A customer complaint hotline, and the experience of its own employees, taught General Motors exactly how awful public charging in Michigan can be.
But learning from those complaints is what allowed the company to launch its next-generation charging station with one of its several EV charging partners, EVgo.
At an event hosted by the Automotive Press Association at the Detroit automakers’ new fast-charging station in a Meijer parking lot across from GM’s Warren Technical Center, Will Hotchkiss, head of public charging for GM Energy, said features of the updated fast-charging station such as an overhead canopy to protect EV drivers from the elements and accepting credit cards came directly from customer complaints received by GM Energy’s call center.
“I don’t want to act like it’s all solved, and we have a long way to go,” Hotchkiss said. “We’re maybe in the third inning of a nine inning ballgame, but the flywheel is in motion.”
GM will have spent over half a billion dollars through its electric vehicle charging partnerships by the end of the decade, Hotchkiss said, helping to fund more than 35,000 charging stations across the country.
For the customers hesitant to adopt an electric vehicle due to insufficient charging stations, Hotchkiss said the change from five years ago when GM partnered with EVgo on the same site is “nowhere near” the new system.
“We’re learning through hard lessons what we need to do and meet the customer,” Hotchkiss said, adding that expanding charging stations where customers can also shop is the next major battleground. “We’re not running from the reliability challenges out there or experience challenges. As we talk about [less than anticipated] EV adoption, this has given us time to go and fix those issues.”
The new charging site differs from the old one that previously occupied the site in these ways:
How many more chargers to go?
Another major leap in charging access came from the partnership with Tesla Inc. to use its expansive fast charging network. EVgo, the company GM collaborated with for its most upgraded charging system, also owns and operates Tesla chargers under a white label partnership.
GM would not disclose how much it pays Tesla for the use of its charging network.
As for knowing how many chargers will be enough to provide for Michigan EV owners as sufficiently as the network of gas stations does for gasoline-powered vehicles, however, is tough to answer, according to Chris Boehm, public charging program leader at GM Energy.
He said the company relies on data from third parties like Bloomberg Financial Data and its own customer data to determine how much distance away from public charging customers can tolerate. That is weighed against the cost of investing in full-scale public stations, which Hotchkiss described as “no small endeavor” to get up and running.
According to EVChargeMap.com, there are 2,463 public EV charging stations in Michigan across Tesla Superchargers, ChargePoint, Electrify America, EVgo and Blink stations.
While GM would not provide a specific number that it said would meet all of its EV customer’s needs based on the projected electric market size in 2030, Boehm said he imagines Michigan will have “enough” chargers once range anxiety has been entirely eliminated.
“I took my family on a charging trip to Traverse City to see ‘Is there enough charging?’ and that’s definitely not because I had to think about where I was going to charge next,” he said. “For the general customer, you don’t want to have to think about where to charge; you just want to charge and get on your way.”
Jackie Charniga covers General Motors for the Free Press. Reach her at jcharniga@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: When GM says EV charging in Michigan will be able to meet demand
Reporting by Jackie Charniga, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Jackie Charniga, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
