It Says It’s Up… But Does It Actually Work? Rethinking EV Charging Reliability

ChargerHelp

• October 28, 2025

When most people talk about EV charging, they talk about uptime. It’s the industry’s go-to metric, the headline number everyone points to when proving that things are working. But there’s a catch: a charger can be “up” without actually working.

At ChargerHelp, we call this difference the gap between availability and true reliability.

Think of it like this — if you walk up to a charger that says it’s ready, plug in, and nothing happens, that charger is technically up, but it hasn’t done its job. In our latest Reliability Report, we looked deeper into this gap. What we found was eye-opening.

We began by introducing a more meaningful measure: First Charge Success Rate. It’s simple — when a driver plugs in for the first time, does the charger start delivering electrons immediately?

Across thousands of assets in our study, we found that drivers were successful about 70% of the time. The other 30% of the time, they were forced to try again, switch chargers, or walk away frustrated.

That’s not a technology gap. It’s an experience gap. And experience matters — because no one buys a car thinking they’ll have to debug it at the pump. As I often tell