During the next two years, the national labs will collaborate with industry to measure and identify opportunities to significantly improve the customer experience with public EV charging infrastructure in the United States. The consortium sets a goal that public charging stations nationwide will provide a charge to vehicles the first time, every time. This new, clearly aspirational, goal, is not enforceable. However, it complements federal requirements of greater than 97% uptime to ensure that each customer can successfully and easily charge at public charging stations.

The national laboratories will closely collaborate with organizations representing a cross-section of the EV industry to address three problematic areas:
• Payment processing and user interface
• Vehicle-charger communication
• Diagnostic data sharing.

Teams working in these three areas will exchange information to help the national labs identify best practices to address common problems and share them with the entire industry. The national labs will also work with consumer advocacy groups to inform ways to measure the customer charging experience and collect customer feedback to track industry improvement over time. Based on this work, the national labs will develop a proposal for a voluntary program that recognizes charging station operators for providing excellent charging experience.