We Logged 341 EV Charging Sessions. 4 in 10 Had Problems.

N Patkai — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:20:27 +0000

We built EVcourse, an app that helps drivers troubleshoot EV charging problems. One feature lets drivers log how each public charging session went: good, okay, or bad.

Between February and March 2026, 72 drivers logged 341 sessions across Finland, Germany, and the UK. This is what we found.

The headline number

39% of public charging sessions had some kind of problem.

60.7% rated good (207 sessions)
24.6% rated okay (84 sessions)
14.7% rated bad (50 sessions)

The 7 most common problems

Drivers who rated a session okay or bad picked up to two reasons. Here's how often each came up:

#	Problem	% of all reasons
1	Charging too slow	20.0%
2	Charger not working	17.8%
3	Payment failed	13.0%
4	No available charger	9.7%
5	Session stopped unexpectedly	8.1%
6	Cost higher than expected	7.0%
7	Confusing interface	5.9%

Also reported: wrong connector (4.9%), app issue (4.3%), long queue (3.2%), heavy cable (2.2%), felt unsafe (1.6%), bad weather (1.1%).

What surprised us

Slow charging was #1, not broken chargers. Most drivers expected faster speeds than they got. This is often explainable (battery
temperature, state of charge above 80%, shared power between stalls), but charger screens rarely explain why.

Payment failures at 13%. In 2026. Many of these were app authentication issues, not card declines.

"Confusing interface" at 5.9%. The charger worked, the driver just couldn't figure out what the screen was telling them.

Caveats

341 sessions from 72 drivers is a small sample. We're not pretending this is definitive European research. Organizations like Transport & Environment and the EU Alternative Fuels Observatory track charging infrastructure at much larger scale.

But this is real data from real sessions, not a survey asking people to remember. Drivers logged each session right after it happened.

As more drivers use the app, this dataset grows. We plan to update the numbers regularly, if you're interested?

The full report

The complete report is on our site:

EVcourse EV Charging Reliability Report

Why we're sharing this

Telematics systems tell fleet managers the car charged from 20% to 80%. They don't say the driver spent 10 minutes figuring out the
payment screen, or that the first charger was broken.

We think this human data layer is missing from the EV charging conversation. If you have any questions, email us at nina@evcourse.com

Built by EV industry engineers in Finland. EVcourse is free to try on iOS. We drive EVs year-round, including through freezing winters with no home charging.