Electric vehicle (EV) charger reliability could worsen if challenges around maintenance aren’t tackled, slowing the adoption of electric cars as concerns about availably of chargers worsen.

This is according to Techniche’s head of product David Cornish, speaking in the Current± Briefings: Maintaining EV charging confidence through maintenance webinar.

Currently, there are a relatively small number of charge points in Britain, but as the ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) nears, this is going to have to grow significantly. The minimum EV chargers being targeted in the UK is 300,000 by 2030, and around Europe it’s even greater, with 6.8 million being eyed across Europe.

Already challenges around charge point availability are emerging, with one example provided by Techniche highlighting a hub that saw a queue of over 40 cars forming and some waiting over six hours to charge over the Christmas period.

Whilst the number of charge points needs to increase, the availability of those already installed will also need to improve. The tools used to manage maintenance of EV charge points are often immature, and it’s usually carried out manually, allowing inaccuracies to creep in and taking a significant amount of time to inform all the relevant parties needed to begin to fix the asset, for example.

At the moment, the community of EV drivers is fairly small, but very engaged and digitally savvy. This means that if a network operator does fall foul to having outages taking a significant amount of time to fix, it can hamper a company’s reputation.

But here automation can really start to come into its own, as Karl Jacoby, CEO of Techniche noted.

“EV chargers are essentially IoT assets on steroids, generating a range of error codes connected to the cloud,” he said in Thursday’s session. “We envision a future were the assets can generate their own repair tasks, both predictive and reactive, to both reduce cost and time to repair.”

Going forwards in order to minimise some of the concerns around EV adoption, ensuring that the charging network is dependable will be essential.

“Maintaining EV charging confidence is not enough,” said Jacoby, “we believe it’s all about improving confidence, and that means improving reliability.”

Find out more about maintaining EV charging confidence through maintenance by watching the full webinar below: