Meet Electrify America’s Roaming EV Test Fleet

Earlier this month, J.D. Power released an electric vehicle owner survey that found plenty of problems with public charging. EV drivers rated their experiences with various public charging stations in ten categories, including the availability of chargers. There are almost 54,000 charging stations that offer over 120,000 ports in the U.S. today, but this is apparently not enough.

One of the main issues EV drivers have with public charging in the U.S. is that too many are sometimes out of order or otherwise broken. “The industry needs to do a better job of maintaining existing charging stations,” J.D. Power said, adding that 20% of respondents did not charge at their intended location and that 72% of those people said it was because the station was not working.

One company, Electrify America, which was created in 2016 as part of Volkswagen’s penance for its diesel scandal, was rated at just 614 on J.D. Power’s 1,000-point scale, coming in second-to-last over EVgo’s 573 and well below the industry average of 674.

A week after this study came out, Electrify America issued a press release clarifying how hard it’s working to keep its EV charging stations up and running. Specifically, EA detailed how its Roaming EV Test fleet operates. Nine teams of inspectors move around the U.S. and Canada (where Electrify Canada operates), checking each of the company’s 3,500 chargers (at over 800 sites) every two months or so. EA said these testers “inspect the stations to ensure all equipment and aesthetics are in top working order including the chargers themselves, power cabinets, transformers, lighting, EV charging parking stencil signage and more,” EA said.

Electrify America says that over 1.4 million charging sessions happened in 2021, a five-fold increase over the number that occurred in 2020. EA created the Roaming EV Test fleet in January 2021 and conducted more than 20,000 tests during the first year.

EA also highlighted its 24-7 customer service centers, which offer anytime assistance for all kinds of problems, and its “Center of Excellence” test lab, where EA uses pre-production and prototype electric vehicles to check how they work with the charging stations.

“Public charging continues to provide challenges to overall EV adoption and current EV owners alike,” Brent Gruber, executive director of global automotive at J.D. Power, said in a statement. “Stations need to be added to areas where there are currently gaps in heavily traveled routes and in high-density areas for people who don’t have access to residential charging, but most importantly, designed with things for users to do while charging—regardless of the use case. Then, we need to make sure those stations are reliable.”