Biden Moves to Rein In the Wild West of Car Charging
The Biden administration wants to make sure America's next 500,000 charging stations work a lot better than the 59,000 it already has.
As the White House prepares to spend $7.5 billion on public EV infrastructure, it published a lengthy set of rules Wednesday aimed squarely at the broken chargers and confusing pricing that have hamstrung EV adoption to date. Roughly one in five public fast-charging sessions is a failure, according to a recent J.D. Powers report, and Twitter appears as crowded with irate EV owners as it is Tesla evangelists.
“The establishment of this final rule provides a powerful antidote to these issues,” read the criteria laid out by the Department of Transportation. “Consumers will be more confident in the availability, safety and consistency of the EV charging stations.”
The document lays the groundwork for some 500,000 new charging stations that the government plans to fund in the next five years. It also represents the first national oversight of EV infrastructure; most notably, it mandates that each federally funded charger:
“Uptime is probably the No. 1 thing,” said Andrew Fox, CEO of Charge Enterprises Inc., which designs and builds charging stations. “It's just like the cell-phone commercial ‘Can you hear me now?' There was so much friction with cell phones in the early days and that's exactly what we're experiencing now. ”
American EV infrastructure is still both anemic and fragmented. The country is scattered with blinky chargers, many already dated or too distant to maintain. Meanwhile, vast electron deserts still patch the South and American West as charging networks wait for paying customers and would-be EV drivers hold out for public places to fill a battery. It's a chicken-and-egg standoff
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