Chargerhelp Guarantees No-excuses ev Charging Uptime For A Fixed Fee

EV charging reliability as a service: Q&A with ChargerHelp CEO Kameale Terry.

It’s not news to Charged readers (or anyone who makes EV road trips) that public charging has a reliability problem. But whose problem is it? Many of the entities that installed public EV chargers over the last decade (businesses, municipalities, utilities) appear not to have realized that ongoing maintenance would be required, and when stations go down, it can be difficult to get any of the players involved (hardware manufacturers, software providers, network operators) to take responsibility.

Startup ChargerHelp will take on that responsibility, and commit to keeping your EV chargers up and running—for a price. Under the company’s Reliability as a Service contract, customers pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited Operations & Maintenance (O&M) support and a guaranteed level of uptime. 

ChargerHelp’s business model is a bit like that of an insurance company or an extended warranty provider, in that ChargerHelp takes on the risk that charging stations will malfunction. However, the company does much more—it proactively maintains the charging stations to try to prevent malfunctions.

As CEO Kameale Terry explained to Charged, the issues that cause chargers to go down tend to arise at the connection points between different software systems, and typically fall outside the scope of product warranties. ChargerHelp addresses the gaps and smooths out connection points.

Through a large data set collected from field service work orders, the company has identified patterns in how software failures occur, and it uses this data to detect failures and understand station behaviors that might otherwise go unnoticed. Furthermore, ChargerHelp continuously trains its model to improve its ability to provide support, whether on-site or over the air.

Charged: Public charging reliability is a scandal, so I imagine there’s plenty of business for a company like yours. Who are your customers?

Kameale Terry: Most of our customers sit in three different verticals: utilities, fleet operators and resellers. They tend to be people that have multiple software providers, multiple hardware providers, and are coming out of warranty on the hardware.

The reliability issues often have little to do with the physical components. It’s usually a software sensor communicating with the hardware that fails, or a handshake issue. 

Charged: Do you take over the reliability guarantees that they had from the hardware providers?

Kameale Terry: Most of them don’t have reliability guarantees—actually, reliability guarantees don’t necessarily exist in the industry. That is what we are offering. 

Most folks who deploy infrastructure don’t believe that it’ll break, so a product like ours doesn’t necessarily make sense to them yet. They think, “The hardware warranty will cover the issues that I’m experiencing,” or, “The software provider will send someone out.”

They don’t understand that that’s not in their contract. Neither the software provider nor the hardware provider technically have to provide support, if they can’t confirm that it’s their problem. And most of the problems that we see sit in a gray space. Is this a communication issue? A firmware issue? An issue with the charge management system? Those are the problems that we see making up most reliability issues, and they don’t necessarily fit into anyone’s responsibility. That’s why I built the company.

I started out at EV Connect, where I was in charge of EV driver support. Often when drivers phoned in, they would describe behavior of a station that I couldn’t see in our log data. I led the deployment of EV charging infrastructure in the US, Canada and Australia, and I always saw instances of stations behaving in ways that weren’t coming through on Open Charge Point Protocol.

In 2020, I decided to leave EV Connect to help my mom with some health problems. Then I wrote a curriculum, because I had found that most of the electricians or technicians that were being sent out to repair charging stations didn’t know what OCPP was. They didn’t have an EV.

The LA Cleantech Incubator bought a license to that curriculum, started to train people, and I was trying to get folks placed. My contacts at EV Connect were like, “We don’t want to hire field service staff—we’re a software company—but if you hire them, we will hire you.” So my first contract was with EV Connect and Southern California Edison on the Parks and Schools program, and I started to deploy technicians there. But what I quickly found out was that simply having a body on site did not necessarily mean you would fix the station, because there was so much troubleshooting involved.

Then I got interested in getting data from the field and figuring out how to find patterns. Eventually that moved into Reliability as a Service and developing this product that we felt confident enough to offer at a fixed price.

Charged: So, in four years, have you seen improvement? Can we say that reliability in general is better than it was then?

Kameale Terry: I think so. When I first started this company, people would say, “Wait, stations break?” They didn’t realize it was a problem. Another issue was the lack of an agreed-upon calculation for uptime. People would claim, “I’m 99.9% up,” but everyone had their own way of calculating it. We worked with the California legislature to create a bill called the EV Charging Reliability Act, which passed last year. It established an agreed-upon formula and includes stipulations regarding down stations.

Companies can still compete on other aspects, but reliability shouldn’t be something we compete on.

Charged: I’m amazed at how many charger deployments seem to have no provision for maintenance. When they start breaking, nobody knows who’s supposed to be responsible.

Kameale Terry: I’m less amazed, mainly because this is a new technology, and people were relying on hardware warranties. What many didn’t realize is that these devices are smart assets, and integrating software into the built environment requires a completely different approach to O&M [Operations & Maintenance].

All the stations come with parts warranties, but the reliability issues often have little to do with the physical components. It’s usually a software sensor communicating with the hardware that fails, or a handshake issue. During the early deployment phase, I don’t think the industry could have predicted these challenges.

