Most EV charging stations do not live up to their promises

I've had an electric car for over a year now, and I can confidently say that my Kona Electric is the best car I've ever had. Given the pandemic and our relatively simple retired lifestyle at the best of times, we haven't done many long trips in it, but we have done some (430km to Killarney, for example). And we've had no problem with charging up to now.

The vast majority of our charging is done at home, using our own Level 2 charger. And when we have had to charge using commercial chargers, we have used fast Level 3 charging stations (many of them free, for a variety of different reasons). On one occasion, both of the chargers I was expecting to be able to use were either in use or out of commission, and I had to pivot rapidly and find another one within range, but that worked out OK. It has got to the stage where I am downright blasé about charging, which is probably not a good thing.

It was interesting then, to read an article in The Globe about how poorly many public fast chargers perform. I have never really been in that much of a rush, so the issue of charging speeds has never surfaced for me, but I can see that, if electric vehicles are to blossom, as we all hope, the issue needs to be addressed.

As the article points out, electric cars tend to come with ballpark promises like "4.5 minutes to get 100 kilometres of driving range" or "go from 10 to 80 per cent charge in less than 18 minutes" or "up to 100 kilometres in approximately 10 minutes". The particular claims depend on the battery size and maximum charging speeds of various vehicles. But the article points out that, in practice, cars do not charge at anything like their maximum charging speeds, and anyway different charging stations have different charging speeds too (and most of those do not meet their specifications and promises in practice).

To give a couple of examples from the article, one PetroCanada charging station, rated at up to 350kW, with a car technically capable of charging at 250kW, only actually charged at 62kW. Another, technically capable of charging at 150kW, actually only charged at 69kW. The upshot of this is that charging, in practice, takes substantially longer than it should. And, given that all charging stations charge per minute not per kW (apparently because of electricity supply regulatory factors), it also costs more than it should.

Range anxiety and public charging issues are top of mind for many people considering buying electric cars, and these kinds of quirks are just the type of thing that need to be addressed before they will be considered an option for the masses. EV batteries are ever improving, both in their capacity and their charging speeds, but if the infrastructure problems are not fixed, there will be a ceiling beyond which it will be very difficult to pass.