<
https://thedriven.io/2025/05/20/ev-lobby-demands-financial-penalties-as-broken-public-chargers-fail-drivers/>
"Up to 13 per cent of registered public electric vehicle (EV) chargers in
Australia are currently unavailable, a number that has the frustrated driver
lobby demanding financial penalties are imposed to spur action.
The data, pulled from charger map Plugshare, reveals the scale of the
maintenance problems affecting Australian EV drivers, says Arcadis national
asset management lead Clara Owen.
Owen found that Australia has 5794 registered public charger sites with 15,290
connectors – the cable that charges an EV.
Of these, 9 per cent were under repair and 4 per cent were listed as coming
soon, a detail which led Owen to question why they are listed.
“There’s still a lot of reactive maintenance and a lot of scheduled
maintenance. In a world with all the data we can collect now… we should be
maximising the use of IOT [internet of things],” she told The Driven.
Owen says in an era of constrained budgets and a wealth of data connectivity,
charge point operators and local governments must start using real time data to
look after existing charger assets, saving money and building confidence in
public infrastructure.
“When you consider it costs $300,000 or so to install, and I estimate around
$7,000 per annum to maintain in scheduled or reactive maintenance, if you’ve
got 100,000 chargers that’s $700,000 per year in maintenance and costs,” she
says.
“When it’s been proven [that using] predictive maintenance you can get 40 per
cent savings.”
But in a country as large as Australia, where environments are harsh, and
termites and other electrically-unfriendly insects are vicious, emergency
callouts and maintenance run by schedule rather than proactive checks based on
data doesn’t cut it.
“We need predictive maintenance, we need real time monitoring and networks that
perform like critical infrastructure,” Owen says, tech that reduces charger
downtime by 25-30 per cent.
“If I turned up at a petrol station and they said ‘sorry we’re out of petrol’,
you can imagine the furor. Chargers should be the same.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
