The First And Last Independent Audit of Electrify America Chargers

Electrify America was born out of corporate wrongdoing and intentional hiding of climate-damaging behavior. It is no surprise then that Electrify America has recently moved to hide just how poor its charging infrastructure is, and block future independent verification. Read on for this story of a future of open data, useful charger statistics, convenient tools for EV drivers; all destroyed by EA on a fateful August morning.

The Dawn of Open Data

Electrify America operates a website where you can browse their stations on a map. Stations that are full or completely out of service are marked (some of the time). Clicking on a station gives a list of individual chargers (or EVSEs, as they are sometimes called). Each charger shows a power rating. The most useful information, however, is missing from the website. Want to know if a charger is broken? If it is in use? If it has been open more than a couple minutes? That information is not shown.

However, all is not lost. In the requests being made to the EA servers is exactly the information EV owners need. Charger status and availability are openly provided for anyone to see and use. The charger ("EVSE") data include whether the charger is working or not:

          "status": "CHARGING",

More importantly, they include the time of the last status update:

      "lastUpdated": "2024-07-17T12:19:41Z",

These status updates give us critical insights:

How many chargers are in use
How long a charger has been unused (critical for a good user experience, as we'll see shortly)

Useful, Accurate Charger Data

These APIs provide enough information to provide useful charger data that is not currently available anywhere else. Take one example, "When should I go charge my EV?" This seemingly simple question is very hard to answer with EA's provided tools. What you want is to find a time when a good portion of nearby chargers have the highest chance of being unused. To do this, you need to know usage patterns, over time, averaged over a region. EA's app and website do not provide this. But the APIs do let you fetch the usage information periodically during the day for nearby stations. Then you can average the availability by hour, and find out what time more than half of the stations have an open charger. (Between 3AM and 6AM, it turns out.)

**Average Availability by Hour of Electrify America Stations**
3AM to 6AM is the only window with more than a 50% chance (0.5)

Live Tools for Charger Selection

More than just a planning tool, the APIs also provide the means to provide a better live station finder. Need to charge your EV? The EA app is not your friend. Let us count the problems:

Stations are full that don't say "Full". The app shows stations as available (no "FULL" label) even when they have only one open charger, and it has last used, "moments ago." This means that usually a station that looks available in the app in reality has a line of cars, and it will say "FULL" again in a minute or two when the next car in line pulls up and plugs in. It is common to head to a station that doesn't say "FULL", only to find a long line of waiting cars.
Non-working filters. When you set the filter to CCS / 350kW, you'll still see a station on the map even if it only has one Level 2 charger. That is misleading and frustrating.
No way to see at-a-glance the stations with the longest-open chargers. The app has information on each charger and how long each open one has been unused. However, to see if the chargers are truly open (unused for several minutes), you have to check each one. And the app makes this as difficult as possible. Rather than showing this information in the summary view, you have to tap each charger one-by-one, then tap 'back', then scroll to find the charger again, frequently having to close and reopen the whole station due to the sadistic UX design.

Fortunately, with access to the APIs it is possible to fix all of these problems. A charger that is reported as unused should still be shown as "in use" until several minutes have passed. This avoids the problem of a charger being reported as available during the window when one person is leaving the charger and the next person in line is pulling in.

Useless chargers are easily filtered out. These days most EV owners want high-speed CCS chargers. The API provides the charger type, easily allowing us to exclude level 2 and CHAdeMO chargers.

Finally, we can use the status and lastUpdated fields to compute the average time the chargers at a station have been open. Then we can sort this list so the station with the chargers open the longest, on average, is at the top. Stations with chargers open for longer periods of time are truly available, ready for that drive-up-and-charge experience we should expect.

Together, these techniques let us create a tool like the following, showing which charger to go to which has the longest-open chargers. This gives you the best chance to arrive at the station and start charging immediately, without hunting and tapping through dozens of stations and their chargers.

**Screen Shot of an Optimal Charger Finder**
This app shows the best charger to use, based on real availability and idle times

August 15: EA Blocks Open API Access

August 15, 2024 started off with a bang for EA customers: A software update EA rolled out destroyed the ability to charge or even use their app to check charger status, an outage that lasted for many hours. At the same time, their public API stopped providing critical data on charger availability. The information on charger state, and last updated time, critical to provide useful guidance to EV users, had been secretly ripped out of their API responses. No announcement was made, no notification posted on their status page. Just a sudden blackout of these key pieces of information.

The fallout was immediate and severe.

Third-party charger finders stopped working within minutes. EA's API calls were blocking critical data to report charger status. The listings showed up blank. The age of easily locating an actually available charger was over.

All independent monitoring (and accountability) of EA reliability was abruptly blocked as well. It is now effectively impossible to track charger availability over time, or for different geographical areas simultaneously. It is impossible to tell if EA is improving charger access, or getting worse with time. It is also impossible to plan ahead knowing charging trends. Yet more roadblocks to EV adoption, and the end of accountability for Electrify America.

Help Us Restore EA Accountability

Please reach out to Electrify America, and ask them to restore status and lastUpdated in their public APIs. Contact Electrify America

Also, reach out to the California Air Resources Board. They are monitoring EA for compliance with the consent decree, and can hold EA's feet to the fire: Ask CARB To Force EA To Unblock Charger Data

Thank you!

Last modified on 24 May 2025 by AO