New EV owner here. We charge at home so I don’t need to use them, but stores nearby have chargers. I tried them to see how they work. They are often broken.
One store has a Volta charger (free!). It worked great the first time; the next time I went it was broken.
Walmart has an Electrify America fast charger. The first time I went, 1 of 3 was not working. The next time I went, 1 of 3 was not working, but it was a different one.
Was I unlucky, or are these charging networks unreliable? Has it been getting better or worse over time?
You have made an impossible request. Consumer Reports, while highly flawed, is the only one without an obvious conflict of interest. Every other source, such as JD Power mentioned below, is for-profit and sells advertising. As such, they really can’t be trusted.
There is literally no other source that could even potentially provide that data (note: data, not anecdotes), assuming these aren’t safety-related issues. I have no particular knowledge of Tesla’s overall reliability, only about the sources one would use to try to find out.
Btw, fires are more common across the industry than you’d think. Chevy had a similar warning about the Bolt (and issued a recall, which is why Consumer Reports lists them as highly unreliable). Ford also issued a warning last year to owners of multiple ICE SUV models to park them outside for exactly that same reason.