Charging an electric vehicle has been one of the pain points for potential customers for a good number of years, but things are getting better and better, at least according to the latest data published by J.D. Power.
Overall customer satisfaction for both public DC fast chargers and Level 2 chargers has shot up in the first quarter of this year even as the biggest player in this space, Tesla, continued to slip for the second quarter in a row.
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The United States is slowly but surely going in the right direction when it comes to public EV chargers, according to J.D. Power. But the biggest news is that praise must go toward players other than Tesla.
On a 1,000-point scale, satisfaction with public DC fast charging stations (Tesla Supercharger network included) was at 663 in the United States in Q1 2024, 16 points higher than the previous quarter. Meanwhile, satisfaction with public Level 2 chargers went up by 9 points to a total of 610. These are the largest quarter-over-quarter increases in satisfaction with public charging since J.D. Power began collecting data on this topic in 2021.
People reported better charging speeds, easier charging, higher availability and better physical condition of the charging locations. It’s worth noting that, even with these gains, the Q1 results aren’t the best recorded. These came in Q2 2022 in the case of DC fast chargers, when satisfaction reached 679 points, while satisfaction with public Level 2 chargers peaked in Q1 2022 with a score of 634.
But the biggest and most important thing about this latest satisfaction report is that non-Tesla charging operators like ChargePoint, Electrify America and EVgo managed to tip the scales in the right direction for the entire industry, even as the biggest player–Tesla–went backward.
In Q1 2024, satisfaction with the public DC fast charging networks in the United States without the Tesla Supercharger network went up by 19 points on a 1,000-point scale. Tesla’s renowned charging network went down 1 point on the satisfaction scale, declining for the second quarter in a row, but it remains the top-rated name in the industry.
According to the Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels Data Center, out of the roughly 43,000 DC fast charging ports in the U.S., 61% are Tesla Superchargers. With such a firm grip on the charging industry, seeing third-party companies take overall satisfaction up is refreshing and calming at the same time, and we hope this trend will continue in the following quarters.
