[jonplackett]

Why is it so hard to keep an electric charger running?

Is it just because it’s so much power that there’s weird components in there?

At face value, plugs are in general pretty solid! Like how many times in your life has a plug in your house just stopped working.

[mattmaroon]

Quite a few if you count GFCIs going bad, they need to be replaced periodically. (If you test them you’ll also find that they really do have a failure mode where they keep delivering power but will no longer trip, which is a lot less noticeable than when they trip and won’t reset.)

But to your actual point: I have a feeling they’re just badly engineered. Tesla ones are so much more reliable than third parties. I’m not sure if that’s because they break less or are fixed faster, and I suspect it’s some of both, but the difference is very large.

[NotSammyHagar]

no - poor design, lack of organization to fix them were issues.

But a key issue seems to be that EA went crazy and made their chargers out of lots of different components in a panic to get started, analogous to the PC world where there are huge numbers of different parts configurations, and even if you have only 6 major charger models, your fix it tech probably doesn't have parts of all 6. It seems obvious this was a bad strategy, but they wanted to get their chargers working as fast as possible. Instead they created a permanent bad quality reputation that may never be fixed for EA.

But it's not just EA, other companies seemed to have no plan for fixing their chargers when they break.