Not long ago, when my husband and I moved from Detroit to Boston, we drove the 600 miles twice in electric vehicles. A short road trip by American standards turned into a frustrating validation of our range anxiety.
The reason: a lack of data.
While Tim concentrated on the highway, my job as passenger was to cross-reference charger apps. One app would plan a route with supposedly optimized charging stops, but it often didn’t tell me if the chargers were working. So I would try looking up each one on the charging provider’s proprietary websites — a time-consuming effort that would be dangerous for anyone driving solo.
This frustrating status quo is holding back EV sales and costing American jobs. Many charging providers do not share live data about their equipment — basic stuff, like whether it’s working or broken. This discourages prospective EV drivers: Concern about public charging is the number one reason people do not buy an EV, according to J.D. Power surveys. Publishing this data is a way to spur EV adoption.
Right now, finding a working and available charger in Maryland is too difficult.
Maryland can lead the way with a straightforward fix — and it will cost the state next to nothing: If all chargers reported their status live so that any mapping app could include this basic information, drivers could easily navigate to working and available chargers. Were this data available, the chargers’ status would appear in your favorite map app, much like Google Maps shows if a restaurant is open. That would go a long way toward eliminating range anxiety.
Moreover, by shining a light on broken chargers, operators will fix them faster, enabling EV drivers to trust what their phones tell them.
My team’s research estimates that making real-time data universal for highway fast chargers would raise the EV share of new vehicle sales by 6 percentage points in 2030 — to about 46% — under current policies. As a result, there would be 3.5 million more EVs on the road by 2030.
That means jobs — jobs building and maintaining charging facilities, and hospitality jobs serving tourists who come to appreciate all the natural wonders and culture that Maryland offers.
Charging operators may object, saying that their data is available in their proprietary apps, has commercial value, and they don’t want to provide too much information to their competitors.
Yet those very operators would benefit if this data helped the EV market take off faster. With 3.5 million more EVs on the road in 2030, operators will enjoy a market that is 9% larger. That means more charging sessions, enabling them to pay off their investments faster.
If charging providers don’t start voluntarily posting the real-time status of their fast chargers, the General Assembly should require open real-time data. Massachusetts has done so, and the California Energy Commission is proposing the same.
My team and I have just published model legislation that can help the Old Line State adopt such common-sense policies.
Making a road trip in an EV shouldn’t be hard. And it doesn’t have to be. If charging providers open access to their data, expect to see many more EVs on the road.
Elaine Buckberg, a Maryland native, leads the Driving Toward Seamless Public EV Charging project at Harvard University.
