EV adoption isn’t the issue — unreliable chargers are

A new annual reliability report from ChargerHelp, an EV charger service and maintenance company, paints a dire picture of the state of EV charging in the US.

Of the thousands of chargers the company surveyed by compiling its own data, information sourced from an EV charging analytics company called Paren, and what’s publicly available from the US Department of Energy, ChargerHelp found widespread issues with EV charger hardware and software, covering everything from the connectors you plug into your car to the software that lets you know whether a charger is available and working.

EV sales are continuing to grow, but the slower pace of building and supporting the infrastructure they rely on could be an issue long after you’ve made the switch to electric. Understanding that problem is the first step to trying to fix it, and this report definitely has some insights.

The problems plaguing EV chargers

Chargers work less often than advertised

Owning a gas car involves friction that almost everyone is familiar with: the cost of upkeep, the price of fuel, and the environmental impact of driving. That’s friction that EVs could help alleviate, not only with a smaller environmental footprint over time, but with the right mental model, by turning “fueling” your car into something as second nature as plugging in your phone to charge overnight.

That’s all fine and good if you’re charging at home, but what about everywhere else? The EV industry uses the term “uptime” to refer to the amount of time a charger is working and available for use. More uptime is good, more downtime is bad, and one of ChargerHelp’s key findings is that “true uptime” is often lower than the reported uptime you might see in an app.

In an “assessment of more than 4,800 charge points across the country,” ChargerHelp found that for 15.4% of stations, the status reported in an app and the observed station status were in agreement that a charger was down. But when ChargerHelp technicians actually went to charge, “a much larger 26.3% of test charges failed — including 15% of stations where the station and its app said the chargers were open and available.” ChargerHelp refers to these false positives as “ghost stations,” while chargers that are listed as down in an app but actually function are “zombie stations.”

According to Dr. Gil Tal, UC Davis professor and director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center,, one or two downed chargers might not matter, “but if an entire station is down, that’s a different thing.” Dr. Tal reviewed the data and findings that ChargerHelp collected and wrote the foreword to the company’s report. He is certain that the biggest contributor to the issues ChargerHelp identified is straightforward. “The main issue, the reason for the low reliability, is that it’s a new technology,” Dr. Tal says.

Widespread EV charger use is a relatively new development, and the wear and tear chargers face has dramatically increased alongside EV adoption. “The learning curve here is really steep,” Dr. Tal says. “The infrastructure that was installed a couple of years ago was not tested for all temperatures, was not tested for all locations.”

Older chargers are more likely to be broken, and the reasons vary

It shouldn’t be completely surprising, then, that ChargerHelp found “older stations were more likely to be down, with a notable step change around the 4-year mark.” Not only does charging hardware degrade over time, but it wasn’t necessarily designed for all the places it ended up being installed. Ironically, ChargerHelp found that the states with the most charging infrastructure also happen to have the worst reliability for this same reason.

What’s actually broken in these down chargers can vary, but ChargerHelp did identify a few trends. Generally, chargers that work have a functioning payment system, and “nearly half of down stations had broken/nonworking payment systems,” according to the report. Otherwise, “internal evidence of component failure or damage” was the most common issue ChargerHelp observed.

Really, the difficulty of improving charger reliability comes from the fact that it’s a multifaceted problem. The chargers themselves can have broken components, but the fact that most fast chargers can be in harder-to-reach, remote locations makes fixing them a multistep process, too. “The problem is that these locations in the middle of nowhere are the ones that we really want to be up all the time,” Dr. Tal says.

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How to improve charger reliability

Better access to data and funding for maintenance — not just installations

ChargerHelp’s suggestions for how to improve EV charger reliability fall into a few big buckets, including making diagnostic data and information provided by the Open Charge Point Protocol (which EVs use to communicate with charging stations and a central management system) more accessible, standardizing how uptime is calculated, and improving and expanding charger technician training, among other suggestions.

For Dr. Tal, the solution is even simpler: “The most important thing that will improve the charging experience is installing many more chargers.” That doesn’t mean he disagrees with ChargerHelp’s assessment or that existing chargers shouldn’t be fixed, but more chargers would lighten the load on our current options and help them need less maintenance over time. “It’s a numbers game,” Dr. Tal says.

Make charging a business that’s impossible to ignore

The best way to create a good environment for EVs and incentivize both fixing chargers and building new ones is to “make sure that we have a reliable business model,” Dr. Tal says. “If they lose money, it’ll be much harder to enforce that they stay online.” There’s no one way to make that happen yet. Governments just need to start experimenting more aggressively.

“The government right now is doing the very simple thing of subsidizing the installation and then asking for a five-year warranty or something like that,” Dr. Tal says. “It’s a good starting point, but we need to be much more innovative about these business models.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean making chargers profitable or at least cheaper will result in them sprouting up overnight. Dr. Tal acknowledged that the current rollout has been slower than expected. “Between federal money being allocated to the states, the states allocating it to charger companies, and electric utilities, which are very slow in bringing the power to the locations… it’s a slower process than what we hoped it’d be,” he says. Infrastructure, which EV chargers ultimately are, is hard.

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Reliability will improve, and for now the pros outweigh the cons

Building more chargers and incentivizing their continued maintenance will go a long way toward improving reliability for drivers. Opening up already reliable and developed charging networks, like Tesla’s Supercharger network, helps, too.

But more importantly, for most people, even a slightly annoying charging experience can’t outweigh the benefits of owning an EV right now. Saving on gas and driving a more efficient, modern car is a real plus for most people, charging frustrations aside. “If you talk to EV drivers, most of them are really happy with their cars,” Dr. Tal says. “I survey EV drivers every day, and the number of EV drivers who say they’re going back to gas cars is close to zero.”