UC Davis

Transcribed using AI. May contain errors.

Amy Quinton 

Cameron Pirouzi sits in his electric car in a grocery store parking lot in Vacaville, California. Several EV charging ports are in front of him, and he's waiting patiently for his car to finish charging. 

Cameron Pirouzi 

This is the Chevy Bolt 2022. When I bought it, it gave me 245 miles with the full charge, but now I put almost 300,000 miles on it, and it gave me still 215 miles per charge.

Amy Quinton 

Cameron puts that many miles on his vehicle because it's his business. He's an Uber driver. He's driven 58,000 people around the Bay Area in his electric car. And he says, When you drive an electric vehicle, as much as he does, you always have to plan. 

Cameron Pirouzi 

I know all the chargers in Northern California also. I know the location. I know which one are available, which one no. And for example, in Vacaville, the EVgo has three locations.

Amy Quinton 

EVgo is one of the electric car charging networks.

Cameron Pirouzi 

But if you go to the Vallejo, Vallejo has only two EVgo chargers, and both of them are out of service since some months ago. And I always call to the customer service and report that, but they don't fix it. I don't know why. Over there in Vallejo, somebody cut the cable also.

Amy Quinton 

Such charging woes are not unusual. Chargers can be broken, slow or just inaccessible for multiple reasons. UC Davis researchers say finding reliable public EV charging has become the top concern for electric vehicle owners. But just how much could this affect EV adoption? We're going to explore that issue and more in this episode of Unfold.

Amy Quinton 

Coming to you from UC Davis, this is Unfold. I'm Amy Quinton

Kat Kerlin 

And I'm Kat Kerlin. More people are making the switch from gas to electric vehicles. But right now, EVs account for about 8% of new vehicle sales nationwide and 26% in California.

Amy Quinton 

Transportation is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. So policymakers have offered loads of financial incentives over the years to try to get people out of their gas cars and into electric vehicles. 

Kat Kerlin 

Consumers once complained about the short range of EVs, but not anymore.

Amy Quinton 

Yeah, some of the newest EVs on the market can go 500 miles on a single charge,

Kat Kerlin 

And the number of publicly available charging ports has doubled in the last four years. Now there are more than 203,000 operating across the U.S.

Amy Quinton 

But increased adoption won't happen unless people have a reliable way to charge. Alan Jenn is an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department and with our Institute for Transportation Studies.

Alan Jenn 

the vast majority of charging that people do is at home, right? So we know today, like 80 to 85% of all the charging that you do happens at home. You know, the home charging experience has generally been pretty positive for most people,

Amy Quinton 

But Alan says the public charging experience can be completely different.

Alan Jenn 

It's kind of the Wild West.

Kat Kerlin 

What does he mean? It's the Wild West.

Amy Quinton 

It's a clash between lawlessness and opportunity, order and chaos, Kat. It is a bit of an untamed landscape. Well, unless you drive a Tesla.

Gil Tal 

The charging experience can be very, very easy if you drive a Tesla. You just go there and you don't need to figure out payment or anything, plug and leave.

Amy Quinton 

That's Gil Tal, director of the electric vehicle research center and an adjunct professor of environmental science and policy. But he says, if you don't drive a Tesla, the pain points are numerous.

Gil Tal 

From finding the charger to paying to starting it. It can be quite challenging for many people.

Kat Kerlin 

The reason? Teslas have been around a while and have their own extensive supercharging network, and Tesla cars easily communicate to their chargers. The supercharging network has recently become available to non Tesla drivers, but not everywhere,

Amy Quinton 

And you'll also need a newer EV and an adapter. So there are hurdles for non Tesla EV owners. Alan pointed to a study from UC Berkeley that looked at public charging reliability. Drivers were sent to a handful of non Tesla chargers across the Bay Area. They found a third of them, a third of them, weren't working. 

Alan Jenn 

You could go to a charger and it could be just off, it could be offline, and so you can access it. You could have issues where you plug it in and then it couldn't process the payments. Maybe it couldn't communicate with the app, right? Maybe the charger itself was damaged and it wasn't working.

