VW Launched Electrify America As Part Of Dieselgate; Years Later, The Network Is Famously Unreliable

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.

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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.) The satisfaction survey is limited to users of the PlugShare app, which makes up the vast majority of non-Tesla EV drivers, but cannot be considered representative of all EV owners. 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.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/13/electrify-america-ev-charger-broken/