Charging station reliability is important, but what does it mean in practice?

As revealed by Elizabeth France in her article, reliability is simple from an EV driver’s perspective –

Does the charging station work when they need it to? 

Key takeaways for sharing:

  • If drivers cannot depend on charging infrastructure, they won’t drive electric.
  • In the EV charging industry, reliability is often measured in terms of uptime.
  • There are different reasons why a charger may not work.
  • Possible key performance indicators:
    • the time needed to detect the service-affecting issue
    • the time needed to escalate the service-affecting issue to the party responsible
    • the time needed for the party responsible to repair/resolve the service affecting issue and restore service (known as mean time to repair or “MTTR”)
    • the time needed to restore service (known as the mean time to restore service or “MTTRS”)
  • For charging equipment in particular, the mean time between failure (known as mean time between failures or “MTBF”) can be considered.
  • All things being equal, a high MTBF should lead to better uptime
  • The metrics for reliability in the EV charging space are not widely known

Read Elizabeth’s article here for more.

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