[PaulWaldman]

> I've come to notice that there is no incentive for 3rd party ev-chargers to be dependable.

I don't know, how often would you stop at a gas station if their pumps weren't reliable? Many 3rd party chargers are selling electricity at a mark-up.

[burnerthrow008]

How many broken gas stations could you build if the government gave grants for building gas stations, but not for keeping them running?

[richiebful1]

The Federal US subsidy for EV chargers require 97% uptime across the year

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/02/28/2023-03...

[jonny_eh]

Unfortunately, the lost income is marginal. The risk for Tesla/Rivian, or even a gas station, is more existential.

[bobthepanda]

Yeah, the forging of EA from the Dieselgate money probably has a lot to do with why they don’t feel the heat on unreliable chargers.

I suppose it would be different if chargers were run by electric utilities or were there to goose the sales of convenience stores.

[zrobotics]

I wasn't aware that EA was owned by VW, I thought it was a separate business. Suddenly all the complaints from friends with EVs make tons more sense.

From wikipedia: (Electrify America) is a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group of America, established in late 2016 by the automaker as part of its efforts to offset emissions in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Volkswagen, as part of its settlement following the "Dieselgate" emissions scandal, invested $2 billion in creating Electrify America.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrify_America

[_ea1k]

That's true, but there's also another weird counteracting effect. Lets say you have 4 chargers offering a full 350 kw each. If they get used at full power for ~15 minutes in the month, the demand charge for the month might be ~$10k (probably will be higher, tbh). This will be true even if the stations themselves see ~15% utilization.

But break two of them? Yeah, there might be an occasional line, but your fee drops to $5k and you still produce the same revenue. TBH, some of these stations likely have better ROI when a stall or two are broken.

High utilization sites are completely different, of course.

[NotSammyHagar]

The stations have all kinds of strategies for avoiding these max demand charges. They can slow down the charge rate to save money for them, but there are lots of places that have local battery storage to reduce the max demand charge likelihood.

[natch]

You can sell something at a markup but a gas station sells so many $50 fill ups per day compared to an EV station, the gas station probably has about 1000X more revenue.

Sure their margin might be better than a razor-thin gas station margin but for the time being it's a miserable business. Unless there's another incentive, like selling cars.

So yeah. Like the poster said, there is no incentive for 3rd party EV chargers to be dependable.