Why are so many EV charging stations broken in California? | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many EV charging stations broken in California?

latimes.com

38 pointslxm110 comments

The article mentions this, but a lot of people don't realize that Electrify America was essentially set up as government-mandated punishment for VW for diesel-gate. Thus, it's not surprising their incentives aren't aligned to provide a great customer experience, as opposed to Tesla who basically views their Supercharging network as an extension of their cars and brand.

Absolutely, and you can clearly see that there are other providers with better incentives. I live in SoCal and drive an EV. I don’t even bother with EA chargers, but the EVGo stations around me are extremely reliable and plentiful.

> as opposed to Tesla who basically views their Supercharging network as an extension of their cars and brand

So they recall their chargers en masse every few months?

Kind of? They are software upgradable, and I get the feeling that software upgrades are fairly common. They also have recently had upgrades to support the upcoming NACS->CCS adapters as well as to natively support NACS enabled cars.

They aren't recalls, though as this kind of thing doesn't happen with supercharger updates: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/13/nhtsa-asks-tesla-why-it-didn...

If you mean push software updates to them then yeah, they probably do.

When did we start calling software updates recalls?

When they need to be officially recorded with the NHTSA as a safety fix attached to the specific VINs affected, and with proper notice given to owners.

That said using that recall count as an indicator of quality isn't really useful either. Most car companies have millions of cars recalled at any given time for usually relatively minor issues.

Exactly... poorly structured economics. Nothing more, nothing less.

There was a Technology Connections video on YouTube that I can’t find right now, so feel free to link it.

He was basically talking about the fact that a lot of the infrastructure that we have surrounding gas pumps in stations being missing from EV chargers is not necessarily something that’s sustainable, and more so a presently lacking feature to prevent damage and other issues. He posits that as EV gets more popular security and amenities will be mandatory, and EV charging parks will look more like our present day gas stations.

In the transition period, we are probably going to see chargers moving away from dedicated locations and into existing gas stations.

I understand that a lot of gas station revenue comes from selling stuff other than gas. I am somewhat surprised that gas stations didn't jump on EV chargers immediately, since charging takes a while and those customers might be more likely to make other purchases while waiting.

Most of the Superchargers in the Cleveland area are at gas stations -- Sheetz, in particular.

> I am somewhat surprised that gas stations didn't jump on EV chargers immediately, since charging takes a while and those customers might be more likely to make other purchases while waiting

At least in this part of Europe, there is simply not enough space at most gas stations for any significant proportion of vehicles to spend more than five minutes there.

One medium to long-term strategy for most of Europe I've seen discussed is to move charging to the streetside and connect it in as a residential utility play with consumer ties -- in other words, chargers that could be used in "residential mode," where the resident just charges their vehicle directly, or in "consumer mode," where non-residents swipe a credit card and the resident gets an additional credit on the power usage.

> to move charging to the streetside

My experience is that roadside parking outside residential property is in pretty short supply across much of Europe too.

That was definitely the thinking behind the Buc-ee's/Tesla partnership; Buc-ee's makes a huge amount of backcourt revenue including QSR sales, so it's a very natural extension for them. I posited to our retail fuels clients several years ago that if they didn't develop a long-term EV strategy around backcourt partnership and sales they risked losing to a Tesla retail strategy, so I'm surprised that Tesla never split off a separate BU to directly attack that space.

It's probably lower barrier to entry - as soon as any generic shopping plaza nearby sets up a few chargers, customers will probably choose hanging around Starbucks or a grocery store rather than a gas station.

I'd guess the hang up is volume.

Right now there are two types of people that go to those stations.

1. People there to put gas in their car, and

2. People there specifically to visit the convenience store.

Gas stations tend to be in places that won't get a lot of foot traffic, so what is going to mostly determine how many potential customers they see a day is how many cars they can accommodate at once and how long those cars stay.

Group #2, the people specifically there for the convenience store, are both very likely to buy something and not likely to stay long.

Group #1, the people there for gas, may or may not also buy something from the convenience store. If they do, great. If they don't at least they won't stay long because gas powered cars "charge" fast. A reasonably well maintained gas pump is over an order of magnitude faster than EV chargers.