On top of that, the business models in this industry are problematic. In many cases, companies are losing money left and right. Was the business model robust enough to support a more comprehensive O&M package? I don’t think so. In the early days, I doubt customers would have been willing to pay for it.

Charged: A lot of people tell me that part of the problem is that so many deployments involve a dozen different companies—hardware, software, site owner, network operator, payment provider, maybe a utility or a municipality…

Kameale Terry: I would agree, but I don’t think this has to remain the problem. Tesla has a vertically integrated system, and invested early in field service operations. When labor is on-site, they gather unique data points to build a better system. O&M should be a part of the flywheel that improves reliability because you’re continuously learning from the field.

For the rest of the industry, the lack of vertical integration and limited emphasis on O&M means missing out on those learnings. When multiple companies are involved, everyone has different priorities. For example, if the firmware you just pushed isn’t working on my specific hardware, will you prioritize a new firmware update if I represent only 1% of your deployed assets? Probably not.

While this fragmented system is a challenge, I believe it’s a solvable one. Look at computer systems, the internet, or telecom—those industries faced significant interoperability issues, yet they figured it out. Collaboration and information sharing are key.

Charged: That’s a good point, and maybe when people say, “It’s because there’s all these different companies involved,” that’s just a cop-out, because they’re not really identifying where the problem lies.

Kameale Terry: Yeah, we have to collaborate. I’ve been advocating for a council of CEOs from network providers and hardware manufacturers to agree on a bare minimum implementation of OCPP. Right now, everyone implements it slightly differently. There are fundamental elements in the OCPP code that aren’t being implemented, and OCA [the Open Charge Alliance] doesn’t test for them today. We need to sit down and agree to share this data set and implement OCPP in a standardized manner.

The next question is: who regulates this? How do we ensure that implementations serve the best interests of the entire ecosystem? Other industries have tackled this by establishing baselines that everyone must follow for the good of the industry. Companies can still compete on other aspects, but reliability shouldn’t be something we compete on.

For example, we were part of the ChargeX Consortium, which created a standard set of error codes. OCPP includes about 30 suggested error codes, but only 10 are required. With every new firmware push, additional error codes emerge, but there’s no standardized understanding of what those error codes mean or, more importantly, what actions they require.

The Consortium wrote a white paper, but the critical question remains: who is committing to implementing these standards, and who will hold everyone accountable?

Honestly, I’m young, and I don’t have all the answers. I look to history for guidance—how have industries in competitive markets done this before? How do you take a white paper, get everyone to agree, and set a deadline for implementation?

Charged: An all-too-common story: thick reports get written, but no action gets taken. So, if I understand correctly, these common error codes have not yet been implemented.

Kameale Terry:As far as I know, it’s only a white paper today. I am not aware of anyone making commitments to the implementation of those error codes.

Charged: Tell us about your EMPWR software package.

Kameale Terry: Today, if something breaks, typically you have to pay an hourly rate. If it breaks again, you have to send someone out again. A lot of these issues are software-related, and not necessarily only for one device. Usually if I find a software problem, I’m finding it across multiple devices. But what typically happens is that you send someone on site to cycle breakers, the site starts working a little bit, and then in three months, you have to go on site to cycle the breakers again.

With the EMPWR platform, we touch stations every single day. We’ve touched over 30,000 charging stations in the last four and a half years, and we have over 19 million unique data points that we’ve gotten from the field. We intercept charge management data, and we try to paint a better picture. Why is that station getting stuck? Where is the failure? Is it the hardware? The car? The software? Are there any patterns in firmware updates? If I’m seeing an issue in California, am I also seeing an issue in New York?

All the data that we’re getting from the field is going into a central mainframe. We’re also bringing in a lot of the OCPP data, and we’re looking for patterns. The last time I solved a problem, could I have detected that problem ahead of time? That’s what EMPWR does, but the product itself is called Reliability as a Service, and that’s a fixed contract where we’re putting a bet on not having to roll a truck, and increasing uptime over the air.

Charged: In your Annual Reliability Report, you define categories for some common software issues that cause problems for drivers, including Ghost Stations (which appear online but are actually offline) Zombie Stations (which appear offline but are actually online) and Dead-End Stations (which fail to deliver a charge despite appearing operational). I encountered a Zombie Station the other day—PlugShare says it’s been down for months, but I went there and it was working. Would that be a communications problem?

Kameale Terry: It could be comms or it could have been put in a free vend mode. A free vend mode is when the software on the station is turned off and the station is able to operate as a dumb station.

Charged: Well, you may not approve, but I love dumb stations. I plug in, they work, I charge. My favorite is at a grocery store near my house—it’s been there for 10 years. It’s not connected to anything—no network, no app. It’s retro and it’s rusty, but it always works.

Kameale Terry: I think what you just said is the problem of the industry. It’s a fact that the software often doesn’t work. People just want to charge. So no, what you’re saying is true. A lot of EV drivers believe that, and it puts the onus on the industry to figure it out.

Charged: I’d like to add one to your list, and I’ll propose a name for it: a Crap App station. It’s a station that requires some special app to use, and the app doesn’t work for some drivers. You download the app and set up your password, and then it just won’t work. And having to use all these different apps anyway—that’s too complicated.

