An EV charging agreement is where assumptions quietly become obligations. Everyone is agreeable during the sales process, and the gaps only surface the first time something goes wrong and two companies have different ideas about whose job it was.
The questions below are the operational ones, the sort that determine how your site actually runs. They aren’t a substitute for having your own legal and procurement people review the document, and you should do that. But those reviewers can only check what’s written down, so it helps to know which answers belong in there before it reaches them.
How Do You Define Uptime, and How Do You Measure It?
Start here, because uptime is the number everyone quotes and almost nobody defines it the same way.
The EV charging data firm Paren spelled out the problem in May 2026: a port can be shown as up and still fail to start a session, appearing available in a dashboard while sitting broken in the field. Paren’s broader argument is that reliability at scale is an operational capability rather than just a hardware question, and that a unit needing repeated retries is degrading the experience even when sessions eventually succeed.
So ask what the figure counts. Does it measure whether equipment reported itself available, or whether drivers actually completed sessions? Ask too whether hardware and software are measured separately, because they’re different systems and a single blended number can hide a weakness in either.
When Something Breaks, Who Owns Getting It Fixed?
Charging sites usually involve more than one company. Hardware from one, software from another, installation from a third, field service from a fourth. Each may be perfectly competent and the site can still sit broken while they sort out whose issue it is.
Ask who owns resolution from the first report to the unit working again, in one sentence, naming one party. If the answer requires a diagram, you’ve learned something useful.
Related: How to Plan Charging Access for a Growing Workplace
Which Downtime Is Yours and Which Is Mine?
This distinction gets skipped and then argued about later. Writing in Government Fleet in August 2026, executive editor Nichole Osinski covered service-based charging and vehicle agreements, and two of the clarifying questions raised there apply to any charging deal: how the agreement defines availability, and which causes of downtime sit with the provider versus the organization operating the site.
A unit that fails on its own is clearly the provider’s. A unit a truck backed into is clearly yours. Plenty of real situations sit between those, so it’s worth agreeing where the line falls while everyone is still being reasonable.
What’s Actually in Scope?
The same article makes the point that scope of support is whatever the contract says it is, no more. That’s worth taking literally.
Ask what’s covered as part of the arrangement and what would be handled separately: monitoring, preventive maintenance, software updates, parts, labor, and site visits. You don’t need figures to get value from this question. You need a clear list, because anything not on it is yours by default.
Who Can See the Data, and Can You Take It With You?
Your charging data tells you how your site is performing and when to add capacity, so it matters who can reach it and what happens to it later.
Ask what your team can see directly rather than having to request, whether you can export it, and whether it stays available to you if the relationship ends. Good EV charging management software should make this an easy question to answer.
Related: What to Look for in an EV Charging Partner
What Happens When the Site Grows?
Few sites stay the size they start. Ask how adding units later works under the agreement, whether the arrangement covers equipment you add in a second phase, and whether anything about the terms changes when you expand.
This is also the moment to ask what groundwork during the initial commercial EV charging installation would make a later phase simpler, so the answer is in the plan rather than in a change order.
What Does This Look Like in Year Five?
Chargers last a long time. Ask what support covers as the equipment ages, how software continues to be maintained, and what happens to your stations if the provider’s plans change.
It’s an awkward thing to raise with someone trying to win your business, which is precisely why it’s worth raising. Equipment that outlives its support arrangement becomes your problem, not theirs.
Who Picks Up the Phone, and When?
Finally, the practical one. Ask who your team contacts, during which hours, and what happens to a fault reported at 10 p.m. on a Sunday rather than on a Tuesday morning.
At OpConnect, we back our equipment with 24/7 support and monitoring, and because we design, install, support, and maintain what we put in, there’s one party accountable rather than a chain of them. Our hardware is built in Portland, Oregon.
On the first question above, our answer is two numbers rather than one, which we think is the honest way to report it. Our chargers run at 98% hardware uptime, and the software platform behind them at 99.95% server uptime.
Related: Why Charger Reliability Matters More Than Anything Else
Get the Answers in Writing, Then Get It Reviewed
None of these questions are difficult for a provider who has thought about them. That’s part of what makes them useful, because the quality of the answers tells you a lot before any money changes hands.
Collect the answers, make sure the ones that matter end up in the document rather than in an email thread, and let your own legal and procurement teams do the review. We’re not the right party to advise you on the contract itself, and no provider is.
If you’re evaluating EV charging for businesses or putting together EV fleet charging at a new site and want straight answers to the questions above, our team at OpConnect is glad to go through them with you. No pressure, just a clear conversation if it helps.
Sources & Further Reading:
- Paren — What EV Charging Reliability Actually Means, and How to Measure It (May 2026): https://www.paren.app/blog/what-ev-charging-reliability-actually-means—-and-how-to-measure-it
- Government Fleet — Moving Government Fleets Beyond the Vehicle Purchase: EV as a Service (August 2026): https://www.government-fleet.com/articles/moving-government-fleets-beyond-the-vehicle-purchase-ev-as-a-service