- Data from Chargeway users will be used to rate EV charging in Consumer Reports
- The Chargeway app offers advanced route planning and more
- What Chargeway provides to CR will be anonymous to the user
Consumer Reports has yet to evaluate electric vehicle charging on any scale like the one it does when considering electric vehicle reliability. But with a series of partnerships announced Thursday, the consumer advocacy giant can get a more comprehensive view of the issue. Reliability of public charging.
The effort, called the Electric Vehicle Charging Community, involves a range of electric vehicle advocacy groups, including Plug In America, GreenLatinos and Generation 180, along with through technical support in partnership with Chargewayone of the applications recommended by Green Car Reports for exploitation intelligence in route planning that some electric vehicles lack.
Chargeway calls itself a software company and is developed to cover many aspects of electric vehicle charging but the most famous is Color coded graphics it launched in 2017 to help users quickly identify EV chargers by output.
Under the new partnership, when a user reviews a charging station on the Chargeway app, the network, station location, and vehicle model charged will be sent to Consumer Reports, with the option to send enhanced reporting information. includes power source and charging station arrival/departure status. fee percentage, and more. This will all be anonymous because only ratings, charging data, and feedback on a per-session basis will be shared with Consumer Reports, not Chargeway users’ personalized data.
Chargeway’s partnership with Consumer Reports ensures charger reliability
According to Chargeway, the data sent through the app will then be used by Consumer Reports to “create a rating and reporting system for the public electric vehicle charging experience to share with charging networks, automakers, policymakers and the public. This will provide electric vehicle drivers with a platform to improve the public charging experience and help create accountability across the industry.”
“Charging stations are an important service, but when they don’t work or barely work, it wastes valuable consumer time,” said Drew Toher, director of sustainability campaigns at Consumer Reports. ”.
CR said it has seen 27% of its 1,600 registered community members, in the early stages of this effort, encounter public charging issues. As Consumer Reports points out, members of the community who don’t use Chargeway can also sign up to be part of the community at this link.
“Now, instead of posting complaints on social media and feeling ignored, EV drivers can use the Chargeway mobile app to provide feedback,” said Matt Teske, founder of Chargeway. them for the leading consumer protection organization.” shares CR’s goal of “giving drivers a voice in the conversation about the reliability of public electric vehicle charging.”
Individual EV drivers may have good reason to feel it’s severely lacking, given failed charging attempts and bad experiences, which are responded to by token direct messages, usually does not appear to trigger a repair or problem resolution.
Chevrolet EVs at the Tesla supercharger station
Furthermore, problems with practice equipment also seem to be becoming more of an issue. The ChargeX Consortium, which the federal government launched in 2023 to help address EV charger reliability ahead of the $7.5 billion charging infrastructure rollout, reported last year that a Among the problems is confusion about one Missing charging error code standardization across EV chargers. J.D. Power, in the most recent study on EV charging satisfactionfound it improved in terms of interface, although charger failure still affected 61% of failed charges.
The reporting feature has been added to updated versions of the Chargeway app now available for iOS and Android.