Kat Kerlin 

How did it get to this point? I mean, after all, federal guidelines require that chargers must have an average annual functional time called uptime of greater than 97%

Amy Quinton 

Well, Alan says many charging operators report high uptime, but that may not include things like slow charging speeds or incomplete charges, or apps that don't work.

Kat Kerlin 

Or the biggest pain congestion at chargers that cause long wait times. There's even something called getting ICEd. That's when a non EV vehicle, one with an internal combustion engine, parks in an EV charger spot.

Amy Quinton 

It's all part of the EV charging experience, and can be frustrating. It's also not being studied until now.

Kat Kerlin 

UC Davis researchers are working with the California Energy Commission on a three year project. They're sending students all across the state to test 1000s of EV chargers,

Amy Quinton 

And I got to tag along with them.

Joshua Bang 

So we'll be riding in the Ford lightning today. 

Amy Quinton 

The Ford F-150 lightning is an electric truck, and it's huge. I'm with Joshua Bang and Brian Olszewski. Both are UC Davis students. Brian, who is driving types the charging station, address into the navigation system,

ROBOT 

Obey traffic laws, be alert and use voice commands while driving.

Amy Quinton 

That's the car talking. The project involves testing three types of cars, the Lightning, the Bolt, and a Tesla. The charger is about 25 minutes away at Vacaville City Hall, although sometimes finding the chargers can be difficult. Joshua says government buildings usually have chargers, but that doesn't mean you can access them.

Joshua Bang 

Through testing, we found that, like a lot of quote, unquote, publicly accessible chargers are actually not publicly accessible. There might be like a security gate, or it's government facility that's inaccessible to public.

Amy Quinton 

Navigation takes us to the front of City Hall, where there are no chargers. Okay, so now we're looking for the charger?

Joshua Bang 

yes, it seems not in this parking lot.

Amy Quinton 

Evaluating how well navigation works is part of the research. We eventually find a row of them in the back of City Hall. They have chargers.

Brian Olszewski 

Try to pull into that one over there.

Amy Quinton 

It's not exactly as smooth as pulling into a gas station, and knowing the location of the gas pumps and the first charging space we pull into won't work. 

Brian Olszewski 

This is a weird one actually.

Joshua Bang 

I have never seen this, so this will not work with the Lightning. We're going to have to re park over here.

Amy Quinton 

At each location, the team tests two different chargers. Here they are testing a Level 2 charger, which is an older one and charges at a slower rate.

Joshua Bang 

The charging plugs right here, so you just open it and then you can plug it straight in. Start a four minute timer, 

ROBOT 

Four minutes counting down. 

Joshua Bang 

I think during the force four minutes is when you can really tell if the charger is working or not.

Amy Quinton 

This one worked fine, and it was free. They say they never know what they're going to run into on these research trips. Depending on the route, Brian says it can be a very smooth experience. Other times, not so much.

Brian Olszewski 

But sometimes it's a charger that's a Level 2 charger that's only there because sometimes people need it in an emergency, and they don't always work. They're really slow, and those, those are probably the worst ones that we get, the ones that just aren't maintained out in the middle of nowhere.

Amy Quinton 

Researchers say one student found herself out in the middle of nowhere, and the only charger was infested with spiders. Sometimes chargers are in places with no security cameras or lighting. Joshua says he once found a US Postal Service box installed in the concrete pavement, blocking the front of the charger.

Joshua Bang 

lI ike, couldn't believe, like, someone like, actually did this. I tried to plug it in to the car, and the cord wouldn't in reach. So I had to, like, park diagonal.

Amy Quinton 

Our next stop, an EVgo fast charger in a grocery store parking lot. One of the three chargers is available. Joshua begins to initialize the charger, which you can do with the EVgo app usually.

Joshua Bang 

This charger might not be on the app, which is pretty rare. Ah, unfortunate. So this one's not on yet. Sometimes they install new ones or do maintenance. Sometimes maybe they didn't update the app. 

Amy Quinton 

So Joshua instead begins to use his credit card. That's when the driver in the spot next to him lets him know that the charger just doesn't work.

Joshua Bang 

Okay, so that's yeah, so that's sort of the things you might run into. I'm still gonna try to initialize it with this card. But yeah, it seems like a local knows what's going on here.

