Biden Administration Plan To Juice EV Charging Network Aimed At Emulating Gas Station Experience

Regardless of how much motorists are required to cough up to fill their tanks with gasoline or diesel there’s one thing that doesn’t bother them—difficulty figuring out how to get the job done. Drive up, fill up. It’s pretty much the same process no matter the brand.

That’s not so when it comes to recharging stations for battery-electric vehicles. For one, unlike gas stations, they may be hard to find, at times causing drivers to wander far off their routes to grab some juice. There’s no standard connectors— the EV version of a fuel pump, which could mean the connector and your EV don’t match. Indeed, Tesla has its own charging network that only works with that brand’s cars.

As Brett Smith, technical director of the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Center for Automotive Research observed to Forbes.com, “You never knew what that experience will be like. With a gas pump you have a pretty good feeling how its going to work.”

But on Thursday the Biden administration took a step towards not only making charging stations more plentiful, but more reliable and standardized accommodating any EV.

The plan is formally titled a “notice of proposed rulemaking” by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. It runs 82 pages. Here are the highlights:

• Standardized charging stations that can work with any EV “regardless of brand.”
• Minimum number of charging ports
• Standards for how stations are installed and maintained
• Charging stations connected to network for monitoring and management

The stated goal of the standards is to “provide consumers with reliable expectations for travel in an electric across and throughout the United States and support a national workforce skilled and trained in EVSE (electric vehicle supply equipment) installation and maintenance.”

CAR’s Brett Smith views these proposed standards as a way to address the many shortfalls of the current charging network but asks, “How standard they become, how executionable those standards are. It starts to put an expectation in place for people when they stop.”

The BlueGreen Alliance is an organization that believes the environment can be protected while preserving union jobs to build and maintain those protections. It put out a statement supporting the proposals saying, “We hope to see states take measures above and beyond what is required of them to make sure that the new jobs manufacturing, maintaining, and installing EV charging infrastructure are jobs with good wages and benefits in safe, equitable, and diverse work environments.”

The proposed standards may be construed as an ambitious plan to improve the environment by taking some of the pain, and frankly reluctance by some to ditch their internal combustion engine vehicles in favor of one that runs on batteries.

Yes, interest in EVs has grown as gas prices hit new highs and automakers produce more of them in attractive packages such as the Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck, the Cadillac Lyriq SUV and Mustang Mach E.

But will this proposal to to juice up the national recharging network have a real impact on accelerating conversion to EVs in the near term? CAR’s Brett Smith warns, “It’s perception versus reality. It’s going to take years to make this work. The reality ain’t gonna be fixed for awhile.”