A Wall Street Journal journalist who owns an electric vehicle (EV) was dismayed to find that about 40 percent of the chargers she tried throughout LA county were out of service. A troubling data point for car companies and government officials claiming that the entire country will soon go electric.
A test of 30 non-Tesla fast-charging stations in LA County, the EV capital of America, revealed that at least 40 percent of them had some type of issue, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
“From the beach in Santa Monica to parking garages under Rodeo Drive, my video producer Adam Falk and I visited 30 different non-Tesla DC fast-charger stations in a Rivian R1T pickup. I ran into problems at 13 of them — that’s over 40%. Oof is right,” WSJ columnist and EV owner Joanna Stern wrote.
The WSJ columnist added that she had deliberately limited the experiment to Level 3 chargers, noting, “I ignored the more common chargers known as Level 2 because they’re just too slow for quick fill-ups.”
Stern explained that she came across “three problem categories” during her testing expedition: first, the charging station was broken, second, there was a problem with payment, such as it being rejected, and third, there was a software error between the charger and the vehicle.