If they add EV charging the EV charging area will probably have to either take space from the gas pumps or to take space from the place group #2 parks.

If they take the space from group #2 parking, they are replacing people highly likely to buy with people less likely to buy and more likely to stay around longer. It is hard to see how this could ever be a win for the store.

If they take the space from the gas pumps then they are replacing fast gas fill ups with slow EV fill ups, which cuts down the number of potential convenience store customers. Maybe EV drivers will be more likely to decide to buy something in that extra time, but I suspect that won't be a big effect. I'd bet people who buy from the convenience store just because they are killing time waiting for EV charging will mostly just make small purchases.

On the other hand, it really is #2 that provides most of the profit. It is possible that group #1 is a sufficiently small contribution that it doesn't matter if replacing some gas pumps with EV charges lowers convenience store sales.

Sometimes I think selling gas at those stores is mostly for awareness. I'd guess that a lot of the people in group #2 are only there because at some earlier time they were in group #1 there. They decide on Friday or Saturday night that they need to get some beer or cigarettes or lottery tickets and remember, and because they got gas there earlier that week they think of the convenience store.

Putting in a couple EV chargers in place of a couple gas pumps might turn some EV drivers into group #2 people who otherwise might have forgotten about the convenience store.

Interesting. It would have never occurred to me that group 2 even exists, but in hindsight it seems obvious.

It honestly makes no sense why non-tesla charge managers care so little about their stations.

It costs a LOT of money to install a L3 charger (Last I saw, something like $500,000). So having it go offline for a significant amount of time is a fairly big loss. And, what's completely frustrating, is the parts that are breaking/being vandalized aren't the $500,000 inverters, it's the screen, cable, or card reader. $100 parts. (Maybe more like $500 for the cable).

The only thing I can think of is there's simply a skill shortage and these companies aren't willing to pay for enough employees to maintain their stations. You need to be an electrician to work with these stations and it may be that these companies don't want to pay for the amount of electricians they need.

The business of non-Tesla chargers was to get paid to install them, not to get paid to keep them running.

I don't have an EV yet but I wonder how practical it will be to charge at gas stations. Where I live, gas stations usually aren't in areas where there's much else to do even for 15 minutes. Sure there is usually a store but even if I needed a few things, how long would that keep me busy, 5 minutes? And if that's the case, how profitable would that be?

Given how long it takes to charge and how limited space is, I wonder if it'd make much more sense to place a large number of chargers in places where people spend time i.e. park for >30 minutes, nowadays anyway. Shopping centers, grocery stores, movie theatres, business parks, etc.

Edit: Thanks all for sharing your experiences

Fast charging is usually so fast that you can barely do anything else before the car is full and you need to move it. If you go for lunch for example usually you need to hurry not to pay overtime fees.

AC charging is another thing, this can take 5-10 hours, that's perfect for a movie theatre or a shopping center. And they are rather cheap to build. Just a small box to plug in a charging cable. And personally I often plug in with 60% SoC or more, so I don't need a full charge.

On the east coast, there's been a trend to larger, well-list stations with clean restrooms and much better food than ye ole hot dog roller. A stop like that is perfect for DCFC, especially when open 24 hours.

On road trips my charging stops are usually 10-20 minutes, so not enough time to go in and sit down at a restaurant or watch a movie.

At longer stay locations then high powered AC chargers (12kW+) or slow DC chargers (25-50kw) could make a lot of sense.

Personally I haven't yet managed to go into a Buc-ee's store, use the restroom, and get out with a snack before the car sends me a notification that it's ready to go.

We did a 3000km trip 4 times with an EV as a family. We basically alternated between 20 minute charging stops and 40-60 minute stops. If you have a family, it takes about 20 minutes to bathroom, buy a coffee and pull a game or something out of the back for the kids. 40-60 minutes is a sit down meal & bathroom break.

It's surprising they don't already look like fancy gas stations, considering the owner of the charging station has a captive audience for half an hour.

I'd expect a lot of food options, video gambling, etc. It's crazy that right now there aren't even vending machines by the charging stations!

