As electric vehicle fleets grow, the conversation is shifting away from charging speed and towards something far more important for business operations: charging reliability.
For Fleet Managers, a charger that is unavailable when vehicles need to be dispatched can quickly become a costly operational problem. According to Henry He, CEO APAC at Autel, charger uptime is emerging as one of the most important performance measures for fleet charging infrastructure.
Speaking to Fleet EV News following the Autel EV Charging Innovation Seminar 2026 in Sydney, Henry said reliability is now driving the next generation of charging technology.
“This is a very critical data called charging uptime,” Henry said.
“If you want to be eligible for some funding in U.S. and Europe, the government actually requires your infrastructure to have exceed a certain availability uptime.”
Uptime matters more than peak charging speed
While much of the EV industry focuses on delivering higher charging speeds, He believes fleet operators should place greater emphasis on infrastructure that is consistently available.
“If you have any issue, you have to respond timely to rectify it to make sure that charging infrastructure maybe you have 98 or sometimes 99% uptime,” Henry explained.
“They don’t care what happened, but you just have to take care of it, no matter hardware, software or whatever.”
For fleets, that reliability translates directly into vehicle availability. A charger that is offline can disrupt delivery schedules, maintenance planning and driver productivity, regardless of how quickly it charges when operational.
Modular designing
Autel’s latest charging systems have been engineered with modular architecture rather than traditional fixed designs, allowing components to be replaced quickly without taking an entire charging station offline.
He said modularity is fundamental to improving operational performance.
“For the second generation it’s about modular design,” he said. “It can help us to improve after sales and support efficiency. It can help to improve the reliabilities, so you can improve the charging uptime.”
Instead of replacing an entire charger when a component fails, modular systems allow individual power modules or components to be serviced independently, reducing repair times and minimising disruption.
Fleet operations cannot afford downtime
For commercial fleets, reliability extends beyond maintenance convenience. It becomes a business continuity issue.
Some organisations operate vehicles around the clock and cannot afford charging infrastructure failures that leave assets unavailable.
“Some fleet customers are very operation intense,” said Henry. “They want to have minimised downtime and make sure our infrastructure has almost zero downtime.”
To address those requirements, Autel has incorporated redundancy into its charging hardware.
“That’s why we design products like the liquid-cooled chargers to make sure we have a one-to-one backup even inside of the hardware.”
“In case a certain portion of hardware fails, there is still a backup to make sure the infrastructure is still up and running and it doesn’t impact the operation.”
Reliability is becoming a procurement decision
The focus on uptime represents a significant shift in how Fleet Managers should evaluate charging infrastructure.
Historically, purchasing decisions have often centred on maximum charging power or purchase price. However, Henry believes reliability, serviceability and operational resilience should now be considered equally important, which contributes to a lower life cycle cost per kWh electricity delivered.
Modern charging infrastructure also integrates software monitoring, remote diagnostics and predictive maintenance, enabling issues to be identified before they result in charger failures.
The result is a charging ecosystem designed to keep vehicles moving rather than simply delivering electricity.
The next fleet metric
Fleet Managers already measure vehicle availability, maintenance compliance and utilisation rates. As electrification accelerates, charger availability is likely to join that list of critical operational metrics.
A charger that delivers 350kW is of little value if it is offline when the morning shift arrives. As Henry explained, successful charging infrastructure is no longer defined by how fast it can charge a vehicle, but by how reliably it supports fleet operations every day.
For organisations investing in electric vehicles, charging reliability may soon become the newest and most important fleet KPI.
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