If you’ve spent any time in the EV charging industry, you’ve probably heard people talk about 99% uptime. It’s become the standard everyone wants to achieve and the expectation customers increasingly have. But it’s also one of those numbers that’s easy to say and much harder to deliver.
But what does 99% uptime actually mean? The answer is more demanding than many people realize.
A charging station operating at 99% uptime can be unavailable for only about 3.65 days over an entire year. Broken down further, that’s roughly seven hours of downtime each month. Every minute a charger is unavailable counts toward that total.
Seven hours sounds like a lot of time until you’re responsible for keeping an entire charging network running.
When something goes wrong, it’s rarely as simple as replacing a part. Someone has to identify the issue, determine what’s actually causing it, coordinate with the right partners, and make sure the charger gets back into service. Every step takes time, and every delay affects uptime.
The larger and more complex a charging network becomes, the more opportunities there are for small delays to accumulate. A charger may experience a software issue that requires investigation. A communications problem might prevent operators from immediately understanding what’s happening. Multiple organizations, including the site host, charging network, hardware manufacturer, service provider, or utility, may all need to participate before a resolution can begin.
Each of those steps might only add a few minutes or a few hours. But when they start stacking up, they can turn what should have been a quick fix into days or even weeks of downtime.
That’s why we think we need to start looking at reliability a little differently.
No one expects complex technology to never fail. Every industry that depends on connected infrastructure deals with equipment issues from time to time.
Telecommunications networks, cloud providers, and electric utilities all have failures. What sets them apart isn’t that nothing ever breaks. It’s that they’ve built systems that help them understand problems quickly, make informed decisions, and get things back up and running as fast as possible.
That’s where EV charging is headed.
As we’ve written before, EV charging reliability isn’t simply a hardware challenge, it’s a systems challenge. That means success depends on how well people, processes, and technology work together when something goes wrong.
As more fleets, businesses, and communities depend on charging infrastructure every day, reliability becomes about much more than the charger itself. It’s about having the visibility, processes, and coordination to respond quickly when something goes wrong. The work that happens before a technician is dispatched can be just as important as the work that happens on site.
We’ve made incredible progress building out charging infrastructure over the last several years. Now we have an opportunity to make sure that infrastructure performs as reliably as the people who depend on it expect.
Getting to 99% uptime starts with understanding the math. But achieving it takes something more. It takes a better understanding of how charging networks actually operate every day and what it takes to keep them running.
Register for our September 17th event now to hear from our co-founder and CEO, Kameale Terry, on the forthcoming 2026 Reliability Report, offering industry leaders a view of a future where charging downtime is minimized and operational efficiency is maximized.
