Techniche announced the results of a study it conducted that examined the reasons why many public EV chargers break down. Data from the study revealed that 30% of all charger breakdowns require an engineer visit to fix them.

The study, which analyzed data from 5,000 EV chargers across Techniche’s European customer sites in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany and Spain over the last year, found that problems with the power supply were the primary reason, responsible for 24% of engineer callouts.

Payment terminals (20%), slow charging or charging failures (20%) and hardware failures (18%), each generated the next highest number of callouts, while communications failures caused 13% of engineer visits.

David Cornish, head of product at Techniche, said: “Analysis of our data shows that 70% of EV charger breakdowns can be solved remotely, but the remaining 30% require an on-site engineer to get them up-and-running again. It’s this 30% which causes the biggest headache for operators, resulting in slow repairs, unwanted downtime and a bad experience for drivers. Better confidence in the charging process can be gained by automating resets and the maintenance process to make faulty chargers available for drivers as quickly as possible.”

“The findings indicate there is much work to be done on improving the grid infrastructure with power issues being the single largest reason for callouts,” Cornish continued. “This could be further compounded during the roll-out of chargers to more remote or rural locations, or the installation of power-hungry rapid chargers in urban areas, which present a challenge for power delivery.”

Read “How to Protect Your EV Charging Station From Vandals” from the April issue of NACS Magazine.