The ongoing transitional shift away from traditional diesel towards electricity as a fuel has and will continue to face a seemingly endless list of challenges, but that doesn't mean that progress towards a more sustainable freight infrastructure should be outright abandoned.
It's vital to understand what works and what doesn't. Enter ChargeHelp! and its just-published 2025 EV Charging Reliability Report.
With 64% of Americans now living within two miles of an EV charging station, ChargerHelp!'s 2025 EV Charging Reliability Report reveals troubling trends for electrified commercial vehicles. While charger uptime has improved, it turns out nearly 1 in 3 charging attempts still fail.
[Related: How Hyliion's on-site power generator could be the key to fleet electrification]
The report highlights that first-time charge success rate (FTCSR) is a more accurate metric than uptime for evaluating real-world reliability, which is especially critical for commercial EV operators. FTCSR at new stations averaged 85% but dropped below 70% by year three, thus exposing performance gaps as infrastructure ages.
Based on over 100,000 charging sessions across 2,400 chargers—and with input from Plug In America, a non-profit organization, and Paren's EV charging data platform—the report offers the most comprehensive view to date of EV charger functionality.
[Related: California Transportation Commission approves $94M for 500 new electric truck chargers]
The report's key data supports several conclusions aimed at advancing the industry:
- FTCSR matches the driver experience: While reported charger uptime has improved (98.7 – 99.9%), only 71% of charging attempts actually succeed. More than one-third of failures occur on chargers that appear operational, and the driver experience suffers when critical charge initiations fail 30% of the time. Many chargers report 100% uptime yet still fail without multiple retries, resets, or errors, making FTCSR a more accurate and actionable metric.
- FTCSR is a better measure. Unlike uptime, which shows whether a charger is technically “available,” FTCSR reflects the true customer experience: whether a driver can successfully start charging on the first attempt.
- Aging infrastructure erodes reliability. New stations average an 85% success rate, but performance drops to 69.9% by year three, a 15-point decline that uptime monitoring fails to capture.
- Short-term fixes fall short. Hardware swaps and site refreshes can temporarily improve uptime, but do not address deeper reliability issues, underscoring the need for preventative maintenance over costly, short-lived replacements.
The report's bottom line warns that while new hardware and site upgrades can reduce short-term downtime, they don't solve deeper reliability problems. Many charging stations aren’t built to handle future software updates, vehicle changes, or new standards—leading to failed charging attempts.
To solve this, the study calls on the industry to rethink planning, standardize software updates, and use better performance metrics to improve long-term reliability and further reduce costs.
"Uptime tells us if a charger is available, but it doesn’t tell us if a driver can actually plug in and get a charge on the first attempt," said Kameale Terry, CEO of ChargerHelp!. "First-time charge success captures the real driver experience, and by centering on this metric, the industry can close the gap between availability and usability and build the trust needed for mass adoption."
