Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have a bad reputation.
Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have a bad reputation. They’re notorious for breaking down, charging at a snail’s pace, refusing customer payment and leaving drivers stranded without juice. Advocates for electric vehicles, or EVs, worry that reliability concerns are hampering adoption at a critical moment in the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but data on the topic is limited.
To address this problem, researchers at the University of Washington designed a survey to tease out exactly how much a car owner’s perception of public charging reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The team created a series of hypothetical scenarios to study the factors that might nudge a skeptical shopper towards an EV over a gasoline-powered car, including vehicle and gas prices, driving range and public charging access.
The results were dramatic. Participants with a negative view of public charging were much less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view. It took some serious hypothetical improvements to offset those negative perceptions: The EV needed to be discounted 30%, have 366 extra miles of range or there needed to be 30,000 additional public charging stations.
Read more at: University of Washington
Photo Credit: Joenomias via Pixabay