I like the fact that the capital costs of a Supercharger are low enough that they go into a variety of places. Yes, I love the Superchargers at Sheetz because I can grab a coffee or a bite to eat while I charge, but I vastly prefer a charger with no amenities to no charger at all.

Personally I prefer fast charging stations at gas stations. They have all the infrastructure you need for cars and road trips (food, toilets, wiper fluid, equipment for cleaning the windshield, checking tyre pressure, roofs, ...). And they are usually easy to find and to reach.

I seriously doubt it will look similar for the most part. I expect a lot more places like Target or malls to have chargers, and this is already happening around me. Once you're charging there, why not go in and do some shopping since you've got nowhere else to go? The incentives are strongly aligned on both ends to make this happen.

Yeah, there will be some charger parks that look like gas stations, but I would expect that to be a small fraction of them. People thinking about gas stations are stuck in an old mode of thinking. We already have a massive investment into electricity resulting in it being everywhere. Building on top of that makes much more sense vs limited special infrastructure.

Agreed! The defining characteristic of gas stations (and EV stations) will be average_stop_time.

These are order-of-magnitude different between gas and EV.

Consequently, it seems reasonable that convenience-optimized gas stations (fast food, grab and go snacks) will transition to more leisurely interactions (restaurant, shopping, attraction) for long-distance EV stopping points.

Which interestingly opens a distance-based development opportunity along high-volume routes (e.g. interstates).

X miles from (major city) to (major city) along (major interstate), regardless of whether there's any sort of town there, suddenly becomes an attractive place for commercial development.

But all of this is predicated on fast charging and battery tolerance... more expensive cars / infrastructure = shorter wait = more like current gas stations.

This would be amazing.

We road trip a few times a year in our Model Y and the Superchargers at the gas stations are the best. Grab a snack, a bathroom break, and a small walk, then back on the road.

The chargers near nothing are just inconvenient. We only normally stop for 15-20 minutes so walking 15 minutes to a store is normally a little forced and so we'll just poke around the Supercharger and then stop at a gas station for a snack afterwards.

I guess it's not a problem unique to California?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/16/23833337/ev-charging-unre...

  The survey also identified the worst place to charge: Miami-Port Saint Lucie-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, with a 35 percent chargeless visit rate. That compares to a not-as-bad 29 percent rate in the Seattle-Tacoma, Denver-Aurora, and Dallas-Fort Worth metro areas.

  The least-abhorrent place to charge is the Cleveland-Akron-Canton metro area, with just a 12-percent failure rate amongst those who attempted to charge their EVs.

This is pretty mind boggling. Imagine if 1 out of 8 gas stations had all the pumps broken. There'd be riots! And that's the best case city for EV charging?

They'd just go out of business and close down.

These charging things are unmanned and unmonitored and clearly nobody cares.

It's myopic / counter intuitive;

An example near me is a Live/Work/Play development that put chargers congregated together in an open area away from businesses. Another example is an old mall, that has a struggling food court, with chargers the longest walk away.

What's weird is that chargers started with the Nissan Bolt/Leaf with a concept of businesses/malls will put chargers up to encourage visitors to shop - or of cracker barrel (https://investor.crackerbarrel.com/news-releases/news-releas...) locations. But it seems charger networks have ignored that gas stations don't make money on gas, but make money on convenience stores and have gone unmanned, even as significant numbers of new vehicles are sold.

There are issues if they get placed too close to the amenities in busy lots. People will block them while not charging.

But you are right that it has sometimes swung too far the other way. I've seen struggling food courts like that where just being a little closer would be vastly better for everyone.

Personally I'd rather the EV chargers be put in the back of the parking lot away from the prime spots, as long as they're still easily walkable to businesses and amenities.

That provides less incentive for non-EVs or EVs that aren't charging to park in them and block the charger just because they want a good parking space.

I agree though that the best economic model for travel chargers is to combing the charging with another business that benefits from the chargers. Some of my favorite travel EV charger stops are at "premium" gas station franchises like Buc-ee's and Wawa that have clean bathrooms and good snacks.

Eh, we'll figure out something that works. Change always has some bumps, no need to blow your top over it. It's a rougher transition than it needed to be because we wasted 50 years arguing with morons about whether water is wet (yes, idiots, climate change really is happening), so now we need to do it in a bit of a hurry. But, we'll get there.

