Pasadena’s Great EV Misfire: How a $10M+ Bet Left Drivers Stranded
Pasadena, a city that prides itself on being an early adopter of green technology, is now facing a system-wide failure of its public electric vehicle infrastructure. After investing millions to build one of the nation’s largest municipal charging networks, Pasadena Water and Power (PWP) is presiding over a field of broken, offline, and unreliable DC fast chargers, leaving EV drivers stranded and furious.
Publicly available data from the city itself paints a grim picture: at one point, nearly two-thirds of the city’s 45 DC fast chargers were offline. This “robust” network, once a crown jewel, has become a multi-million dollar monument to a failed bet.
The Cascade of Failures
The core of this meltdown is a catastrophic supply chain and vendor collapse. PWP’s primary partner in this venture was Tritium, an Australian manufacturer that supplied the bulk of the city’s fast chargers. In August 2024, Tritium declared bankruptcy.
According to a PWP public notice, the company that acquired Tritium’s assets, Exicom, is only honoring warranties for parts, not for the labor to install them. This has left Pasadena holding the bag on dozens of highly complex, broken machines with no one to fix them.
To compound the disaster, the city’s software and network provider, Shell Recharge, abruptly terminated its EV services in March 2025. This forced PWP into a hurried contract with a new provider, PowerFlex, a switch that has been plagued by user complaints of a buggy app and failed charging sessions.
The result is a near-total collapse at key locations:
- Del Mar Garage: 100% of fast chargers (3 of 3) offline.
- Arroyo Parkway (Glenarm): 100% of fast chargers (6 of 6) offline.
- Marengo Garage: 60% of fast chargers (12 of 20) offline.
- Victory Park: 100% of fast chargers (3 of 3) offline and now slated for total replacement.
“Should We Be in This Business?”
The debacle has not gone unnoticed at City Hall. During a May 2025 budget workshop for the Municipal Services Committee, a frustrated Councilmember Tyron Hampton, himself a long-time EV driver, openly questioned the entire endeavor.
“Right now, there’s so many repairs that it’s almost as if we should discuss whether we should be in this business,” Hampton stated, giving voice to a growing sentiment among residents who feel the city’s experiment has failed.
The city’s response, led by PWP General Manager David Reyes, has been to manage the crisis. Reyes acknowledged the severe operational challenges, and PWP has scrambled to find solutions, including plans for a “real-time online dashboard” to show drivers which of the few remaining chargers are actually working.
Adding Insult to Injury
For residents and visiting EV drivers, the situation has become a frustrating game of “charger roulette.” Angry posts on social media and public forums like Reddit decry the network as “100% unreliable.” Drivers report arriving at garages with low batteries, only to find every single charger out of service.
In a move that baffled many, PWP also implemented a two-hour parking limit for its fast chargers—machines designed to charge a car in 30-60 minutes. This “shortsighted” policy, as one critic called it, encourages drivers to abandon their cars for hours, blocking the few functional chargers and making a bad situation even worse.
Pasadena bet big on a single, unproven hardware vendor and lost. Now, as the city struggles to replace entire lots of chargers and pivots to yet another software platform, its residents are left paying the price—stuck with a “state-of-the-art” network that doesn’t work.
