The UK’s transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is accelerating, with recent AA research showing that 82% of UK drivers believe EVs are the future. However, this study also reveals that almost two-fifths (39%) of EV drivers experience poor charging reliability.

Additionally, further research says that one in five charging sessions fails, highlighting the urgent need for higher-quality charge points and improved maintenance. Challenges remain around visibility, connectivity, and infrastructure bottlenecks brought by insufficient local funding.

But by trusting in up-to-date status data on charge points nationally, drivers and charge point operators (CPOs) can become more informed and proactive, to help boost adoption and ensure a more reliable and sustainable future.

Building charging hardware to last

Three major decisions are on any CPO’s to-do list when installing infrastructure.

First, they must consider which hardware they are going to use, and why. Second, how is it going to be connected and be as reliable as possible? Last, there’s the software element: ensuring it is always available, stable and fast.

The initial UK public charging installations were, in hindsight, rushed, rendering the software behind the infrastructure unstable. When it comes to maintaining public charging, EV industry stakeholders should look into encouraging the use of real-time data and lead by example by basing decisions and maintenance on this information.

A supported charge point list displaying millions of sessions’ worth of data can help CPOs make informed decisions around how to improve. This can present insights around poor connectivity as well as mismatches in timeouts across hardware, compared to when users plug chargers in.

Having such information available can, and has, halve the amount of incomplete, or ‘zero kilowatt hour’ sessions – bolstering efficiency in the process.

Diagnostics and predictive maintenance

Real-time diagnostics and predictive maintenance can play a major role in reducing charger failure rates. While diagnostic capabilities to carry out the reactive work can be helpful, this should also be utilised to find problems where marginal gains can be made.

Oftentimes, ‘predictive maintenance’ brings to mind large AI models running in the background. This can be supported by incoming updates to the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP) standard, which is a method of industry-standardised communication between charge points and central systems. While this holy grail for DC charging is still to be realised, new standards like OCPP 2.0.1 – allowing for data collection from specific components – could eventually make this possible.

Predictive maintenance – and the subset of that, which is proactive maintenance – is vital towards achieving a long-lasting charging infrastructure. When you buy a mobile phone, regular firmware updates are expected to keep it operational for as long as possible. It is the same principle with maintaining charge points; there is always an element of learning in the background to stay fit-for-purpose and keep software bugs at bay that could damage the charger.

The importance of interoperability

Interoperability across platforms also remains a challenge. Hardware that is compatible with various software platforms, and vice versa, is vital for roaming, where different apps can access different backend platforms while staying integrated.

While OCPP has been really helpful for aligning different providers and systems, with hundreds of models possibly being present in one platform, they will all perform very differently. The communication between those different devices can be compared to people speaking different dialects across the UK – terminologies used can differ and cause inconsistencies and misunderstandings.

It’s one thing to say an OCPP charger is completely interoperable; however, when approximately 90 million charge points have a 0.01% failure rate on millions of charge point sessions, that will cause a lot of frustration among EV drivers. Many support calls to engineers need to be made, costing time and money, which is what the UK public charging rates are designed to mitigate.

OCPP should not just be a tick-box for CPOs; the underlying integration that is based on OCPP must also be accounted for. Those hardware and software dialects – so to speak – need to be able to communicate seamlessly.

Considering standards for CPOs

While the current public charging regulations for CPOs are necessary, they can end up being a blunt instrument to try and solve quite a complex problem.

We have seen service outage issues in the past, resulting from a lack of maintenance over the first wave of infrastructure deployment. The Government’s aim to address this problem is appreciated, because it harms consumer confidence.

However, implementing a generic ‘99% uptime’ target and enforcing contactless payments for all new public charge points above 8 kilowatts is not a nuanced enough level of regulation to help CPOs meet those standards.

Regulators should instead push more circumstance-specific performance targets and payment capabilities, as well as proportionate penalties. This should come with clearer guidelines around how best to meet these mandates.

Ensuring a reliable future

A market approach based on real-time service data and more suitable guidelines from the government is necessary to keep charge points across the UK operational and EV adoption attractive to end-users. Reliability pitfalls should be addressed as soon as possible to mitigate the risk of stalling the UK’s transport decarbonisation efforts.

By making use of up-to-date predictive maintenance and diagnostic insights and making sure providers with different terminologies can connect seamlessly, CPOs can be empowered to maintain the value provided to drivers and help the country meet its ambitious net-zero targets.

Tom Stebbing is partnerships and business development director at Monta