The big difference is that most EV owners today are homeowners and they can and have installed home chargers that completely sidestep the question of public charging. Unlike gas cars that have to visit gas stations, EV owners charge at home. What's better than spending three minutes to fill up gasoline at a gas station is to just spend five seconds plugging in when you arrive at your garage and another five seconds unplugging. In other words EVs take advantage of a pre-existing energy distribution network that's basically already in every home.

And there's another benefit that people don't talk about: You don't have to deal with smelly gasoline and burning smells from the gas station.

No joke, a lot of people love that smell.

They can go huff gasoline in the privacy of their own homes, then. :shrug:

If the whole station was down I'd just go to the next one and wouldn't riot.

I'm a new EV adopter and so far my household gets by with the L1 home charger. We don't drive that far on a daily basis. Home charging is another disincentive to rioting. How much does home charging eat into demand for public chargers?

People in LA just really like to riot.

Imagine correspondingly that you could put a box in your house that pumped gas into your car at the rate of 1 gallon per hour. That's what electric cars owners do.

Correct. There is nothing about fair weather that makes California's EV chargers particularly bad. They are all bad. It is a harder problem than the EV industry boosters want you to believe. Coupling and decoupling a load of hundreds of kilowatts to and from the grid presents significant life safety issues and the people who make the equipment are biased towards having the equipment fail open at the slightest whiff of a fault.

> Coupling and decoupling a load of hundreds of kilowatts to and from the grid presents significant life safety issues [..]

Am I the only one who read that bit and immediately started thinking of all the things that can - and very occasionally do - go wrong when refueling an ICE vehicle?

It's a mixture of different problems.

L2 charging is pretty simple -- connect to existing AC grid, let people charge slowly. Needs to be everywhere (light poles) and needs to be robust and inexpensive.

L3 charging is hideously complex -- you're dumping 5-10 single families of power into a cord, outside in the driving rain. You're getting billed as a commercial utility consumer where you're charged at your 95th percentile current draw for any given month, and you're paying commercial power rates. People will get mad if you vaporize their husband or hurt their car.

But -- Tesla seems to have done L2 and L3 at scale. Other companies such as electrify america seem to be examples of malicious compliance or, at best, absolute incompetence.

Yeah, I saw a video recently where an EVGo stall was down because someone had reported a cracked connector. They are pretty quick to just disable things until they can have it inspected, and this can be the case even when the other cable might be fine.

It isn't an easy business right now.

The EV charging station (i.e. not at my home) situation is abysmal. I get the idea is that eventually every parking lot you're in has one, but there are still concerns.

Here was my recent experience in Houston:

- staying at a family members apartment building. cool I see there is a chargepoint station in the building. the building admin (1) didn't know if there was one (2) where it was (3) how to get access to it. finally another admin told me where it was. Okay now I need a chargepoint app. Downloaded. Oops, that chargepoint account needs to be linked to a resident of the apartment. Fail, on to the next.

- Okay now I go to a movie and turns out there is a 50 kW charger in the parking. It's an EVGo. I drive up because I have no way of knowing whether it's being used or not. Parking lot is super busy and guess what - the EVGo charging block is just slammed in the middle of the standard parking lot and 3 of 4 parking spots that the power cables can reach are consumed by non-EVs. Only one car is actually charging.

- So I'm now 20 min late for my movie. I find a 6 kW charging station (24 hours to get 50% of my battery) on the other side of the building, and its in a corporate parking garage. I use the first chargepoint and says the connector isn't working. Turns out there is a small piece of plastic that has broken on 2 of the 4 charging cables. So I'm on my 3rd cable when it finally works. I'm now charging at a measily 6 kW. 2 min later I get a message saying "if you stay past 7pm, the charge goes from $1.50/hr to $25/hr"...wtf?

- Temperature drops to below freezing overnight and now my battery is degrading quite a bit. I have to stop at a Supercharger to get home to Austin. Awesome...250 kW tesla supercharger, will only take an estimated 8 minutes. Nope - it's super busy and turns out that it can only deliver 45 kW because there are 20 other Tesla's using the service. So now it's 25 minutes to charge my battery.

