Public DC Fast Chargers Degrade to 69.9% Success Rate by Year Three, Despite Reporting 99% Uptime

EV drivers who rely on public DC fast charging stations (DCFC) experience a roughly 1-in-3 failure rate when attempting to charge, even though charging networks report 98.7-99% uptime metrics. New stations average an 85% charging success rate, but performance drops to 69.9% by year three. The gap exists because 'uptime' measures whether a charger is powered on and communicating with the network, not whether a driver can actually plug in, authenticate, and receive the expected charging speed. Why it matters: A 30% failure rate at three-year-old stations means drivers waste an average of 30 minutes per failed attempt finding an alternative charger, so EV owners develop 'charger anxiety' and avoid trips that depend on public fast charging, so the resale value of EVs without home charging access drops as buyers discount the unreliable public network, so charging network operators like EVgo and Blink see lower utilization and revenue per station making it harder to justify maintenance spending, so a vicious cycle emerges where undermaintained chargers drive away customers whose absence further reduces the economic case for repairs. The structural root cause is that the EV charging industry adopted 'uptime' as its primary reliability metric -- borrowed from telecom and data center industries -- which measures hardware availability but not end-to-end session success, and no federal standard requires reporting actual charging success rates, so operators can claim 99% reliability while 30% of real-world charging attempts fail due to payment system errors, cable damage, software bugs, or communication failures between the vehicle and charger.