Kameale Terry: Yes, you’re totally right. I was chatting this morning with Hubject’s North American CEO Trishan Peruma. That’s what they’re working on—you just use one app for all the stations—but he said there still are certain network providers that want to own the EV driver and don’t want to do roaming, don’t want to sign on.

That goes back to my previous point that we have to figure out where we’re going to compete and where we’re going to collaborate. Electric vehicles are new, they’re stylish, people like them. The car OEMs are doing their part, and we as an ecosystem have to make sure that we’re doing our part.

Charged: How far are we from that ideal ecosystem? Are we making progress?

Kameale Terry: I think we have one year. These things that we’re chatting about—roaming, Plug & Charge, more reliable infrastructure, I think we have until the end of 2025 to save consumer trust. There’s a lot of consumers today that do not trust the infrastructure, so my goal for 2025 is to put together this coalition around error codes. My goal is to support organizations like Hubject and Chargeway, to highlight companies that are doing things to improve the driver experience and not to grab a quick dollar.

Charged: When you say we have a year, you mean that if we fail to fix the reliability problems in a year, we’re facing disaster?

Kameale Terry: I think so. I think a lot of people are looking at the administration change, and people are getting antsy about EV adoption. In 2024 we were faced with a lot of negative press around broken charging stations. If we have another year of people having poor experiences, you’ll see more charging companies go under, and it’ll be hard to see consumers, and folks who are doing fleet electrification, putting their dollar into EVs. But I think if we continue to highlight the businesses that are doing well, if we double down on reliability, it will show that it wouldn’t matter what administration is in office.

Charged: Do you have any competitors that are doing something similar to what you’re doing?

Kameale Terry: Not today. There are people that do traditional O&M, like rolling a truck, and some that say they can use AI to solve things over the air. But solving how we are solving? No. Selling an unlimited truck-roll package? No. We will roll trucks forever for this fixed cost. All my investors think I’m crazy. But we’ve been doing well so far because I think we’ve figured out how to solve this problem.

Charged: Do you get involved with commercial fleet charging as well?

Kameale Terry: Yeah, we do. We’re selling an insurance-like product, so we’re looking at the risk level of covering the uptime of particular charging stations. So, we look at our data set to price it out, and if with some projects we have enough data to say, “Oh no, that station is probably going to be down 40%, 50% of the time,” or we know that a company does not prioritize reliability, I’m not going to cover that station.

We will work with fleet operators, but there are some software and hardware makers that I can just look at and say “You’re always going to have a problem.” Because we’re like insurance, I have to be mindful of my risk, right? There is a certain makeup of assets that I can cover, but we can’t just cover everybody.

Charged: I imagine you have to carefully analyze each potential customer and get a detailed picture of their system before you sign them up.

Kameale Terry: Exactly. And we have a lot of procurement managers working with us, because we can give them a breakage rate. We worked with McKinsey with our data set, and for every hardware or software product, we can tell you what your breakage rate and your O&M costs will likely be.

Americans, we like to spend money on good products. If you can wow us, make our lives easier in an affordable way, we will give you a dollar.

Charged: So, companies that provide Charging as a Service should be natural partners for you, because you can advise them on what brands of hardware are the most reliable.

Kameale Terry: Absolutely. We work with some turnkey providers. We call them our reseller partners—they will resell our insurance product as their O&M. There are some hardware partners that we are working with as well—they add our Reliability as a Service as part of their hardware package.

What we often see with people who end up hiring us, is that they have multiple softwares, multiple hardwares, and on top of that, they may have a load management system. And load management software doesn’t always play nice with OCPP in regards to the integrations and how it understands error codes, or even how it understands the other software.

We just put out a case study with one of our depots. They have about 100 buses, and we were seeing core interoperability issues between the load management system and the multiple manufacturers. That’s hard for depots, working with multiple platforms, so we tell a lot of fleet operators, either work with a company like ours or go with one software, one hardware. Sometimes mixing multiple software and hardware products will open you up to more pain than anything else.

Charged: What do you see ahead with the new US regime? Are they going to sabotage the EV industry?

Kameale Terry: We just had the LA Auto Show. Almost 80% of those vehicles were electric. At the Super Bowl last year, all of the car commercials were electric car commercials. And I don’t think that’s because of federal incentives. I think the OEMs have bought the idea of being able to create a better experience through an electric vehicle. Do they care about the environment? Maybe not, but you can put in more technology, you can drive efficiency, you can do a lot without having an ICE.

The other thing that I pay attention to is the competitiveness of the US. I was in Mexico City recently, and half of the EVs, if not all, were from BYD. The EV market outside of the US is booming, and if we’re going to be competitive in the global space, we have to figure something out. So that’s a big indicator to me that I don’t think is connected to the federal government.

I think now it’s in the hands of the consumer. Americans, we like to spend money on good products. If you can wow us, make our lives easier in an affordable way, we will give you a dollar. So now it’s just like, “Let’s make good experiences.” I think that it’s all reliant on the EV charging experience at this point. And we need to make EVs more affordable. There’s a lot of things outside of government participation that the private sector needs to figure out for itself.