Public electric vehicle chargers break down for a variety of reasons. Pins on the connector that attaches the charger cable to the vehicle can bend or break, preventing a complete connection. The screen customers interact with to make payments can go dark or suffer glitches. In some cases, an internal component like the power converter might break. And vandalism is increasingly common, with people cutting charging cables to extract and sell the copper wiring inside them.
These are just a few of the reasons that about 12,000 of the 212,000-odd public electric vehicle chargers scattered around the United States are inoperable right now. Some are down for scheduled maintenance, but many more are simply broken, with nobody coming to fix them.
The Biden administration wanted to remediate this epidemic of broken chargers, which is why it implemented the first-ever federal reliability standards for EV chargers. These standards meant that owners who received government subsidies were obligated to repair broken chargers — or risk losing their funding. &nb... Read more
