The Gap Is Real
Global EV sales crossed 20 million units in 2025. Charging infrastructure, by most measures, hasn't kept pace. The ratio of EVs to public charging points varies wildly by region — some markets are well-served, others are significantly underbuilt.
The problem isn't purely one of quantity. It's reliability. A charger that's offline 30% of the time isn't really part of the network. Studies from the US and Europe consistently show that 10–25% of public chargers are out of service at any given time, for reasons ranging from network connectivity issues to payment system failures to firmware bugs.
That last one is something we can actually fix.
The Software Layer
Modern EV chargers are sophisticated networked devices. They run Linux (or FreeRTOS on simpler hardware), speak multiple protocols, handle payment processing, manage thermal conditions, and communicate with cloud backends. The software stack is substantial.
And yet the tooling available to firmware developers has lagged behind. The charger space has historically been dominated by hardware companies who bolted on software as an afterthought. The result is fragmented, often buggy firmware that causes exactly the reliability problems the industry is trying to solve.
This is changing. A new generation of companies is building EV charging products with software-first mindsets. They're hiring engineers with backgrounds in embedded Linux, distributed systems, and networking — not just power electronics. They're writing tests, running CI pipelines, and treating the software as a first-class deliverable.
Protocol Fragmentation Is (Mostly) Solved
A few years ago, interoperability was a real problem. Different CSMS vendors implemented OCPP differently; chargers certified against one backend wouldn't always work cleanly with another.
OCPP 1.6 with the JSON binding (OCPP-J) has become the de facto baseline. If you support OCPP 1.6-J correctly, you will work with the vast majority of CSMS deployments in the field. OCPP 2.0.1 is gaining traction for new deployments, especially those requiring better smart charging, ISO 15118 (Plug&Charge), and improved security — but 1.6 isn't going away anytime soon.
What Developers Are Building
The most interesting work happening right now is in:
Smart charging and load management: Dynamically adjusting charge rates based on grid conditions, local load, and utility pricing signals. This requires tight integration between the CSMS, the charger, and sometimes the building energy management system.
Plug&Charge (ISO 15118): Automatic authentication via the vehicle's certificate. No app, no RFID card. The vehicle and charger negotiate directly. Implementation is complex but the user experience payoff is significant.
Bidirectional charging (V2G/V2H): Using the vehicle battery as grid storage or home backup. Requires hardware support and significant protocol extensions beyond standard OCPP.
Reliability tooling: Monitoring, diagnostics, and remote firmware update systems. As operators scale to thousands of chargers, manual intervention becomes impractical.
The Developer Opportunity
If you're a developer interested in infrastructure that matters, EV charging is one of the more interesting spaces right now. The problems are real, the scale is growing, and the software quality bar is — honestly — not that high in many incumbent products. There's room to do meaningfully better work.
We're building tools to help developers in this space move faster and ship more reliable firmware. OCPP Tester is the first. There's more to come.