8
votes
How Norway's EV rising star Easee fell foul of Swedish regulators, which took it to the brink of bankruptcy
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- Title
- It ain't Easee: How Norway's EV rising star fell foul of regulators
- Published
- Nov 16 2023
- Word count
- 1602 words
EDIT: After excellent points made by Malle below, I must concede that my points were biased by my experiences of US regulatory bodies being manipulated by corporations. I do not consider this post an accurate take on the matter after being provided with further context.
Just disgusting. So according to the Swedish National Electrical Safety Board, the product is "dangerous enough to stop selling" but not "dangerous enough to need a recall."
That seems really suspicious to me, in all seriousness. I mean, Sweden has in 12.3 Billion Car exports, 8.8 billion refined petrol exports, and another 5 billion in automotive part exports. Seems decently beneficial if a popular EV charger manufacturer using a "technically functional but not industry standard" for their product was immediately given a lot of scrutiny. This of course is leading towards conspiratorial thinking, and I have no evidence in backing anything up, so I won't continue with that argument.
The issue I have, is that the alternative, i.e. gasoline powered vehicles, are powered with a highly flammable and dangerous fuel. If these chargers were even as dangerous existing transit and fueling solutions, that's not been communicated by the ESV. Like, most articles I see about a product that needs to be banned have had some sort of definable impact. Someone gets electrocuted, or it breaks a building's electrical system or something. However, given that they haven't been recalled, the ESV trusts them that much. This feels fishy no matter which way I look at it.
Yes, this is a category of action which is deemed less forceful than a total recall. In the information regarding decision on Easee AS Home and Charge chargers made by the Swedish national electrical safety board (Elsäkerhetsverket; link in Swedish) you can find the information on the decision:
My translation:
If there had been a recall the company would be liable to refund all previous purchases. By allowing the company to take action to correct this for already sold equipment, the burden on the company is likely reduced. If the company believes it to be less cumbersome, my understanding is that nothing prevents them from recalling the equipment instead.
In Elsäkerhetsverkets press release regarding this decision the state that six different popular chargers were tested. The 10-page report is available on their webpage (Swedish; pdf) and states they tested the following units:
I am not familiar with the popularity of EV chargers, neither in Sweden nor anywhere else, so I cannot comment on how representative this selection is, but the report states that they were working from a total of 10 - 15 relevant brands on the Swedish market, and they selected 6 of them (presumably based on budgetary constraints).
The report does not contain any test data, more so just brief descriptions of the conclusions of the tests. In section 4.4 Beslut (ENG: "Decisions") the report states that
My translation:
After reading your post, and the release you linked, I concede the original points I made. This does feel like a bureaucratic decision that was made arbitrarily, but I lack the information to make any substantial points as to this. I really appreciate the additional research and context. I will concede that personal bias has definitely affected my thoughts on the matter, and that I was overly aggressive in my original comment. I still feel that given the true need for rapid scaling of Electric Vehicles, that these decisions should not be made arbitrarily. Additionally, I am dismayed by the lack of test data or methodology.
The ESV cites the lack of an electromagnetic fault circuit breaker, as they used an earth fault circuit breaker, as the basis of their decision. Their reasoning is that potentially, a charger, after operation of greater than 1 year, the unit could break and cause property damage or injury. I wish they would describe what the scale of damage they think this could cause, because that's not clear from the materials provided.
I really think they needed to have released the data on this. If this is a truly a product design that had issues, it is important to know why, so that a company doesn't repeat the same mistakes. Additionally, I wonder if they simply verified that the charger didn't have an electromagnetic circuit breaker, and based their results off of those findings. Do we know if their research is released anywhere publicly?
I must say, that given the need for rapid scaling of EV technologies, safety regulations may need to be revaluated for greener technologies. It's a great example of Pascal's Mugging, where the potential catastrophe of climate change may necessitate 'riskier' solutions to potential issues such as this. It's also worth pointing out as an EU member (even if it doesn't use the Euro) the impacts of its regulatory bodies may be contradictory to other regulating bodies in the EU.
On a very personal note, I'm from the US, a nation built on 2 on centuries of government agencies being manipulated by corporations. I definitely feel like it's warped my perspective on issues like this. I really think that in this age of misinformation where competing interests wield tremendous amounts of market power, it's seriously important to be transparent in these issues. I will concede my original points about this , as I cannot offer enough information about Sweden, or the safety of EV chargers from my own experiences.
I appreciate your response.
Before anything else, I just want to be clear that it is my understanding that the report linked above is not a collection of all information in the case, as much as a summary report on the actions taken. It was published in May 2023, while communication between Elsäkerhetsverket and Easee had been ongoing from at least March 2022.
As far as I know, any communication between Elsäkerhetsverket and Easee (with some categorical exceptions) would be included in the type of information covered by the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act (wikipedia; English) (tryckfrihetsförordningen (wikipedia; swedish)). The actual text of the law is available in Swedish on the webpage of the Swedish parliamen.
Searching around some, we can for instance find an article from early February, 2023, regarding the topic of Elsäkerhetsverket and the Easee charging box, hosted on carup.se, a newssite for "cars, car tests, and guides". This is from before the official decision of sale stop and retailer recall was made, and has in it images of part of the information Elsäkerhetsverket sent to Easee regarding their opportunity to provide information regarding their product ("möjlighet till yttrande"). This includes information regarding the basis for their analysis, and informs of a risk of a decision of sale stop and total recall.
More importantly, it also includes the note "Dnr 22EV1261". This is a diarienummer, basically a case number. Using this we can easily find a list of all documents regarding the case on Easee charge boxes on Elsäkerhetsverket's webpages.
I did not know of this page when I woke up this morning. In retrospect, I can easily find the general catalog for all Elsäkerhetsverket's cases both through google and using the search function on Elsäkerhetsverket's webpage. Inputting "Easee" as the "Avsändare/mottagare" (ENG: sender/receiver) finds the case numbers for both the initial inspection/investigation (22EV1261) and Easee's appeal in March this year (23EV1830).
Some entries are labeled with "sekretess" (ENG: secret). Tryckfrihetsförordningen (TF 2 kap. 2 §) gives some restrictions on information that is not made public, and certain documents here could definitely fall under, for instance, the provisions for agencies' operations for inspection and investigation, or the economic interest of public parties (e.g. if Easee sent some of their own internal test data to Elsäkerhetsverket, that could be kept secret so as to not provide that information to competitors).
Any other documents on that list could be requested under the Freedom of the Press act by sending an email to Elsäkerhetsverket, and instructions on how to do so is provided on these pages.
We can also note that we find the entry at 2023-01-27 with DNR 22EV1261-19 for the document partially shown in the article linked above.
With some additional googling, I can also find that carup.se from above hosts the comment dated 2023-02-14 made by Easee in response to the above notification of opportunity to comment (primarily in English; pdf) (presumably by the date either 22EV1261-19 or 22EV1261-20.3)
I'm not an investigative reporter, I have no training to be a journalist, and still I can find this information in half an hour before work in the morning. My point here being that just because it isn't reported as a news story doesn't mean it's necessarily unavailable, not understandable for those who are more actively involved in the situation, or malicious. I'm not arguing whether the ESV's decision is correct or not - I do not have the knowledge now, nor the time or interest to acquire it to get deep into this case - but I think there is no readily apparent cause for faulting the opportunity for transparency in the process if you are armed with the knowledge of how those processes work in Sweden.
Nitpick: I don't think this is actually a good example of Pascal's Mugging, which is supposed to illustrate the absurdity of a utility function which considers very unlikely but very large outcomes, which is the opposite point from what I think you're trying to convey.