If you’re leading a transit fleet through electrification, you already know the vehicle side of this equation. You’ve evaluated range, duty cycles, battery warranties, maybe even wrestled with the 30C tax credit timeline. Charging infrastructure, by comparison, has probably felt like a secondary decision, a line item to check off after the buses or vans are ordered.
That’s the mistake. And it’s an understandable one, because for years the charging industry has trained buyers to think about hardware first: kW ratings, connector types, dispenser counts. Almost nobody in a sales conversation leads with the question that actually determines whether your fleet runs on time: will this charger be working when my vehicles need it?
It’s time to change the question you’re asking. Stop buying chargers. Start buying uptime.
The Belief That’s Costing You
If you’ve been circling the EV charging space for a while, you’ve probably absorbed a belief that’s mostly true: chargers are unreliable, and vendor support is spotty. You’ve heard about buses that couldn’t complete their morning routes because a charger wouldn’t initiate a session. You’ve heard about support tickets that sit for days. And if a headline in the last few years has crossed your desk, you’ve probably seen the phrase “bp pulse exits fleet charging” or something like it, a reminder that vendors in this space don’t all have staying power.
The instinct that follows is to optimize for price. If reliability is a coin flip regardless of who you buy from, the logic goes, at least get the best deal. That instinct is exactly backwards, and the data explains why.
What The Data Actually Says
In 2022, researchers from UC Berkeley’s Department of Bioengineering tested 657 public DC fast-charging connectors across 181 stations in the Greater Bay Area, one of the most mature EV markets in the country. A charger counted as “functional” if it charged a vehicle for at least two minutes or was actively charging at the time it was checked. Only 72.5% of the connectors tested met that bar. That result stood in stark contrast to the 95–98% uptime figures the charging networks operating those same stations had been reporting publicly. A follow-up spot-check about a week later found no meaningful improvement.
That gap between reported uptime and observed uptime is the whole problem in one number. Networks and vendors have been reporting figures in the mid-90s for years. Independent, on-the-ground testing found reality closer to 70%.
This isn’t just an academic footnote either, it’s the baseline against which public funding standards are supposed to hold providers accountable. Under the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, the Federal Highway Administration requires that federally funded charging ports maintain an average annual uptime greater than 97%, with a port considered “up” only when its hardware and software are both online and available and it successfully dispenses. The Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management sets the bar even higher, requiring public DC fast-charging pedestals to be operational at least 99% of the time. The Berkeley researchers noted plainly that the 72.5% functionality rate they measured falls far below the 97–99% minimum uptime required by public funding agencies.
So the standard that governments and funders have set is 97%+. The number independent researchers actually measured is 72.5%. If you’re a transit or fleet director evaluating a charging vendor right now, that’s a 25-point credibility gap you should assume exists until a vendor proves otherwise, with data, not a sales deck.
More recent industry research suggests the problem isn’t limited to whether a charger is technically “online.” Analysis by ChargerHelp, drawing on more than 100,000 charging sessions across 2,400 chargers, found that even when uptime numbers look strong on paper, nearly one in three charging attempts still fail to complete — and first-time charge success rates decline from roughly 85% at new stations to below 70% by the third year of operation. For a fleet running tight turnaround windows between routes, a charger that’s technically “up” but fails to actually deliver a charge is functionally no different from one that’s dark.
Why This Happens: Hardware And Uptime Are Sold By Different People
Here’s the structural issue. Most charging vendors are, at their core, hardware and installation companies. They design the electrical infrastructure, install the equipment, hand over the keys, and offer a warranty that covers manufacturing defects. Ongoing performance, the software, the monitoring, the maintenance, the truck roll when something breaks at 5 a.m. is frequently an afterthought, outsourced, or simply not built into the commercial relationship at all.
That’s why “buying a charger” and “buying uptime” are not the same purchase. A charger is a capital asset. Uptime is an ongoing operational commitment, one that requires round-the-clock monitoring, a defined response time, spare parts logistics, and a business model that actually penalizes the vendor when performance falls short.
