A decade ago, before all-electric vehicles were routinely spotted on roads, drivers of Volkswagen’s diesel offerings thought they were making an environmentally conscious choice. The company had touted a “best of both worlds” approach: It said its diesel vehicles produced lower emissions than competitors, but still gave customers more energy per gallon compared to gasoline.
“It was this amazing promise in vehicle technology,” Christopher Hennigan, a University of Maryland professor of environmental engineering, told Tech Brew. “But it turned out to be a lie.”
That lie involved Volkswagen putting what the Environmental Protection Agency called “defeat devices” in model year 2009–2016 cars to deceive federal emissions tests: When the cars were being tested, emissions were low. But on the road, they emitted a “major excess” of NOx, or gas particles that can lead to illness and premature death
The entire scandal was revealed when then-International Council on Clean Transportation Senior Fellow John German and his team tested Volkswagen diesel vehicles on the road—not in a test facility. Using a machine in the car’s trunk and a probe down the length of the exhaust pipe, they uncovered extremely high emissions.
As a result, the EPA and Department of Justice found that Volkswagen, which included the Audi and Porsche brands, violated the Clean Air Act, a federal law passed in 1970 to regulate emissions from stationary sources, like factories, and mobile sources, like cars. Under the law, the company agreed to pay multiple settlements and pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
“The Clean Air Act worked as it was intended to—in the sense that we had a company that was violating it and when that was discovered, [there were] massive penalties in response,” Amanda Halter, a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman’s Environmental & Natural Resources practice, told us. “It’s the kind of law, frankly, that you just couldn’t get passed by today’s Congress.”
Electrify America: As part of the settlement, Volkswagen spent $2 billion to establish a public fast-charging network, Electrify America, which today is the second largest in the US. It now has more than 4,800 charging ports across the country, second only to Tesla.
“The contribution that Electrify America has made to the public charging infrastructure is really substantial,” Brent Gruber, executive director of JD Power’s EV practice, told Tech Brew.
However, the network has been criticized by EV drivers and electrification advocates over reliability issues, as detailed in a December 2023 report by The Washington Post. An executive told the outlet that the network was “working hard to improve reliability.”
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Electrify America ranked last on consumer satisfaction with public fast chargers in a 2024 JD Power study. It scored 559 on a 1,000-point scale, while Tesla ranked highest, with 731.
In general, there are two major problems with US public charging, Gruber said: lack of availability and unreliability.
The EV “adoption rate is outstripping the pace of charger installation by about two to one,” he said. And about one in five public charging visits fail, per JD Power and other data, because of issues like faulty chargers and long wait times.
Solving these issues is important because public-charging concerns remain the No. 1 barrier to EV adoption, Gruber said. But now, that effort must proceed without federal help, as the Trump administration rescinds federal support for public charging infrastructure and electrification.
Gruber said he expects to see a near-term slowdown in charger installation, but that states and private-sector players will push ahead, because strong public charging is key to an electric future in which manufacturers are heavily invested.
As for Electrify America, the network continues to expand. It reported that its customers’ 16 million charging sessions represented 50% growth in 2024, and it plans a 30% expansion this year. Electrify America declined to comment on Tech Brew’s questions.
The network is working to increase the number of “Hyper-Fast” 350 kilowatt-hour chargers, per a company report, as well as opening larger stations. It says it’s implemented policies, like idle fees, aimed at reducing wait times.
“Increasing customer satisfaction and station performance is a top priority for Electrify America,” the network said in its Q1 2025 report to the California Air Resources Board. The network will report to the board annually on charger station uptime and “strive to achieve target uptime thresholds on its California network of chargers,” under the terms of its latest maintenance plan.
Meanwhile, Gruber said he was heartened to see significant progress in Q1 on customer satisfaction and charger reliability.
The public charging failure rate dropped to 16% in Q1, the largest improvement since JD Power launched the survey in 2021, according to Gruber. And the satisfaction level with public fast chargers went up by six points from Q4 2024, to 656 out of 1,000.
The results, Gruber said, “gave me a lot of hope that we’re starting to see the tides turn with public charging.”