Plugshare is a great site/app for checking on weird chargers that you don't know exactly where they are and if they are working.

The only chargers I actually trust to be there and working are Tesla Superchargers or actual public Chargepoint stations that I have checked on Plugshare.

Those dinky 6kW chargers in parking garages installed by the city or whatever are nice bonuses when you come across them and they work, but definitely not worth planning around unless you are really desperate for a charge.

In Europe I've barely seen any broken chargers. Off course sometimes there is a charger out of service, or some random issue. Most of the time this is shown in an app/car navigation, so you don't even go there. But in general they do work as advertised.

But we also have a different connector (type 2/ccs instead of type 1/ccs), that seems to be less error prone. And for AC charging usually you need to bring your own cable (which gets locked by the car and the charger). Vandalism also doesn't seem to be such a big issue like in the US.

How does a business that doesn't provide any service say in business?

From the article:

> How did the state-subsidized public charger system end up so problematic? California’s policies are at least partly to blame. The state chose not to require that charger companies meet performance standards as it doled out $1 billion in subsidies, grants and other assistance to charger companies, with billions more on the way.

There it is. I suppose one silver lining with this "just build chargers, any chargers will do" approach is the faulty locations that currently exist can be made reliable in time, at least the space is reserved. The state just needs to fix their broken incentives.

Shouldn't automotive refuel and recharge stations all be governed by Weights and Measures departments across the nation?

Why are these giant glorified USB chargers not subject to the same regulatory pressures yet?

Honestly... that's not a bad idea. There are all sorts of EVSE testing apparatus on the market, surely we can have W&M ensure that electricity dispensing equipment are providing properly metered power at precise prices.

I'm sure it'll happen eventually. Regulation lags I suppose, and mainstream uptake is still small for now.

It's like we forgot in the last ~30 years how to do useful regulation. I am inclined to blame this on the Republicans trying to starve the government to death instead of having lean, but well-executed regulations and the Democrats seeming mostly focused on environmental stuff.

https://archive.ph/20240124135252/https://www.latimes.com/en...

Because all infrastructure in California is crumbling with a population in decline (currently at 2015/16 levels) with the prop 13 landed class parasitically sucking the productive class dry with increasingly burdensome rents, taxes, and cost of living?

> Because all infrastructure in California is crumbling

If you think CA infra is trash, wait till you visit the East Coast. There is so much infra construction across California with highway expansions, rail expansions, etc.

Anyhow, it's Electrify America's chargers that are the ones that are broken due to VW's incompetence in the EV space.

Maybe a biased source but California homeowners tend to be in the middle when you rank areas by the length of homeownership, median length being 13 years https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/how-long-do...

Any sale would reset the assessed value of the property.

This is a case where average might be more useful the median.

If the richest real estate owners (top 1% own 13% of all US real estate) have a longer average ownership period, then that will have a disproportionate effect on the local market, because they own so much of it.

I noticed many inoperable chargepoint chargers are due to the broken plug clip - it's a plastic clip that snaps easily when exposed to weather. It's truly poor design and even worse maintenance.

You can generally still use if the unit is otherwise undamaged. Plug it in, then lift/prise the remaining ‘thumb press’ part of the plug up.

> prise

Use a knife for extra style points.

And I have noticed that when the chargers are broken in this manner, Tesla vehicles are still able to charge due to the J1772 adapter being able to sidestep the issue. It's mainly because for Tesla connectors, the latch is on the car's side, so a cheap adapter simulates the latch on the J1772 side.

Yep, it's a seemingly silly thing but the physical external latch is one of the biggest downsides of the J-1772 / CCS Combo 1 cables compared to NACS.

Europe's version of the AC charging connector (Type 2 Mennekes) and DC connector (CCS Combo 2) both use an internal vehicle-side latching mechanism like Tesla's connector and seem to have fewer reliability issues with the connectors themselves.

Ultimately EVs are good, but they are too short sighted. If Cali wants to make real impact, they need to bring back light rail. It is completely wasteful to basically require everyone have a car, because there is no real alternative. This whole EV push is just FUD from car companies to give a partial solution that won't really work in the long run, but keeps making them lots of money.

