Comment by sib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sib | Hacker News Reader

These articles are pretty much garbage. They never note which chargers, where, were investigated.

For example - are they talking about Tesla chargers or non-Tesla chargers? What geography?

From the article: "ChargerHelp conducted a point-in-time assessment of more than 4,800 charge points to see if reported uptime matched drivers’ actual experience. The company found that 26.3% of test charges failed."

I have owned a Tesla as my daily driver for 6 years. My wife has for 5 years. We have taken many road trips in our cars, ranging from 300 - 1,000 miles (480 - 1,600km) one-way. And, occasionally, for reasons, we find ourselves using a Supercharger locally, not on a road trip. In all that time, we have had one (1) time when a Supercharger failed to initiate a charge, in which case, we moved to the unit 10 feet away.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data, but the difference between 1 time in 11 combined years of driving and 26.3% failure rate is extremely suspect.

And when the source is a "study" funded by ChargerHelp, whose website says

>>> ChargerHelp is tackling the biggest hurdle to rapid EV adoption—the charging experience.

>>> We ensure charging stations stay operational, keeping EVs powered and on the move. Reliable access to charging is crucial, whether for personal vehicles or entire fleets, and we make sure drivers can charge anytime, anywhere without interruptions

The smell of bias is, shall we say, not surprising.

I agree with what you've said, but I think pretty clearly they're not talking about Superchargers.

As any non-Tesla EV owner knows, the other DC fast charging options are pretty egregiously bad - Electrify America was most notorious I think for having abysmal reliability.

In the past couple years, though, every other EV company has pretty much agreed to switch to Tesla's "North American Charging Standard", and an obvious major reason for this is that the Supercharger network is leaps and bounds better than the alternatives. This switchover is still in progress, so over the next few years you'll see CCS decline and more Superchargers.

As a Volvo EV owner I was really excited for Suoerchargers to be available this year. Now it seems Musk firing everyone on the Suoercharger team has put a massive delay into everything, if it happens at all now.

They don't even seem to specify what kind of charger they've tested. But I wouldn't be surprised if they found that a quarter of public L2-chargers were out of service. They have tons of failure points and usually very little internal logic to self-report.

Some of the early fast chargers (outside of Tesla) were notoriously bad, and a lot of them are still around, for better or worse. Many of the early AC and DC chargers were also without any kind of connectivity, making it hard to properly manage them. In the early days even some of the fast chargers at gas station weren't really network connected, and if they were it was poorly implemented. Not that different from pumps at the forecourt.

I would think that Tesla’s really high reliability is probably pulling up the average for Electrify America’s really horrible reliability. So to me, 26% failure rate means like 2% for Tesla and 98% for EA, but ya, context is needed to understand the numbers.

I'm not sure it's bias, just sloppy reporting. I've been a Tesla driver for 5.5 years and had similar experience. I think I've had twice as many problems though (2 times in 5.5 years and had to move 10 feet). The only times I've had any range anxiety was in those rare locations (usually well up in mountain wilderness) where I had to rely on non-Tesla chargers.

The value of the Tesla Supercharger network is totally underrated by the mainstream press.

IME, it's obviously Electrify America and Blink.

I rarely charge outside, but when I do I try to stay away from their chargers as my reliability rate of a successful charge on first plug is like 10%. It used it not matter that much, but with way more EVs out there, you can't just plug in to the next port as they're all taken.

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