted, Tesla Superchargers have been victims of vandalism attacks and kept having their cables cut not just for the copper inside at one point last year, but it remains to be heard if such isolated incidents have reflected on the network's reliability in any way.

Government officials in charge of distributing the US$7.5 billion of federal EV charging infrastructure funds are trying to convince Elon Musk to open Tesla's Superchargers to other EV brands if it wants to take part in the federal funds bonanza. So far, Tesla has remained noncommittal about letting everyone use its charging stations, but it did open-source its charging system for other automakers and charging infrastructure companies to use as they see fit, calling it the North American Charging Standard. 

The J.D. Power study reflects 26,500 attempts to top up at Level 2 or Level 3 chargers, so it would be interesting to follow which is the most reliable EV charging network in the US when the full report is released.

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