Charging Station Goes Boom, EV Won't Work: What Happens Next

When I was doing research to potentially purchase a broken Nissan Leaf to try to fix, I found a bunch of reports of EA chargers causing damage to cars. According to some sources on Reddit, the problem is that the charging station does not respect or misinterprets the maximum DC fast charge current allowed by the vehicle, and just tries to send full power to the vehicle. Because DCFC is controlled entirely by the charger under the instruction of the vehicle, this causes the contactors in the vehicle to open, or in the worst case, melt components in the car's internal power distribution network.

Unfortunately, it would seem like this is the kind of problem that is often caused by bad protocol conformance testing, and it's potentially likely that it is a software problem. The fact that above software, there are no other safety mechanisms to prevent hardware damage is concerning.

Part of the electrical certification for things like this probably needs to include a standardized protocol certification such as what they do with USB-IF, MFi, HDMI etc. Otherwise, small software bugs like these can cause thousands of dollars in damage without any indication that something is about to go wrong.

If there was one good application of DRM and remote attestation, components that are designed to handle over 200 kW of power are where that effort should be. You would have a hard time starting a fire with an iOS lightning cable, but it has way more security than this, it seems.

If anything about this is news to me, it is that the rate of problems with chargers is apparently so low. How many gas station fires were there last year, certainly more than three. Would be interesting to see how the numbers on charger failures vs gas station failures shakes out per mile driven.

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