EV owners angered over constant problems with public charging sites

Electric car owners are being forced to play the waiting game at regional public charging stations thanks to a shortsighted approach to infrastructure rollout.

Electric vehicle owners are being left high and dry by out-of-order public chargers.

Owners are venting their frustration in online chat rooms after turning up to scarce public chargers in regional areas and finding them out of action.

In some cases, chargers in rural and regional areas have been offline for several weeks. That has in turn created long wait times at any nearby charging facilities that do work.

Some people reported lining up behind four cars at a single charger. With average charging times taking up to an hour, it can mean a very long wait.

The situation has been exacerbated in NSW where Tesla owners are shunning the company’s dedicated charging network, which can cost about 60c per kWh, in favour of free NRMA chargers.

The growing number of EVs on the road is causing headaches at charging stations. Picture: Thomas Wielecki.

The NRMA said the global shortage of semiconductors had meant delays in getting parts from its hardware manufacturer, Tritium.

“There have been delays with parts due to global supply issues. The company has not been able to get them,” a spokesman said.

He said the company had decided to replace entire units rather than wait for parts to be delivered.

“We’re actually replacing them rather than waiting for them to be fixed,” he said.

Tritium, an Australian success story, has become one of the world’s leading providers of charging infrastructure, with more than 7600 chargers worldwide.

But local industry experts, who declined to be named, questioned whether the company’s rapid global expansion had led to local delays in parts supply.

The chief executive of Tritium, Jane Hunter, said that while global supply of semiconductors was an issue, there were other issues behind the delays.

Some Tesla owners are shunning the company’s paid chargers for free public outlets. Picture: Thomas Wielecki.

“There’s no doubt that we would have had shortages on semiconductors during the thick of Covid. I would say that those are now getting better and better,” she said.

She said the company’s chargers had “world-leading” reliability, so the problem was not the number of equipment faults but the time it took to fix them.

The chargers were covered under warranty but the agreed industry turnaround times for warranty claims were “really, really slow”.

She said some charging station operators were opting not to buy service agreements that guaranteed quick repair times.

That meant stations could be offline for long periods when a fault occurred.

“What we’re trying to sell our customers is a service agreement exactly like petrol pumps have. Every petrol forecourt – BP, Shell – they have a service agreement where somebody turns up on site and services the chargers within four hours or eight hours or 24 hours, whatever selection that you’ve made.

“Now among our maybe 250 customers globally, we’ve sold four or five service agreements,” she said.

Tritium supplies the majority of charging outlets in Australia. Picture: Supplied.

The situation was made worse by the fact that many charging stations only had a single charger.

“You can never have one charger. That’s critical in a remote location or a rural location. It’s just not a suitable business model for drivers. You need some redundancy,” she said.

The NRMA said it had signed a service agreement with Tritium but that hadn’t stopped some of its stations from being offline for long periods.

Hunter said the current issues highlighted the need for strict guidelines attached to the rollout of government-funded charging infrastructure.

“Australia really needs to think about how you roll chargers out and single charger sites is absolutely not the way for Australia to roll out chargers,” she said.

The US government’s charging infrastructure rollout requires stations to have multiple chargers and funding set aside for ongoing maintenance. There are also “uptime” requirements for charging stations.

Ampol's new AmpCharge electric vehicle charging stations. Picture: Supplied.

Hunter said the situation was likely to improve as petrol retailers such as BP, Ampol and Shell rolled out charging networks, as they were focused on providing “a seamless driver experience”.

“We’re more desperate than anybody for it to become a phenomenal user experience because it’s our hardware that wears the negative connotations and we want it to be super successful,” she said.

Ross de Rango, the head of energy and infrastructure for the Electric Vehicle Council, said reliability of public charging infrastructure was an important issue in the transition to electric vehicles.

“To meet consumer expectation, the goal needs to be that public fast charging locations are reliable at a comparable level to petrol stations. It’s OK for an individual charger to be out of action occasionally, and it’s OK for there to be short queues occasionally, but the service has to work for the drivers,” he said.

“There are many aspects involved in solving this challenge, including redundancy in site design, maintenance planning, service level agreements for spare parts, uptime targets and payment methods. We have called for federal, state and territory governments to come together with industry to work on this.”