Enlarge (credit: ChargePoint)

By now, most of us are aware of the poor state of reliability when it comes to charging electric vehicles in public. In fact, it’s safe to say that the superior charging experience within Tesla’s walled Supercharger garden has been the prime consideration for other automakers to buy into what’s now called the North American Charging Standard, despite little reason to believe that third-party charging networks will be any more reliable simply because they change plugs. Happily, the federal government has enacted new uptime requirements to qualify for the $5 billion set aside for high-speed charging networks as part of the New Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program.

To help it get there, EV charging network ChargePoint has opened a new Network Operations Center to monitor its network of more than 243,000 charging ports in North America and Europe.

It says that once the system is fully implemented, the company plans to get to nearly 100 percent uptime, up from what it says is 96 percent today. (ChargePoint says that in the absence of a standard measure of uptime, it uses “the portion of time each individual charging port can dispense energy, as a driver pulling in for a charge would expect, not averaged across a bank of charging stations at a single address.”