Monta, a Danish Charge Point Management Software provider, has released its 2025 Charger Performance ranking. Monta has 260,000 chargers connected to its platform, mainly in Europe, and produces a ranking based on uptime and charging success rate of those chargers.
It makes for interesting reading, not least because nine out of ten of the top-ten performing DC fast charger models are on sale and in use in Australia.
Rank Model Name Brand Score Country Charge Success Rate Availability (Uptime) 1 HYC 400 Alpitronic 96.54 Italy 95.42% 97.65% 2 HYC 200 Alpitronic 96.46 Italy 94.50% 98.43% 3 HYC 300 Alpitronic 95.16 Italy 94.83% 95.50% 4 HYC 150 Alpitronic 94.16 Italy 92.41% 95.92% 5 C-Series Kempower 93.85 Finland 91.87% 95.82% 6 MaxiCharger DC Fast Autel 93.01 China 87.85% 98.17% 7 HYC 50 Alpitronic 91.63 Italy 90.18% 93.09% 8 S-Series Kempower 91.51 Finland 89.22% 93.80% 9 espresso&charge EVTEC AG 91.03 Switzerland 90.18% 91.88% 10 Troniq Modular EVBox 91.02 France 88.53% 93.51% Source: Monta 2025 Charger Performance Ranking
Alpitronic, which has found favour with Ampol AmpCharge and BP Pulse, takes the top four slots in the performance ranking. Kempower take the fifth and seventh slots with their C and S series units that are used by Evie Networks, Exploren, RAA, and others.
Next comes Autel, who have been installed at a large number of Woolworths locations on the Chargefox network. Autel fits in at number six, a brand that has been selected for a number of Woolworths supermarket charging sites on the Chargefox network.
The Autel MaxiCharge DC Fast unit has the second-highest uptime score in the top ten, but it is let down by the lowest charging success rate in the top ten of 87.85%. Monta don’t release data beyond the top ten, but I’m sure every EV driver can point to charging hardware that performs much worse.
Even on the best-performing Alpitronic, 4.5% of charges don’t start successfully. Whilst uptime and charging success are given equal weighting in the ranking, uptime can at least be partially mitigated by increasing the number of chargepoints on a site.
Charging success cuts right to the quality of the charging experience. It impacts the brand perception of the CPO and whether a driver is likely to revisit a site.
Monta describes charging success as “The share of sessions that completed without interruption and delivered energy. We count as failures for this rate: (a) charges that failed due to hardware (by our failure classification), and (b) charges that delivered less than 1 kWh. User-related issues—authorization, payment, insufficient funds, user cancellation—are not counted as failures.”
Initiating charging at a DC fast charger is a complex orchestration involving a human, vehicle, charger, and several pieces of software. A user has to plug in and complete a series of steps with an app or a credit card reader within a short period of time, or the process will time out and have to be restarted.
Behind the scenes, after the plug is inserted, a pin has to drop to lock the plug, the car and charger have to handshake and initiate communications, Plug & Charge or Autocharge IDs need to be checked, and a loop has to be closed with the app or credit card reader to collect payment and receive the start charge instruction.
In Europe that chain may be extended by going through a roaming hub to a roaming provider’s app.
This complex orchestration is something that the Charge Point Operator needs to conduct. Selecting the right hardware is only one piece of the puzzle. Monta, of course, would like you to select their software solution, and this hardware ranking controls for the software dimension by only looking at charging hardware connected to Monta.
It is clear, though, from the wide variety of different apps available in Australia that there is a big variation in both quality and approach to initiating charging. Across the globe, wherever Autocharge or Plug & Charge are offered, these are known to dramatically increase both charging success rate and customer satisfaction.
US CPO EVgo just released their Q4 2024 financial results and trumpeted their ‘One and Done’ charging success rate rising to 96%, something that has risen in line with the adoption of their Autocharge+ feature, which now has logged 5,000,000 sessions with 300,000 customers registered.
Fastned, a European CPO with 410 locations at the time of writing, launched Autocharge on its network in 2017 and sees it as a cornerstone of its customer satisfaction strategy.
One of the great things about reporting metrics such as charging success and rankings such as Monta’s is that it drives change. CPOs should be looking hard at who is and isn’t in the top ten when they select hardware. Uptime and charging success drive operational cost and profitability.
EVgo has been focusing on uptime and charging success for several years and has just been able to announce that it has achieved positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time. Fastned, with its long-standing focus on these metrics, has achieved positive EBITDA since 2023.
Public charging is a business, and a business has to make money. Charging success and uptime are key metrics to be continuously monitoring and improving. Hardware is part of that story, but only a part.
