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by daggersandscars 698 days ago
“There were 930,000 UK chargers at the end of June, according to ChargeUK, a lobby group, but the majority of these have been installed in homes and business premises, with only about 65,000 public chargers available.”

The article does not break down the 65K public chargers or the added chargers by charging speed.
1 comments
krona 698 days ago
Nor does it mention how many of those chargers actually work.
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dark-star 698 days ago
yeah, I have seen this in Germany as well. I guess the companies get incentives for installing these chargers, and then just let them sit there until they rot

In our city (~100k) alone I have spotted over 10 chargers that have been defective for at least half a year, some even longer than 1 year. And that's only those that I regularly drive to.

As long as there are no requirements to actually service them and have them in a working condition, the raw numbers of installed chargers are meaningless

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chrisandchris 698 days ago
> ... there's no requirement ...

Is a requirement really necessary? I'm not aware that any requirement exists to keep your petrol station running (well, maybe there is one). And I'm sure it's not necessary to have one, because if your station does not work you go out of business very fast.

So why are these companies still in business if it's profitable to have non-working charging stations?

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two_handfuls 698 days ago
At least sometimes, yes. WV’s charger network (“electrify America”) is notorious for perennially broken chargers, and when the government announced the next round of subsidies was contingent on the chargers actually working then suddenly WV got serious about maintenance.
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lesuorac 698 days ago
> So why are these companies still in business if it's profitable to have non-working charging stations?

Pretty sure the government pays them the cost of installing the charger + profit. So they're just in the business of installing chargers.

While I don't think anybody pays you to just build gas stations so you'll need to operate it to recover your initial investment.

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pjc50 698 days ago
I wonder if there's some kind of ridiculous accountability split like the famous McDonalds non-working ice cream machines.
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