Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have a bad reputation. They’re notorious for breaking down, charging at a snail’s pace, refusing customer payment and leaving drivers stranded without juice.

Advocates for electric vehicles, or EVs, worry that reliability concerns are hampering adoption at a critical moment in the campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but data on the topic is limited.

To address this problem, researchers at the University of Washington designed a survey to tease out exactly how much a car owner’s perception of public charging reliability influences their willingness to buy their first EV. The research was published in Transport Policy.

The team created a series of hypothetical scenarios to study the factors that might nudge a skeptical shopper towards an EV over a gasoline-powered car, including vehicle and gas prices, driving range and public charging access.

The results were dramatic. Participants with a negative view of public charging were much less likely to choose an EV than those with a moderate view. It took some serious hypothetical improvements to offset those negative perceptions: The EV needed to be discounted 30%, have 366 extra miles of range or there needed to be 30,000 additional public charging stations.

“No one knew how much charger reliability was coloring the decisions of prospective EV buyers,” said senior author Don MacKenzie, a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

“I was not at all surprised by the direction of the response. What surprised me was the size. These were monster results. This is a warning for the whole industry.”

The results come at a tenuous time for EV adoption in America. The market continues to grow, but political factors like the end of federal tax incentives are complicating sales outlooks. The federal government is also challenging California’s plan to phase out gas car sales, which could threaten similar efforts in Washington and several other states.

The state of public charging isn’t inspiring confidence in buyers, either. Studies in recent years have shown significant reliability issues with public networks. There are signs that the situation is improving, and home charging is an option for some drivers, but the threat of slow and flaky public chargers remains a powerful deterrent for anyone venturing outside their “home range.”

“We know there’s a lot of range anxiety out there,” said lead author Rubina Singh, a UW doctoral student of civil and environmental engineering. “EV owners often tolerate charging problems, while newcomers are less aware of the hurdles. If trust erodes, adoption could slow.”

The team found it tricky to measure the link between station reliability and buyer behavior because there weren’t obvious real-world groups to compare. Tesla’s stations get consistently higher marks than other networks, but Tesla cars and their owners are too different in other ways to make for a useful comparison. Simply asking people for their thoughts about charging may produce answers that are colored by their overall feelings about EVs.

Instead, the researchers turned to hypothetical scenarios. They recruited roughly 1,500 participants who had never owned an EV and surveyed them in three groups, asking the first to picture a world where public charging is a mess, the second to imagine a charging utopia and the third to simply give their preexisting opinions about charging.

Each group then went “shopping.” Each round of the survey, participants chose between an EV and a comparable gas-powered car. The researchers tweaked variables such as vehicle cost, gas prices and range, and trends emerged over several rounds.

Participants with a negative view of public charging demanded strikingly large concessions before choosing an EV. In some cases, the adjustment needed was nonsensically large.

“People wanted a 366-mile increase in range before they bought an EV,” MacKenzie said. “Lots of EVs don’t even have a 366-mile range today. That’s obviously not a practical demand. But it illustrates the strength of this effect.”

There were other surprises in the data, too.

“The results were basically the same for people who have access to home charging and people who don’t,” Singh said. “So even if they wouldn’t actually have to rely on the charging network, respondents were still concerned about reliability.”

As the auto industry works to bring EVs into the mainstream, these findings are both a warning and an invitation for further study. Little is known, Singh said, about what specific improvements would have the greatest impact on public charging perception. Asking the right questions could help stakeholders throughout the industry figure out where to invest.

“What are the specific factors that would convince skeptics?” she said. “Does a station need to be online 90% of the time to improve a user’s perception? Or 95%? Or 99%? Or would improving the point of sale system help more? Where do you put your dollars to have the greatest effect on public perception?”

What’s clear, MacKenzie said, is that reliability must be prioritized as charging networks expand.

“This is the Achilles’ heel right now for EVs,” he said.

“If we push the broader market towards EVs, or if it grows on its own before we can fix this problem, it’s really bad news for continued growth. I think it could engender a real backlash. It only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. That’s a big danger for EV adoption.”

Technology veterans, politicians and Nobel Prize winners called on nations around the world Monday to quickly establish “red lines” too dangerous for artificial intelligence to cross.

More than 200 prominent figures including 10 Nobel laureates and scientists working at AI giants Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and OpenAI signed on to a letter released at the start of the latest session of the United Nations General Assembly.

“AI holds immense potential to advance human well-being, yet its current trajectory presents unprecedented dangers,” the letter read.

“Governments must act decisively before the window for meaningful intervention closes.”

AI red lines would be internationally agreed bans on uses deemed too risky under any circumstances, according to creators of the letter.

Examples given included entrusting AI systems with command of nuclear arsenals or any kind of lethal autonomous weapons system.

Other red lines could be allowing AI to be used for mass surveillance, social scoring, cyberattacks, or impersonating people, according to those behind the campaign.

Those who signed the message urged governments to have AI red lines in place by the end of next year given the pace the technology is advancing.

“AI could soon far surpass human capabilities and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations,” the letter read.

“Left unchecked, many experts, including those at the forefront of development, warn that it will become increasingly difficult to exert meaningful human control in the coming years.”

© 2025 AFP

Backup provider Nakivo has moved to version 11.1 of its Backup & Replication software. Key additions include expanded capabilities in the Proxmox virtualisation environment – an emerging VMware alternative – that include disaster recovery (DR) orchestration. It also adds a much simplified connection to the customer infrastructure for managed service providers (MSPs).

Nakivo also responded to questions about a security vulnerability discovered earlier this year by a third-party security company (see box below).

Nakivo offers backup for virtual machines (VMs) and physical machines, and can protect sources that range from datacentres to edge devices, as well as cloud files and applications. It offers replication and disaster recovery for some environments, with automated failover. All of this is admin-able from a single-pane-of-glass user interface.

According to vice-president for product management Sergei Serdyuk, Nakivo offers data protection at “roughly half the price of competitors” in the backup space.

The company claims 16,000 customers, which include Coca-Cola, Cisco, Siemens, Honda and Radisson, where they are deployed in at least some departments, if not the whole customer environment, according to Serdyuk.

Core among the additions in v11.1 is MSP Direct Connect, which allows service providers to connect to customer environments without the need for open ports and network configuration on the customer side. According to Nakivo, this will allow backup for VMware, Hyper-V, Proxmox VMs and physical machines, as well as working with Nakivo’s site recovery feature.

“Providers can install our solution at the customer site. It can connect to the solution installed at the MSP, and basically off they go. This is to simplify and speed up deployments for MSP customers,” said Serdyuk.

Meanwhile, the new version sees expanded Proxmox capabilities. These include the ability to create VM replicas, boot VMs from Nakivo backups, verify backup integrity and recovery readiness, and restore from tape.

“With the new version, we can create Proxmox VM replicas in the same or different locations,” said Serdyuk. “So, customers can, in case of a disaster, just switch to a replica VM instead of spending time on restore from backup.”

Additionally, Nakivo claims to be the only backup provider that offers disaster recovery for Proxmox environments.

According to Serdyuk, that translates to having in place a site-level workflow that is dependent on replication.

Further additions to the latest version of Nakivo include real-time replication for VMware, which was in beta but is now generally available.  

There is also the addition of granular physical backups for Windows and Linux physical machines. This allows for backup of specific files and folders without full backups, and storage of backups in any location, including as copies to comply with 3-2-1 backup plans.