Nobody buys an EV charger. They buy the next ten years

I have spent a good part of my working life inside the systems of companies that put things on roofs, in depots and on the sides of buildings, and I can tell you exactly when most of them lose money. It arrives on a Tuesday afternoon about eighteen months after the install, when a fleet manager rings to say three chargers in the depot are dead, and nobody in the office can find out who is responsible for them, what they were contracted to deliver, or whether the site was ever making a dollar.

That Tuesday is about to come around a lot more often. Battery electric vehicles went from 8.4 per cent of new car sales in January to 23.4 per cent over the past six months, more than a fifth of the 108,000 new cars sold in July ran on a battery, and researchers at UTS and the University of Queensland are already warning that the charging network may struggle to keep up. Chargers are going in faster than ever, and most of the businesses installing them still run on systems designed to deliver a project and send the invoice.

The boom hides a simple fact: nobody buys a charger. A fleet manager who signs for depot charging is buying ten years of vehicles charged on time for every shift at a cost tracked to the kilowatt-hour, and the charger is just the equipment that delivers it. The money in that contract lives in the years after commissioning, and the operator who makes that money is the one whose records of the asset keep living after the project file is closed. Right now that is a small minority of the sector.

Uptime is where the pain shows first. The same UTS and UQ researchers cite a San Francisco study in which only 73 per cent of public chargers worked when tested, against the 95 to 98 per cent the operators claimed, and chargers built with Australian taxpayer money have to meet a 98 per cent uptime standard. Getting to 98 means the charger reports its own fault, the system checks it against the service history and the technician roster, and a job is booked and the customer told before the outage is old enough to have a name. Waiting for a driver to report it is how operators end up at 73.

The money is the second reason, and the bigger one. Charging-as-a-service contracts, fleet agreements priced to the kilowatt-hour and financed hardware all pay on how the asset performs over years, and the lenders and acquirers now circling the sector price a charging business the same way, as a portfolio of assets, each with a history. A charger with no history is worth less than a charger with a record, however good the hardware was on the day it went in.

The third point is that some operators worked this out early, and JET Charge, a business we have worked alongside, is the example I would point to. It has installed more than 30,000 chargers across Australia and New Zealand, and its charging-as-a-service offer for fleets, backed by more than $12 million from ARENA, was described by the federal government as Australia's largest EV fleet charging project. In 2023 it went to market for a platform that would put finance, stock, assets and customers in one place before the volume arrived, and it runs that platform itself today. The side effect is that its data is ready for the AI tools everyone in the sector now wants, which is more than Gartner expects of most organisations, given its forecast that 60 per cent of AI projects without AI-ready data will be abandoned through 2026.

The obvious objection is that hardware matters more, and that a dud charger is a dud charger whatever your systems say. Yes, and no. Better hardware fails less often, but every charger fails eventually, and the difference between a two-hour outage and a two-week one is whether anybody in the business knew about it, owned it and had a part on the shelf. The other objection is that the charger's own software already monitors uptime, and it does, in the sense that the charger knows it is down. The question is whether your finance system, your service roster and your customer record know it too, because if they do not, the fault sits in a dashboard nobody is paid to watch.

So pick a charger you commissioned in 2023 and ask five questions of your own team: who owns it, what is it contracted to do, how is it performing, what does it cost to service, and what margin is it returning. If the answers come back in a day, you are running a charging business. If they come back in a week, you are running a project business with a charging problem. If they never come back, I would fix that before you bid for the next depot, because the fleet manager who rings you on that Tuesday afternoon has already worked out which one you are.