How auto makers are taking the hassle out of charging EVs

DETROIT—It's becoming a staple of electric vehicle sales: Along with your new EV, you get some sort of public charging assistance.

With some vehicles, such as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Mercedes-Benz EQS, you get two years of complimentary fast charging through Electrify America, a nationwide network of more than 600 public stations.

Then there are programs such as General Motors' Ultium Charge 360, introduced in April, and the FordPass Charging Network, which give drivers access to thousands of charging stations across multiple third-party networks through a single app.

It wasn't always this way. The first mass-market EVs sold a decade ago certainly didn't come with any free charging plans—not until Tesla offered no-cost sessions at its Supercharger stations in 2012 and Nissan created No Charge to Charge in 2013. In the intervening years, access to public charging in the U.S. has been hit or miss, with any individual's personal access dependent on location and local EV support.

"That's what you've seen over the last eight years, and that gives the impression that the infrastructure out there is horrible," said Robert Barrosa, Electrify America's senior director of sales, business development and marketing.

For EV drivers, public charging "solutions" often required membership in a multitude of charging networks such as ChargePoint, Blink Charging and EVgo, each of which had a unique access card or app login. In some places, stations were rare and regularly inoperable. Without home charging, which is how most electric vehicle drivers fuel up, EVs may never have taken off.

Jay Friedland, senior policy adviser at Plug In America, has seen all of this chaos in his years of EV advocacy. Now, he said, it's the best of times and the worst of times for EV charging.

The way auto makers are bundling high-power home chargers with their new EVs—the Ford F-150 Lightning can be ordered with an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro, for example—the increase in workplace chargers and the long-awaited arrival of EVs that can tap into multiple charging networks using a technology called Plug and Charge all point to a simpler future for EV owners, Friedland said.

"The reason why it's still the worst of times is that the charging industry, while it's gotten better and there are lots of new roaming agreements so you don't need to carry as many [access] cards around, is that, in general, too many are still resisting the minimum common denominator, which is credit cards," he said.

Turning points

There has been some improvement on that front. More and more charging stations now come equipped with card readers, including all of the DC fast charge stations from Electrify America, the company formed from Volkswagen's settlement with the U.S. after the auto maker's diesel emissions scandal. California Air Resources Board standards also require new charging outlets to accept credit cards, and similar efforts are underway in Washington state.

Beyond simply accepting credit cards, many charging sites, including all of Electrify America's stations, are ready for Plug and Charge, a technology that automatically allows communication between a charging station and a vehicle to authorize payments without the driver ever needing to pull out their wallet.

"You used to always have to join a club to get a charge," Electrify America's Barrosa said.

EV advocates have been working for years for a simplified charging environment, and Friedland credits one particular auto maker for showing the rest of the industry how it's done.

"Obviously, Tesla figured it out early, this concept of 'plug and charge' and what will become ISO 15118, the Plug and Charge standard," he said.

Plug and Charge is or will be available on the F-150 Lightning and EQS as well as the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Porsche Taycan, Audi E-tron and models from Lucid and Rivian. Fifteen to 20 models from various auto makers are compatible with the technology. The first, though, was the all-electric Smart ForTwo in 2018, according to Hubject CEO Christian Hahn.

Hubject is an e-mobility company that has been working for years as a manager of all of these memberships and clubs for EV drivers, especially in Europe, where the e-roaming scene was even more complex than in the U.S. Hahn said the fact that Plug and Charge is finally becoming available to more drivers is a sign that things have changed. For years, he said, charging companies were focused on simply installing public chargers—creating a "dot on a map"—so that something was available to early adopters.

"That's now done, and now we can focus on the customer experience, on reliability, on scalability and on standardization because it is becoming a more mature market," he said.

Not 'a thing'

Plug and Charge is also signaling the next stage of public vehicle charging through the way it handles IT security, Hahn said. Europe is now seeing its first EV charging scams, he said, adding that Plug and Charge protocols will help defend against potential hacks.

"Whatever we have done in the past is just the beginning of a huge market that is coming soon." he said. "This huge market will (work) if we find a good solution that standard customers, normal people who are not believers, who are not pioneers, who are not doing it for improving the climate, who are just normal people, make it happen. And that's a challenge."

Barrosa said the important thing is to make charging not really "a thing."

"It's about essentially making charging uneventful," he said. "You got what you wanted, you didn't think twice, and it worked. That is, ultimately, what the EV movement needs."