New EV owner here. We charge at home so I don’t need to use them, but stores nearby have chargers. I tried them to see how they work. They are often broken.
One store has a Volta charger (free!). It worked great the first time; the next time I went it was broken.
Walmart has an Electrify America fast charger. The first time I went, 1 of 3 was not working. The next time I went, 1 of 3 was not working, but it was a different one.
Was I unlucky, or are these charging networks unreliable? Has it been getting better or worse over time?
The Tesla chargers – do they live up to their reputation for being reliable? Or are they also unreliable, but Tesla puts so many chargers at each location that you can always find a working one?
Just watch any of the YouTube videos that compare road trip charging and you will see the difference. While you may have 1 or 2 Tesla chargers down sometimes, normally there are many more to choose from and the speeds are reliable. Ease of payment and different apps are also a pain. This will hopefully clear up a lot of your manufacturer has a deal with Tesla to use their superchargers soon. https://youtu.be/92w5doU68D8?feature=shared
The Tesla supercharger network is very reliable. My wife & I drove from Boston to South Carolina last year with no issues. I think we found one plug that was damaged & unusable but there were 8 or more others at that location that were working fine.
Were also approaching 2 years on our Tesla home charger and no issues at all with that.
As a Tesla owner of 5 years with a cross country road trip in the car, Teslas charging has never failed me. It’s rare to encounter a charging stall not working, but every location has multiple chargers and they repair stalls quickly.
Almost every location I’ve been to has at least 8 stalls if not more. The navigation in the car also keeps track of stalls in use, electricity prices, expected wait time and if any stalls are not working.
They are genuinely more reliable. Having more stalls does help for when there’s issues, but they have 99.96% uptime across the entire network. I’ve had to move stalls once in my almost 3 years of ownership.
They also have their own service people that travel to chargers to fix them, where Electrify America hires local electrical contractors that may not be experts on DC Fast Charging equipment.
Edit: ran some numbers and I’ve charged 109 times on Superchargers. One failed session. I live in the rural Midwest/South so it’s not like I’m in EV heaven either.
I installed one in my garage a bit over 5 years ago and have never had a problem with it. My parents also installed one in their garage several years before that. They did have an issue with it at first but I think they replaced it with a newer version of the charger (same version I have) and haven’t had any issues since then.