Why is EV Charging So Unreliable? The Role of Competition in Supplementary Services

• In Event: Innovation, competition, and tariffs: insights from EV value chains across batteries, vehicles, and charging infrastructure

Abstract

The prevailing emphasis on technological innovation often overshadows the critical importance of maintenance and repair in sustaining infrastructure reliability. As maintenance theorists argue, this innovation-centric mindset can introduce systemic vulnerabilities by undervaluing the upkeep required to support long-term functionality. This tension between expansion and quality also extends to the growing landscape of sustainability-oriented supplementary services, such as EV recharging at hotels or carbon credit offerings to offset airline emissions. Despite their being a growing source of revenue and differentiation, little is known about what drives the wide variation in the quality of supplementary services.  

In this paper, we examine the deteriorating reliability of EV charging stations in the United States and investigate how competition influences the reliability of U.S. public EV charging stations, an increasingly popular supplementary service offered by hotels, retailers, parking facilities, and other businesses. While infrastructure growth is essential for EV adoption, poor upkeep undermines user trust and creates indirect network effects, where unreliable components reduce the overall value of the system. Analyzing 49,902 charging stations from 2011 to 2024, we apply machine learning methods to measure their reliability.  

We find that increased competition among establishments providing the same core business improves charging reliability, but charging station reliability declines as more competition arises from establishments offering different core businesses. The latter is especially important given that most EV charging stations in the U.S. compete against establishments operating different core businesses, which provides an explanation for the declining trend in charging reliability. We project that an average annual increase in competition is associated with a decrease in service reliability scores ranging from 11% to 23% across the most common establishment types over a 5-year period, suggesting a potential further erosion in EV charging service quality. Moreover, the positive effects of competition are geographically constrained, attenuating within 10 miles and showing not statistically different from zero in rural or disadvantaged areas. These findings highlight the importance of targeted investments to stimulate the benefits of competition to promote equitable and reliable EV charging infrastructure nationwide. 

To our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically test how competition affects the quality of supplementary services. We empirically confirm our hypotheses that the effects of competition on supplementary service quality vary depending on the nature of competitors. On one hand, when increased competition in the charging market comes from the same core industry, charging reliability improves through mechanisms like reputation-building, peer effects, and visibility. On the other hand, when increased competition in the charging market comes from different core industries, charging reliability declines. This occurs because managers can still benefit from nearby providers’ charging services without making investments themselves or losing customers to direct competitors, which aligns with free-riding behaviors. We argue that implementing more effective public monitoring and real-time quality updates could be a potential information-based solution to this service quality puzzle. 

Authors

• Yifan Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Presenting Author

• Omar Isaac Asensio, Georgia Institute of Technology
  Non-Presenting Co-Author