This company was ordered to spend $2B on EV chargers

Many don’t work

The nation’s largest public EV charging network was created by court order. In 2016, the year after Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” emissions scandal came to light, the German carmaker agreed to make amends by spending $2 billion building electric car chargers and encouraging electric vehicle adoption. The goal was to compensate society for the air pollution created by Volkswagen’s faulty engines and to pepper the nation with EV chargers.

In the years since, the company that arose from that settlement Electrify America has built thousands of charging ports across the country, from the visitor center of the Grand Canyon to Newark.

But advocates say many of those chargers, which are intended to help shift the nation to electric cars, don’t work. Those nonfunctioning chargers, they argue, are slowing the transition to electric cars and violating the original purpose of the settlement agreement Volkswagen reached with the government.

“I consider this to be public money,” said David Rempel, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of a recent study on charger reliability. “There should have been more oversight on how it was spent.”

Volkswagen was an unlikely birthplace for the nation’s largest public EV charging network. In 2015, the company admitted to installing software that allowed its vehicles to cheat on emissions tests only preventing the emissions of dangerous air pollutants like nitrogen oxide when the cars were being tested by regulators. In a settlement with the federal government and the state of California a year later, Volkswagen agreed to spend $10 billion fixing or buying back the faulty cars, $2.7 billion on addressing the air pollution it had caused, and $2 billion to build out a charging network and educate the public on electric cars.

Seven years later, Electrify America’s almost 4,000 chargers make it the largest fast-charging network in the country after Tesla. (A fast charge can take just 20 minutes to fill an EV battery to 80 percent, compared with slower charging, which can take hours.) And although Tesla has promised to begin opening its charging network to other vehicles, Americans with non-Tesla EVs largely have to make use of a much smaller set of fast public chargers dominated by Electrify America.

But the network has come under fire for its day-to-day performance. Almost all non-Tesla charging networks have significant reliability issues: According to the study co-written by Rempel, only 72.5 percent of all fast public chargers in San Francisco Bay Area were operating at the time of the study in early 2022. The data analytics company J.D. Power estimates that just 80 percent of all charge attempts nationwide are successful.

But even among a group of struggling companies, Electrify America stands out. In a recent J.D. Power study, the company ranked last in consumer satisfaction among fast-charging networks, scoring a 538 on a 1,000-point scale. (In comparison, Tesla’s network scored a 739.) In the Berkeley study, researchers found that 7 percent of Electrify America’s stations didn’t have a cord long enough to reach the vehicle they were trying to charge.