While consumers consistently cite lack of adequate public electric-vehicle chargers as a top reason not to buy EVs, their satisfaction with charging infrastructure is making headway.
J.D. Power’s latest consumer study of U.S. public EV charging found a second straight quarter of improvement for both direct-current fast charging and the much slower level 2 charging in the second quarter.
Consumer satisfaction with DC infrastructure rose two points to 665 on a 1,000-point scale and seven points for level 2 charging to 617. That’s after 16- and nine-point increases, respectively, in the first quarter.
J.D. Power acknowledges that charging infrastructure has a long way to go to meet current demand, let alone to support mass EV adoption. In fact, increasing EV sales over the past few years have negatively impacted charging satisfaction because infrastructure hadn’t kept pace with sales.
It credits Tesla’s opening of its fast-charger network to non-Tesla owners as a big factor in the turning satisfaction tide.
The reliability of public chargers appears to still have much room for improvement. In a year-over-year comparison, nearly 20% of survey respondents said they experienced a nonworking public charger, just a 1% improvement over last year.
More than 9,600 owners of EVs and plug-in hybrids responded to the survey, which was conducted from January through June.
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