Improving reliability of DCFC

Quick note: Image is meant to draw attention, it was actually a gas car driven by a drunk driver that ran into Tesla Superchargers, but point is EV charging stations have many reasons they could stop working (including reckless drivers), so how do we get them back working as fast as possible.

A few months ago I wrote a newsletter post about the reliability of DCFC stations and mentioned the now well referenced study that showed that:

"Of the 657 open public?#DCFC?#CCS?#EVSEs?evaluated in this study, 72.5% were functional at the time of testing while 27.5% were either not functional or the cable was too short to reach the?#EV?inlet. The most common cause of a nonfunctional EVSE was an electrical systems failure which included an unresponsive or unavailable screen, a payment system failure, a charge initiation failure, a connection failure, or a broken connector"

The windfall of cash from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (aka NEVI) that will fund DCFC stations requires 97% uptime, but how with that be met and measured?

The challenge with DCFC reliability is that there are:

1. multiple points of failure
2. not an easy way to report failures back to the charging network provider
3. not always an incentive for the network provider to quickly fix the stations

This post will focus on item 2, which is quickly highlighting reliability issues so network providers can respond quickly. One way to do that is to use AI to read EV Charging Station reviews, which a team from my Alma Mater of Georgia Tech did:

"To address the problem, Asensio and his team tailored their algorithm to electric vehicle transportation lingo. They trained it with reviews from 12,720 US charging stations to classify reviews into eight different categories: functionality, availability, cost, location, dealership, user interaction, service time, and range anxiety.

The AI achieved a 91% accuracy and high learning efficiency in parsing the reviews in minutes.

As opposed to previous charging infrastructure performance evaluation studies that rely on costly and infrequent self-reported surveys, AI can reduce research costs while providing real-time standardized data."

Whenever I'm on a road trip and need to plan my DCFC stop, I always go to Plugshare, who is owned by EVgo, and read the reviews to try and see if I can get a feel for that location's reliability. All these reviews are from individual EV drivers and we're at the mercy of those drivers to actually leave a review and make it accurate, but for the most part, it's probably the best metric to gauge reliability.

A similar approach is being taken by Ford, but they're not just relying on the public, they're sending their own people - called Charge Angels - to test charging stations (not sure if this is still ongoing as first reports of this were from late '21):

"Ford is constrained in what it can do; it neither owns the stations nor controls them. So the automaker has assigned itself a new role, as a sort of inspector general.

"There is a high proportion of annoyances, and that’s not acceptable to us," said Matt Stover, Ford’s director of charging and energy services. "Someone needs to take a leadership role."

Ford is sending a fleet of its Mach-Es to misbehaving charging stations around the country. At the wheel are representatives that Ford calls "Charge Angels" who as of late last year were testing the stations with special equipment. Ford will then diagnose the problems and share results with the station owner.

And if the station continues to misbehave, Ford won’t direct its drivers there anymore.

The new effort is the clearest sign yet that the country’s web of charging stations, built piecemeal over a decade and never taken very seriously, are being asked to grow up, and fast."

Chargepoint operator EVCS has their own approach to reliability where they use remote diagnostic testing and seem to have a great approach to proactive maintenance:

"If a reboot fails to solve the issue, we send a specially trained technician to service the equipment. However, some issues might fail to appear on one of our remote tests, which is why we routinely send field techs out to inspect every one of our installations across the West Coast. Working to preemptively address issues means less of a chance our customers get burdened with the hassle of faulty equipment."

As Ford and EVCS have realized, the best approach is to gather real word data with real live humans who use an electric vehicle to test stations.

What other ideas are out there to quickly report malfunctioning stations or is Plugshare the best solution?