Most RFPs and procurement processes aren’t built to capture that distinction. They ask about equipment specs, warranty length, and total installed cost. They rarely ask: What happens, financially, to you, the vendor, in the month your chargers underperform? If a vendor doesn’t have a real answer to that question, cost is the only thing you were ever comparing.
The Questions That Actually Matter
Before you sign a contract for charging infrastructure, ask your vendor these questions directly:
- Is your uptime figure a marketing claim or a contractual guarantee? A number on a spec sheet is not the same as a number in a service level agreement with a remedy attached.
- What happens financially if you miss it? Does your invoice change, or does the number just get “explained” in a quarterly business review?
- Who is monitoring the charger, and how? Is there a 24/7 network operations center watching telemetry, or does someone find out a charger is down when a driver calls it in?
- What’s your guaranteed response time when something fails? Same-day? Next business day? Whenever a technician is in the area?
- Do you own the whole stack including electrical infrastructure, hardware, and software, or are you assembling other people’s components and hoping they play nicely together? Attribution matters: a vendor who doesn’t control the full environment often can’t tell you why a charger went down, let alone guarantee it won’t happen again.
If a vendor can’t answer these with specific real numbers, real contract language, real consequences then that’s your answer. Walk away, regardless of the price on the quote.
What Accountability Actually Looks Like
This isn’t a hypothetical framework. Camber built its Camber Complete™ service model specifically around this idea: fleet operators purchase the hardware and installation upfront, but the ongoing monthly service fee covering network operations center monitoring, remote diagnostics, firmware updates, and preventative maintenance is performance-gated. If uptime doesn’t clear the contracted threshold, of up to 98%, in a given billing period, the service fee for that period is zero. No fee, no questions, no negotiation.
That structure is now underpinning some of the largest transit deployments in the country. As part of a six-year service agreement to electrify its bus network ahead of the 2028 Olympics, LA Metro secured a Camber Complete commitment guaranteeing at least 98% charger uptime, with response times as fast as two hours. Uptime in that model isn’t reported after the fact in a vendor’s internal system, it’s measured continuously via telemetry and visible in real time on the Camber Core dashboard, by charger and by site, so the customer sees the same numbers the vendor does.
That’s the difference between a charger vendor and an uptime partner: one sells you equipment and hopes it works; the other builds a business model where they only get paid when it does.
The Bottom Line
You’re not in the business of buying chargers. You’re in the business of running routes, on time, every day, for the public you serve. The charger is just the mechanism. Uptime is the actual product you need and it’s the one thing most vendors have historically been unwilling to put a number on and stand behind financially.
The next time a proposal lands on your desk, don’t start with the price of the hardware. Start with the guarantee behind it. Ask what happens when it fails. Ask who’s watching it. Ask what the vendor loses if they don’t deliver. If the answers are vague, you already have all the information you need.
Ready to see what a real uptime guarantee looks like? Learn more about Camber Complete’s 98% uptime guarantee or contact Camber to talk through what a performance-backed charging program could look like for your fleet.
Ready to start the conversation?
Sources
- Rempel, D., Cullen, C., Bryan, M.M., Cezar, G.V. “Reliability of Open Public Electric Vehicle Direct Current Fast Chargers.” UC Berkeley / SSRN, 2022. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4077554
- eCFR, Title 23, Part 680 — National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Standards and Requirements (NEVI minimum uptime rule). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-23/chapter-I/subchapter-G/part-680
- InsideEVs, “Study: Public Chargers Far Less Reliable Than Previously Reported,” 2022. https://insideevs.com/news/590679/study-public-chargers-low-reliability/
- Camber Charging, “Camber Charging Launches CAMBER COMPLETE™,” BusinessWire, April 2026. https://cambercharging.com/camber-launches-camber-complete/
- BusinessWire, “LA Metro Taps Camber Charging to Electrify Bus Network in Time for 2028 Olympics,” May 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260504683551/en/LA-Metro-Taps-Camber-Charging-to-Electrify-Bus-Network-in-Time-for-2028-Olympics
- Camber Charging, “The Fleet Operator’s Guide to Charging Schedules and Load Management” (ChargerHelp data citation). https://cambercharging.com/the-fleet-operators-guide-to-charging-schedules-and-load-management/
