Why Broken EV Chargers Stay Broken

Take a walk around almost any property with EV charging and ask how long the offline station has been dead. Apartments, offices, student housing, hotels. The answer is rarely days. It's often months.

The easy explanation is that someone dropped the ball. That's almost never what happened.

The real reason is structural, and it is fixable. Fixing it was nobody's job.

Kicking the can down the road

The onsite team notices the charger is down. They don't have the parts, the training, or the authority to fix it, so they reach out to the vendor.

That vendor sold the hardware two years ago. Their priority is not your property.

The property manager has a roof leak, a turnover list, and a budget review this week. A charger that a handful of drivers use does not crack the top of that list.

The owner doesn't know it is down at all. Nobody told them, because nobody owns telling them.

So the unit sits. The station is still dead.

What it actually costs

Drivers notice dead stations long before owners do. A resident, employee, or guest who chose your property partly because it had charging now plans around a station that doesn't work. Some folks might complain about it publicly.

Prospects tour the property, see the charger, and ask whether it works. Your leasing agent or front desk has to answer that honestly.

And a dead station is worse than no station. No EV charging is a gap. A broken charger is a promise the property made and didn't keep. That station sits in the parking area, quietly screaming that nobody cares.

The vendor model problem

Most EV charging is sold the way hardware has always been sold. A company quotes the equipment, installs it, invoices you, and moves on. The relationship ends at commissioning.

That scenario works for a water heater. It doesn't work for a networked device that takes payments, talks to an app, and gets used by people who will tell others about the experience.

When the seller has no ongoing stake in whether the station works next year, responsibility for uptime lands on whoever is standing closest. Often that's a property team that never signed up for it.

What a different arrangement looks like

For qualifying properties, REVS does not hand over hardware and disappear. Our agreements run for years, not until the invoice clears.

Station monitoring is ours, not something an onsite team checks manually. When a unit reports a fault, we see it.

Warranty claims are ours to chase. Nobody at your property waits on hold with a manufacturer.

Driver support is ours. When someone can't start a session at 9pm, they call us.

You hear about a problem from us, not from a review.

We hold a stake in these stations. On many properties that stake is financial. Our name is attached to the performance of the EV charging on every property we work with. A broken station at your property is a broken station with our reputation on it. That is the difference between a vendor and a partner, and it is why the problem gets solved.

If it's been on your list for a year...

Adding charging isn't the hard part. Keeping it working is. Whether you are evaluating EV charging for the first time or you already have stations that haven't worked in a while, there is one question worth asking any provider.

When this breaks, whose job is it?

Ask them to point to the sentence in the agreement that says so.

If you are not sure who is responsible for the stations at your property today, we can help you find out. Contact REVS and we will walk through your setup with you.