ChargerHelp Report Analyzing Half a Billion Data Points Finds Charger Recovery Is a Critical Challenge for Commercial Fleets

• Analysis expands from approximately 19 million to 500 million data points, providing greater observability into how charging assets behave and how operational actions help identify and resolve root causes.
• Commercial fleet electrification is making charging reliability an operational requirement.
• Longest charger outages are driven by diagnostic delays, fragmented data, and coordination across organizations rather than the physical repair itself.
• Long-term charging reliability depends on an intelligence layer that combines operational visibility, machine learning and AI with collaboration across the charging ecosystem.

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As commercial fleets, ports, and autonomous vehicle operators become more dependent on electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, ChargerHelp's 2026 EV Charging Reliability Report finds the industry's biggest challenge is no longer deployment, but operating existing charging infrastructure reliably at scale. Drawing on approximately 500 million data points, the report provides ChargerHelp's most comprehensive analysis of EV charging reliability to date. The findings show that the longest charger outages are driven by diagnostic delays, fragmented data, and coordination challenges across multiple organizations rather than the physical repair itself. As common charging problems become easier to identify and resolve, the remaining failures can become less obvious, more complex, and harder to diagnose. Combined with an aging installed base, these challenges are making deeper operational visibility critical to charger recovery.

“EV drivers, quite simply, just want charging to be easy and reliable. GM understands that and has advocated for better customer experiences through infrastructure and software investments,” said Wade Sheffer, Vice President of GM Energy. “We’ve helped put better, faster chargers in more places and now we’ve launched Energy Pass, a tool that puts GM EV owners in control of their charging with one single app to start and pay for sessions across nearly 70 percent of America’s fast chargers. EV adoption only grows when we come together as an industry to break down barriers and think customer-first."

For example, charging issues requiring multiple work orders took a median of 32 days to resolve, compared with seven days for issues completed in a single visit. For organizations that depend on charging to keep vehicles moving, these delays can reduce vehicle availability, disrupt operations and increase the cost of downtime, underscoring why faster recovery has become a business-critical priority.

The analysis combines communications between chargers and charging management systems, anonymized ChargerHelp operational data, technician observations, repair history, Paren network analysis and industry case studies to provide a detailed view of how charging infrastructure performs in real-world operating environments. By bringing these data sources together into a single view, the report reveals recovery patterns that may not be visible when these data sources are viewed independently, including:

• Recovery starts before dispatch: For common charging issues requiring a single field visit, about half of the recovery time occurs before a technician is ever dispatched, highlighting the importance of diagnostics, data access and operational coordination.
• Repeat repairs drive extended outages: Charging issues requiring multiple work orders take a median of 32 days to resolve, compared with seven days for repairs completed during a single visit.
• Operational bottlenecks matter as much as field service: Diagnostic access, partner coordination, financial and administrative processes, and supply chain constraints often have a greater impact on recovery time than technician response alone.
• Charging infrastructure is entering its operational phase: More than one-third (37.6%) of U.S. charging ports are already at least three years old, with warranties lasting 2-5 years, increasing the importance of long-term maintenance and operational planning.

Rather than simply measuring whether chargers are online, the report also examines the operational factors that determine how quickly charging assets return to service. It finds that reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) depends more on improving visibility into charger health, accelerating diagnostics, and enabling stronger collaboration across hardware manufacturers, charging networks, software providers, service organizations, utilities, and site hosts.

"Reducing MTTR isn't just about dispatching technicians faster," said Kameale Terry, CEO of ChargerHelp. "These are connected assets, and getting someone on site in two hours does not mean the problem is solved. Without the right data, permissions, manufacturer support or parts, a charger can still be down for days. As this infrastructure becomes more sophisticated and more integrated with distributed energy resource management systems and other smart energy assets, we need to understand much more about how these systems perform and interact. The industry needs better visibility into asset health and stronger coordination across the organizations responsible for keeping chargers operating reliably."

The report encourages organizations to move beyond viewing charging infrastructure as a hardware deployment. Instead, it recommends evaluating the operational capabilities needed to support the asset over its lifecycle, including diagnostic visibility, data access, manufacturer support, parts planning, and clearly defined service responsibilities.

Reducing MTTR ultimately requires a more connected operating model. The report recommends greater visibility across the recovery process through shared operational data, real-time diagnostics, intelligent dispatch, coordinated service-level agreements and stronger collaboration across the charging ecosystem. Together, these capabilities help organizations identify issues sooner, coordinate repairs more effectively and keep charging infrastructure available when it is needed most.

“When public charging was new, low reliability was largely a growing pain of a new technology. That explanation is expiring," said Professor Gil Tal, Director, Electric Vehicle Research Center, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis. "For the next wave of drivers and fleet operators, reliability is no longer just a metric but a requirement. Our research at UC Davis shows that public charging reliability has no simple owner. This report reveals that recovery is a coordination problem, not a repair problem. It shows the industry exactly where the time goes when a charger fails, and crucially, how to give that time back.”

The report concludes that the next phase of EV charging will be defined not by how many chargers are installed, but by how effectively the industry keeps them operating. Organizations that invest in operational intelligence, coordinated workflows, and greater visibility into asset health will be better positioned to deliver the reliable charging experience that fleets, site hosts and drivers increasingly depend on.

“The transition to a clean energy economy is well underway, and ensuring the reliability of our electric vehicle charging infrastructure has become a business-critical priority for the region. For Los Angeles to maintain its competitive edge, our ports, commercial fleets, and goods-movement corridors require a public charging network that is highly dependable and quickly restored. This 2026 report provides the exact data-driven blueprint needed to shift focus from mere station deployment to the robust, ecosystem-led recovery required to keep our global regional economy moving,” said Maria S. Salinas, President & CEO, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

This is the fourth consecutive year that ChargerHelp has published its reliability report. To view the full 2026 report, click here. The ChargerHelp team will be on-site at the Forth Roadmap Conference in Seattle, Wash.

About ChargerHelp

ChargerHelp is a data-first EV charging O&M company focused on reliability through intelligence rather than just technicians on the ground. Its Reliability as a Service (RaaS) powered by the EMPWR platform uses AI-driven diagnostics across all vendors and owns issue resolution end-to-end. The EMPWR platform, which unifies hardware, software, and protocols into one system, leverages data from over 500 million charge sessions and 10,000+ resolved issues across 60+ charger brands, eliminating the chaos of fragmentation. For more information, visit www.chargerhelp.com.