New shared language will facilitate faster service, improve EV user experience
The National Charging Experience Consortium (ChargeX) has released a report that recommends 26 common electric vehicle (EV) charging error codes to enable faster error reporting, diagnostics and resolution within the EV charging industry. Ultimately, the codes would improve the U.S. charging experience.
The ChargeX Consortium is a collaboration between U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, EV charging industry experts, consumer advocates and other stakeholders.
The Recommendations for Minimum Required Error Codes report aims to reduce confusion between charger manufacturers, EV manufacturers and charging station operators, who currently use different messages to report similar errors. The common codes will simplify diagnostics when a charging session fails, improving EV charging network operations and charging experiences for drivers. Further, the codes will simplify diagnostics when a charging session faces an issue, streamlining EV charging network operations, reducing workforce training complexity and improving the charging experience for drivers.
“The landscape of the American road trip is changing,” said Gabe Klein, executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which funds ChargeX. “To make an electrified road trip convenient and reliable, companies in the EV charging ecosystem must be on the same page about how they communicate, especially when issues arise.”
Launched in August 2023, ChargeX — with expert help from Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — works to gauge and improve the customer experience with public EV charging infrastructure throughout the United States. This report is the first deliverable to serve that mission.
“We are excited to begin implementing these codes,” said Cuong Nguyen, manager of Industry Affairs and Standards at ABB, a consortium industry participant and co-chair of the working group that led the report. “As a company that helped develop these common error codes, we hope to now demonstrate their value to others in the industry, leading to widespread adoption.”
ChargeX also published an implementation guide to help industry practitioners adopt the error codes uniformly and quickly, and additional industry recommendations will follow.
ChargeX industry participants ABB and EVgo demonstrated some of the error codes during the recent CharIN Testival North America 2023 in Cleveland, Ohio. “We are proud to work alongside ChargeX to implement root cause solutions that will lead to an elevated customer experience,” said Ivo Steklac, Chief Technology Officer at EVgo, one of the nation’s largest fast charging providers. “Standardized error codes, which apply to both vehicles and chargers, are foundational for understanding customer experience so the full EV ecosystem can march forward together towards solutions.”
About ChargeX
A collaborative effort between Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, electric vehicle charging industry experts, consumer advocates, and other stakeholders, ChargeX’s mission is to work together to measure and significantly improve public charging reliability and usability by June 2025. For more information, visit chargex.inl.gov.
About the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation
The Joint Office was created through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) to facilitate collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Transportation in their efforts to deploy a national network of electric vehicle chargers, zero-emission fueling infrastructure, and zero-emission transit and school buses.
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