Charging Station Goes Boom, EV Won't Work: What Happens Next

I have driven both gas and diesel vehicles for over 20 years, from small cars to bulldozers, and had all different kinds of them fail spectacularly at the worst moments. I have got gas at places where they accidentally put diesel in the gas tanks, diesel from places that had water ingress, rods thrown through the side of the block 1,000 miles away from home, you name it. I don't own an electric vehicle but I don't think anyone that does is under the impression that they would be completely problem free. It seems strange to me that a couple hundred thousand cars burn to the ground ever year in the US but all the news stories focus on the handful of EV fires. I also find it suspicious that the slightest problems they have are simultaneously written about by dozens of news sites with nearly the same wording. I don't have any skin in the EV game, but it's hard not to notice the bias against them. It would be interesting to see where the money flows to and from in all this reporting.

Why can't the breaker just be reset like a house breaker? Shouldn't there be a physical switch in the fuse panel? Or if it's a consumable part that sacrifices itself like a regular fuse shouldn't it be user-replaceable? Being able to fix something roadside with a <$100 part seems to be easily achievable here.

I had a chademo fast charging station clamp on my car and refuse to let go, along with not actually doing any charging. They tried resetting the charger but nothing worked. It eventually timed out and gave up after 12 hours or so. No harm done to the car but quite annoying.

This probably was caused by poor design of the charger.<p>For a huge overcurrent event to happen, some of the switching elements in the power converter failed (or their control logic did).<p>However, that is a reasonably foreseeable event. The charger should have been tested for what happens when each piece of the charger fails open circuit or short circuit.<p>It is perfectly possible to design control electronics which can detect the failure of any piece and adjust the control strategy of the other parts of the circuit to prevent damage to whatever is on the output.