A friend of mine sold his first generation Leaf and purchased a used Prius instead. He is an EV fanatic and that was his first car.
There is a private network of charging stations in our area. He has a few stories about them.
One time he arrives at a station that disconnects him after 5 seconds. He calls them. Customer service says it's functional and nothing is wrong with it. He asks them to look up the previous charges. They all disconnected after 5 seconds. Coincidence!
He goes to another broken station. He calls them. Apparently they're not aware of it being down right now, but tell him it's a recurrent problem with this one. Nothing else is done.
He breaks his own rules and takes his chances on a charging station without having enough charge to go to another one in case this one fails. Sure enough, it's broken. He call them. He has to get towed to the next station, and they will pay for it, but that doesn't include his own transport. He has to pay for a cab himself.
He gets to another non-functional charging station. He calls them. They tell him it's a compatibility issue with his car despite him having used the same ones for the past 5 years. There is nothing else they can do for him. He asks to speak to someone higher up and to pass on his complaint. He never hears back.
He wasn't even discouraged by the long recharge times. In the end, it's because he was tired of being late to appointments and having to worry about this crap all the time.
This sounds like some kind of market failure. Perhaps we need fewer EV charging networks with random unattended parking-lot terminals; and more independent, non-network EV chargers, built into gas-station-like operations, with individual owner-operators who are very concerned with ensuring you can pay them money.
There is a counterpoint to this. Currently in Finland we have chargers like this. They're known in the EV circles to be utter shit and don't work more often than they do. The station does show in all maps, but if you check the reviews it's all red.
The reason is that the owner bought them from a random company, they installed it and do have a service contract - the problem is that the service queues are measured in weeks and spare parts are scarce.
The same thing is with chargers on the parking lots of some chain stores. Corporate has mandated that there has to be X charging spots - enter /r/maliciouscompliance - ok boss, here's the charger. Does it work? No. Do they care? No. Does corporate actually care? No, they can quote numbers of installed charging stations in their quarterly reports.
Meanwhile bigger operators standardise on one station provider, have their own trained staff and a stockpile of common spare parts. A few even frequent the local EV driver FB groups and interact with their customer base there.
By "The station does show in all maps" do you mean google/bing/apple maps? They're usually pretty good with removing reported places. If a listed place cannot offer services for weeks I wouldn't hesitate editing it to temporarily closed.
Usually car manufacturers license some third-party charge point dataset. They don't have an online review component (like Plugshare for example) so the car can't know that the charger it's currently navigating to is most likely broken. This will result in a shitty experience for inexperienced or non tech savvy EV drivers.
Tesla on the other hand knows exactly what's happening on their Superchargers and share that data with their vehicles.
There is a private network of charging stations in our area. He has a few stories about them.
One time he arrives at a station that disconnects him after 5 seconds. He calls them. Customer service says it's functional and nothing is wrong with it. He asks them to look up the previous charges. They all disconnected after 5 seconds. Coincidence!
He goes to another broken station. He calls them. Apparently they're not aware of it being down right now, but tell him it's a recurrent problem with this one. Nothing else is done.
He breaks his own rules and takes his chances on a charging station without having enough charge to go to another one in case this one fails. Sure enough, it's broken. He call them. He has to get towed to the next station, and they will pay for it, but that doesn't include his own transport. He has to pay for a cab himself.
He gets to another non-functional charging station. He calls them. They tell him it's a compatibility issue with his car despite him having used the same ones for the past 5 years. There is nothing else they can do for him. He asks to speak to someone higher up and to pass on his complaint. He never hears back.
He wasn't even discouraged by the long recharge times. In the end, it's because he was tired of being late to appointments and having to worry about this crap all the time.