The answer is both. Public transit to reduce the number of car miles needed, and EVs to replace the car miles that remain since the basic structure, zoning, and layout of a lot of homes and businesses in the US is not conducive to public transit replacing all or even most car miles driven.

EVs are also great for all sorts of vehicles. Delivery vans, buses, garbage trucks, and local/regional trucking aren't easily replaceable with rail but will benefit from EVs.

Even if we put huge emphasis on building out public transit, EVs can still be deployed faster. Converting a substantial amount of commuter miles to public transit is a great project but will take many decades.

It is indeed both, they're not mutually exclusive. electric cars also increase quality of life for everybody having to suffer the cars in their neighborhoods. They're much more quiet and don't pollute the local environment. Charging stations are also not nearly as trashy as a gas station.

Tire particles are also among the largest known sources of microplastic pollution with research completed in San Francisco Bay identifying nearly 50 percent of microplastic fibers that entered the Bay as vehicle tire wear.

Need to get rid of tires.

fair enough, EVs pollute less than ICEs, still an improvement imho

ICEs would be heavy rail

The two highest light rail ridership systems in the USA are in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_light_r...

This doesn't count subways.

They obviously need a lot more

Interesting data. Even ignoring SF Muni Metro, the SF cable car system has more riders than San Jose or Sacramento light rail systems. Hills, density and history may matter.

Tourism can also drive rider numbers higher, and may or may not really be "car cancelling trips".

After all ridership on rollercoasters is quite high, but they don't really transit you anywhere.

We should have invested more in plug-in hybrids. It would have be more realistic and cheaper.

True, but I think that moment was 20 years ago. Level 3 charging makes most plug-in hybrids obsolete.

The plug-in hybrids on the market are currently not really cheaper than EV equivalents.

I don't think being cheaper is actually a given as EV batteries continue to scale up in mass production. PHEV will always mean having two drivetrains and all of the necessary accessories for both.

PHEV also only really works if you have daily home or work charging. BEV can be filled up once a week more or less like a gas car, but PHEV needs its small battery charged every day you commute to get the benefit.

I think there are definitely people and situations that benefit from PHEV. A big one is those who occasionally take long trips to remote areas, or those who tow long distance (See the upcoming Ramcharger truck). But I expect BEV to win out on price and provide enough utility for most people within 5-10 years.

> Distressed by the state of the public charger system, automobile companies have struck agreements with Tesla to use its Superchargers. The details are yet to be announced. No word on what percentage of Tesla chargers non-Tesla cars will be able to use, how much it will cost

The announcements promise > 15k stalls. That is basically every v3/v4 station. Why does he pretend that he doesn't know this when he purports to cover the EV industry.

Oh, just another piece of rubbish by Russ Mitchell, the world's worst EV salesman. He "[...] covers the epic transition to electric vehicles" but somehow only finds negative things to say, especially about the largest manufacturer of EVs.

Weird.

That's a core behavior of the LA Times. They have a guy dedicated to trashing EVs. They have a guy dedicated to trashing high-speed rail. They have a guy dedicated to writing FUD about solar, wind, and lithium batteries.

But anyway, it remains to be seen whether the perceived superiority of the supercharger network survives its initial contact with cars from makes other than Tesla.

> how much it will cost

I have seen non Tesla cars already charge at Tesla Superchargers, how do they not know how much it will cost?

Good point, there are some stations that support magic dock now. There are even a couple of those in California.

What is the role of the 4th estate if not to hold the government accountable for how they spend forcibly taken money from the citizenry.

I think this is failing at accountability and achieving something more like empty criticism. If it was only a balanced commentary on the pros & cons of public funding for these things, I'd be more inclined to like it.

TBH, there's a lot to be said for cutting back public funding. Wal-Mart is massively increasing investment in their own charging network (not EA any more!). They are being joined by Circle-K, BP, Pilot/EVGo, and many others that are making investments in a lot more than just government funded NEVI sites. I don't really think we even need NEVI at this point and we especially don't need state funding.

But I've seen too many articles from him to see this as nuance and policy shaping. Its just a sugar rush for people who agree with his anti-Tesla and virtually anti-EV style of writing. There's little real informing here.

