It’s bad enough when a public EV-charging station is out of service. It’s worse when your app doesn’t know that and sends you there just as you’re in desperate need of a charge. 

This experience is all too common among the U.S. EV drivers who don’t have access to Tesla’s dependable network, per a new report on EV-charger reliability based on exhaustive data collected from the field. 

Unreliable public charging infrastructure and unreliable information on EV-charger uptime have become two of the biggest barriers to the EV transition in the U.S. That’s a problem, as the country needs to shift to EVs fast in order to slash carbon emissions from transportation. But it’s a problem with clear, if complicated to implement, solutions. 

So says the inaugural annual reliability report from ChargerHelp, a startup that trains and employs technicians who service and repair EV-charging stations in more than a dozen states. Its analysis of more than 19 million data points collected from public and private sources in 2023 — including real-time assessments of 4,800 chargers from ChargerHelp technicians in the field — finds that ​“software consistently overestimates station uptime, point-in-time status, and the ability to successfully charge a vehicle.”  

That doesn’t mean that the technology under the hood of public charging stations is fundamentally broken, said Kameale Terry, ChargerHelp’s CEO and co-founder. But it does mean that players in the EV-charging industry have to work together — and with the federal and state regulators setting uptime requirements for chargers being installed with the support of billions of dollars of public funds — to solve the root causes of the problems at hand.