Amy Quinton 

That local was the Uber driver, Cameron Pirouzi, who was happy to tell me about his history of charging issues and the problem he runs into the most with the EVgo fast chargers.

Cameron Pirouzi 

Some of them are out of the service. And I don't know why they don't fix it. In some areas like Oakland, some of the people start cutting the cable because of the copper. And those chargers are like this for some months. They don't replace the cable. 

Amy Quinton 

The last station we hit is a Charge Point in another grocery store parking lot. It was easy to spot with its green glowing light. There was no one in line. It initialized easily on the app, and with a charge card, you could even hear the slight electric buzz as it charged the car.

Joshua Bang 

Awesome. We've done it.

Kat Kerlin 

Amy, it sounded like it wasn't a perfectly smooth experience checking out different EV stations. What is the research finding so far? I mean, is this typical?

Amy Quinton 

Well, so far, Alan Jenn says that just about 70% of charge attempts have succeeded. This is preliminary data.

Kat Kerlin 

And who's responsible for fixing this problem and improving the system? I asked Gil Tal that.

Gil Tal 

It's very, very complicated story. In many cases, the charger is installed by one company on the land of a second company, when the utility bills is paid by a third and the fourth one is the one to do the maintenance, and the

Kat Kerlin 

And the fifth one oversees the app that's not working.

Amy Quinton 

Right, but Gil says one of the biggest hurdles and making the charge experience better is that there's really no business incentive.

Gil Tal 

Problem is that with electric transportation, with chargers, we are selling a very cheap commodity. It's really, really hard to make money on selling electricity, and because of that, many of these places are not profitable now and will not be profitable for a long time, or maybe forever. And therefore, the motivation to keep them running is not strong enough. 

Kat Kerlin 

If it's not profitable, why are there so many people waiting in line for chargers? I mean, it seems like demand is there.

Amy Quinton 

That sounds like it will take some time to implement. Isn't there a risk that without reliable public charging, people just won't adopt EVs?

Amy Quinton 

Yeah, and demand is there in some areas, like busy cities, but not in rural areas where chargers are needed. So what's the solution? Well, Gil says policies that encourage bundling one profitable location, maybe with a less profitable one. Researchers say lots of areas need improvements, stricter uptime requirements, better oversight of charger maintenance and better collaboration between car makers, charging point operators and software providers.

Amy Quinton 

Well, remember what Alan Jenn said at the beginning of this episode, that most charging is done at home.

Kat Kerlin 

And EV drivers are happy with that, like it's just a bump in the road, so to speak. Well.

Amy Quinton 

Well, I mean, think about it. You could think about public EV charging experience like air travel. I mean, all of us have probably had a flight delay or a plane that just never takes off, leaving you stranded at an airport. That happened to me last year. It doesn't necessarily stop us from flying. Here's what Alan told me.

Alan Jenn 

When I go to conferences, I ask everyone to raise their hands if they have an EV, and then I ask them to put their hands down if they've never had a problem at a charger. And all of them keep their hands up like every single one, right? But then you asked them, you know, would you still get an EV and they all would.

Amy Quinton 

And Kat, remember the Uber driver I talked to at the beginning of this episode? 

Kat Kerlin 

Oh yeah, the one who complained about the broken chargers, 

Amy Quinton 

Literally, in the same sentence of his complaining, he said this.

Cameron Pirouzi 

But I love EV car. If you drive EV car, you're never back to the gas car for sure.

Kat Kerlin 

Well, let's hope that's the case.

Amy Quinton 

 For sure. And that wraps up this episode of Unfold. 

Kat Kerlin 

You can find out more about our EV research and our show notes at our website, ucdavis.edu/unfold

Amy Quinton 

And if you like listening to Unfold, be sure to subscribe and follow us on your device. That way you'll never miss an episode. I'm Amy Quinton.

Kat Kerlin 

And I'm Kat Kerlin. Thanks for listening.

Andy Fell 

Unfold is a production of UC Davis. Original Music for Unfold comes from Damien Verrett and Curtis Jerome Haynes. Additional music comes from Blue Dot Sessions.