Negative news makes better clickbait. And this journalist and outlet probably have long given up on anything resembling serious journalism. I clicked on the author's name to get a list of titles. And you are right. Not great. To put it mildly.

Tesla is most of the EV market in California (80% or so). So are their chargers. Most of those work fine of course. And all of those fine chargers are now becoming available to non Tesla cars. Problem solved. A minority of chargers (i.e. the ones not provided by Tesla), are a bit problematic. Some companies are improving what they do. Competition tends to bring out the best in them.

If you are holding onto your gas guzzler because you are a bit suffering from (range) anxiety, you might want to consider what will happen to your favorite local gas stations when double digit percentages of their customers buy EVs and stop buying petrol. I'll sketch what will happen for you. It's just simple economic reasoning:

As the number of chargers goes up (like by 2025-2030), the number of still operating gas stations will go down. The least profitable ones will go out of business first. Anything remote and rural will be at risk sooner rather than later. Basically any areas where it is currently still challenging to find a charger will also be the first where long struggling petrol stations will start closing doors first.

That's happening a lot sooner than people realize. All the people spending lots on fuel right now will be switching sooner rather than later. Commercial fleets, people that drive a lot, etc. All of them are switching to EVs. In a few short years very few people driving for work will be buying petrol or diesel. Technically it's cheaper now already and it's only going to get cheaper from now. Some companies may put off making the switch for some time but we're talking years, not decades. This will be over by the early 2030s.

It's the small users that will drag their heels for a bit longer. Decades even maybe. But they don't buy a lot of fuel and most of the fuel business is commercial traffic. So, logically the petrol business is going to decline a lot more rapidly than the EV sales percentages suggest. Another logical consequence of increasing petrol station scarcity is people raising their prices as it becomes harder to find a working petrol station. That's just market forces kicking in. You're more than welcome to drive 50 miles to the next station also selling fuel at a premium. Oh wait, you are nearly out of gas. 10$ per gallon it is for you! That's going to speed things up further of course.

“[California] chose not to require that charger companies meet performance standards as it doled out $1 billion in subsidies, grants and other assistance to charger companies, with billions more on the way…no financial penalties for poor reliability were included in its subsidy and grant contracts, and no mechanisms for enforcement were set up.

…

Another big problem: A lack of comprehensive data…The government can’t even agree how many chargers there are in California.

…

Pasquale Romano left his job last fall as chief executive at ChargePoint, the nation’s largest charger company measured by total installations. ChargePoint’s board paid him more than $31 million over the last three years, plus stock options that vest this month valued at $44.8 million.“

It's insane that you still see things like this in procurement / grants.

Assume bad faith and put as many checks as you can efficiently include.

In this case, centralized registration and random operation auditing seems a minor expense, relative to the amount of money spent.

Build a broken incentive structure, shame on you when the outcomes aren't as desired... :(

> a broken incentive structure, shame on you when the outcomes aren't as desired

What’s surprising is the lack of course correction. The California Energy Commission should threaten to sue, to claw back funds for non-performing chargers. Instead, they haven’t even changed the way they distribute new funds.

Then compliance costs spiral out of control.

This is why this kind of stuff should be done with state capacity. Make it a normal employer employee relationship.

Anecdotally, I was traveling in Maryland and struck up a conversation with a fella that worked for the state weights and measurements. He was going around checking gas pump accuracy. He said years go between when pumps are checked.

Balancing efficiency in auditing is fascinating to me.

It always seems to boil down to "likelihood of auditing" vs "penalties for failing audit."

In single-business industries (e.g. selling gas), I'd imagine penalties are highly effective. A gas station banned from selling gas because they were caught mis-measuring amounts isn't much of a gas station!

> always seems to boil down to "likelihood of auditing" vs "penalties for failing audit."

California can’t even figure out how many chargers have been built. They know some aren’t working, they just can’t or won’t do anything about it. There doesn’t seem to be a downside to taking that money and putting up kaput chargers.

One figures that wanting to make money would be a sufficient motivation for companies to maintain their equipment. With anything even remotely resembling competent leadership, having the government pay for you to setup infrastructure that provides you with reoccurring revenue is a dream position to be in.

