New EV owner here. We charge at home so I don’t need to use them, but stores nearby have chargers. I tried them to see how they work. They are often broken.
One store has a Volta charger (free!). It worked great the first time; the next time I went it was broken.
Walmart has an Electrify America fast charger. The first time I went, 1 of 3 was not working. The next time I went, 1 of 3 was not working, but it was a different one.
Was I unlucky, or are these charging networks unreliable? Has it been getting better or worse over time?
Unfortunately basically every charging company has decided reliability isn’t important. The exception, Tesla, has the most reliable charging locations by a large margin.
The good news is most cars will be able to work with Tesla chargers in the next year or so. Not sure what car you have, but look up when they are adding support for your vehicle. Until that happens, your experience is quite common and will continue.
It’s ironic that Tesla’s chargers are vastly more reliable than their actual cars.
I have yet to see any believable evidence that there is any excessive reliability problems with Tesla cars. And don’t try to cite consumer reports. They lost my business after they wouldn’t stop recommending Samsung products.
We have lemon laws for a reason. Because lots of cars are lemons. You are just only hearing about it because every car fire or trim problem or excessive repair needs on a Tesla is a news story that you recall. There are many similar phenomena that are at play here. Start with the availability hueristic if you’re interested.
I’ve seen lots of lemons in my life. My parents car blew a transmission right away. So many car fires on the side of the road, and I bet you don’t even know that Hyundai and Kia owners are being advised to park outside because there’s a high risk of fire. That’s really bad. If your ice catches fire when it’s parked and off, that’s a serious design flaw.
You have made an impossible request. Consumer Reports, while highly flawed, is the only one without an obvious conflict of interest. Every other source, such as JD Power mentioned below, is for-profit and sells advertising. As such, they really can’t be trusted.
There is literally no other source that could even potentially provide that data (note: data, not anecdotes), assuming these aren’t safety-related issues. I have no particular knowledge of Tesla’s overall reliability, only about the sources one would use to try to find out.
Btw, fires are more common across the industry than you’d think. Chevy had a similar warning about the Bolt (and issued a recall, which is why Consumer Reports lists them as highly unreliable). Ford also issued a warning last year to owners of multiple ICE SUV models to park them outside for exactly that same reason.
I’m thinking you are agreeing with me on every thing I said, and I have made no such impossible request. I’ve already linked to the nhtsa which is charged with this, and I’m sure that there is something similar in the eu.
Jd is bad. Maybe you don’t agree that CR is, but that’s minor.
Tesla’s reliability is the topic at hand. That was my introductory statement.
Per the fires, that’s exactly what I meant. I’ve seen enough burning cars and had my other calls recalled. That’s just not news. It’s news when an EV does that.
I’m not disagreeing on most, but I am pointing out that no good, independent sources of data exist. If we were to reframe it as how to get accurate data on make/model reliability, such as trying to quantify their reliability in an unbiased way, we quickly discount most sources. Or, ask the reverse question- how could we show that Tesla is reliable? Again, no good sources.
NHTSA tracks safety concerns, or at least certain types of them. They don’t track things like how often ignition coils fail, or the radio, or the water pump, or the plastic trim breaking. All of these are part of reliability, and what CR at least attempts to do.
CR isn’t biased, but they are bad in other ways due to (sometimes highly) flawed methodology. They also only offer very broad info on failure data, and what they consider. I recently learned that they listed the Bolt as having excessive numbers of failures in the battery, because they counted every single recalled vehicle as a failure point. Not biased, but still bad (or at least, not very useful) data.
How about J.D. Power? https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-initial-quality-study-iqs
A legacy industry funded advertising group is criticizing the disruptive novel EV companies. All of them, lucid, rivian, and polestar plus tesla.
I’m shocked.
Rankings are lower when it’s harder to find good data. I’m shocked.