Tesla Is Self-Sabotaging Supercharger Reputation by Using Cheap Tricks To Report Uptime

The Supercharger network is arguably Tesla's crown jewel and an important reason why people choose a Tesla electric vehicle. Earlier reliability reports indicated that the Supercharger network offers one of the best experiences in the industry, thanks to an almost perfect uptime rate.

However, the 2023 Impact Report reveals that Tesla used a deceptive method to assess uptime, casting doubts about its honesty.

Tesla advertises its Supercharger network with the line "Chargers that just work," with an uptime rate of 99.97% in 2023. If this reminds me of the unanimous votes in totalitarian countries, which rarely reflect reality, it is because Tesla uses some shady method to assess the uptime.

The way Tesla presents it casts a shadow on the report and makes people question its accuracy. According to a slide in the 2023 Impact Report, the uptime of Superchargers sites reflects "the average percentage of sites globally that had at least 50% of their daily capacity functional for the year. "

That's a very low bar if you ask me, and confusing as hell. According to this metric, a whole Supercharger site can be down every day for 11 hours and still counts as 100% uptime. Or half the stalls at a station could be down the whole year, and it gets the same result. Even if the Superchargers have the best uptime rates, you wouldn't know if a single stall in the network had a 50% uptime or 100%. This is a rather strange definition of uptime.

Moreover, it is difficult to compare these numbers with those of other companies if they don't use the same metric. Again, I'm sure Tesla Superchargers are the golden standard, with better uptime than every other charging network in the world. However, the way Tesla presents this information doesn't do it justice.