Yet somehow.... here we are.

Right now fast chargers are very expensive to build and install, and the return on investment just from selling electricity isn't great unless it's actually used many times per day.

I think a lot of these charging providers make most of their money by installing the charger when it's paid for by grants, businesses, etc. rather than from the ongoing business of charging cars.

Tesla reduces up front costs with vertical integration instead of buying chargers from third party suppliers like other charging companies do. They also have their own fleet of cars and data on where chargers are needed, so most of their chargers get decent utilization.

That said I think part of why Tesla is doing deals to get more cars on their network is to increase that utilization even farther at more remote chargers that might currently be losing money on their books.

> Right now fast chargers are very expensive to build and install, and the return on investment just from selling electricity isn't great unless it's actually used many times per day.

It is funny, I have a friend running a fast charger business in another country, and he is making plenty of money w/o needing any government grants to get started.

They are vertically integrated from doing HW design, software (they tried outsourcing that, it went badly), to managing physical locations.

They are also expanding slowly and only doing installations where it makes financial sense.

Sounds like they are doing things right. Do they also provide any other amenities that might drive revenue like vending, coffee, etc?

> Do they also provide any other amenities that might drive revenue like vending, coffee, etc?

Full meals. :-D IIRC they sublease land to small restaurants to open food stalls.

So they have incentive to keep the chargers and site in good shape because it impacts their charging business as well as the food sales.

A lot of chargers in the US are just dropped in the back of a parking lot somewhere. Once the provider has gotten the installation check then they don't have much ongoing incentive to keep it working well. Or even if they want to, keeping the hardware and software working well is tougher when they aren't vertically integrated.

Sure, but it also requires the decision makers to be rational.

I worked for a publisher that I had built a social platform for that encompassed a number of different things, but their main money maker was their classified ads system since they were in a state that allowed classified ads for gun sales (a big hunting and fishing site).

So this required a two tiered approach because we were not allowed to display third party network ads on pages that specifically featured firearm categories. Later, some bug got into the ear of the new company President about just converting everything over to a different platform and putting the classifieds system behind the same paywall they use for magazine subscriptions.

After telling her that we had already gone over the economics of the decision and why we stuck with what we had, she decided to switch over anyway. In her mind, it was unfathomable that people wouldn't pay her money to post ads on her site. Her husband went so far as to accuse me of not wanting to change because it would mean the elimination of my retainer.

So what used to be a section of the site that generated about $45K a month in ad revenue now receives about 80 classified ads per month, and a family that has spent a generation leeching off of the work of their parents is about to erase a legacy before the old man even dies.

> Sure, but it also requires the decision makers to be rational.

This is true, and I wasn't taking into account that short term misaligned incentives are super easy to create even in companies that are trying to be rational.

Something as simple as quarterly sales bonuses are a common enough cause of this. (Sell sell sell, fail to meet delivery times, lose all customer trust)

It is astonishing how much money has been doled out to executives at these charging companies, while the company fundamentals have been extremely weak. It is hard to justify compensation packages like that.

If we pay them more, it's clearly wasteful. If we pay them less, do we expect better results?

In the most recent quarter, Chargepoint had $367M in cash and cash equivalents. These large compensation packages suck a surprising amount of working capital out of businesses that already do not have huge runways. I'd expect better results if they focused on saving cash and building the business in a lower cost manner.

They are early stage businesses and losses are expected, but they need to focus on the long term and long term compensation plans.

Higher profits is better results, so I guess yes?

> If we pay them less, do we expect better results?

Sometimes, yes.

Not speaking about the charging field specifically, but in general there seems to be a compensation level past which you begin to attract less desirable candidates.

To some extent, we've developed a system that rewards people for being able to pump the stock. It isn't always a bad thing, but it seems to be going pretty badly for most SPACs.

If you don't pay them that much money, then you'll only be able to attract low-quality talent who won't be good at their job. /s

california is a socialist-injected bankrupt state that takes money hard-earned by people to redistribute it to people that did not work.

welcome to socialism : tell us what you need, we will tell you how to life without it.

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