⚡ TL;DR – What 252 UK EV charging professionals told us about firmware reliability
We surveyed 252 UK EV charging professionals on firmware reliability.
Nearly 7 in 10 said their firmware updates caused a noticeable issue in the past year.
57% said firmware had delayed a certification or commercial launch, and 59% named stronger cybersecurity as their top priority for the next three to five years.
Full findings and a six-point firmware readiness framework are in the free report below.
A firmware update is supposed to make a charger better. Often enough, it is the thing that takes it offline.
A charger is judged in the moment someone tries to use it. Does the session start? Can the driver get back on the road?
Firmware decides the answer, and when it fails, a driver cannot start a session, an installer has to go back out to site, and a support team spends the next hour chasing a fault nobody can quite reproduce.
That pattern is what a new Versinetic report, When Charging Updates Go Wrong, set out to measure.
We surveyed 252 people working across EV charger design, operations, installation, maintenance, technical support and software in the UK, and asked them what actually happens when firmware updates go out into the field.
“A firmware update caused a subset of DC fast chargers to repeatedly reboot during active charging sessions,
leaving vehicles stranded mid charge and requiring a coordinated rollback across several sites.
We contained it within hours, but it highlighted gaps in our firmware validation process.”
Survey respondent, EV charging installation and maintenance provider
Responses like that were typical across the sample.
Firmware updates cause more problems than most teams expect
69% said at least 5% of their firmware updates caused a noticeable issue in the past year, whether that was downtime, a failed session, a site visit or a rollback.
Almost one in five said it happened on more than a fifth of updates.
57% said firmware issues had delayed at least one certification or commercial launch in the past two years.
A bad release does not stay contained to the engineering team that shipped it. It shows up as a support call, a missed deadline, and a driver who stops trusting the network.
On-site updates still dominate deployment
Two-thirds (66%) still rely on manual, on-site updates to get firmware onto chargers in the field, compared with 46% using OTA through a central system.
Most estates run some mix of the two, alongside third-party contractors, and that mix is part of the problem: every extra update path adds hardware variants, access routes and people into a process that is hard to standardise.
What are UK charging teams prioritising next?
59% named stronger cybersecurity and signed firmware as a top priority for the next three to five years, ahead of better diagnostics (47%) and faster protocol integration (46%).
64% are at least moderately concerned about firmware security today, and weak or missing update signing is the single sharpest worry, with 47% very or extremely concerned.
If update integrity is where your own risk sits, our cloud security assessment tool is a quick way to check where your estate stands.
The gap between confidence and readiness
More than half of respondents (54%) rate their own firmware readiness as ahead of peers.
Only 11% say they are well ahead, so most of the teams in this study are managing firmware competently without it being a genuine advantage over their peers.
Get the full report
The numbers above are a fraction of what's in the report. The full study covers testing and rollout maturity, who actually owns firmware inside these organisations, the specific barriers holding teams back, and a six-point firmware readiness framework you can run against your next release. Getting this right buys fewer emergency rollbacks, better uptime, and the confidence to scale a charging estate without every release being a gamble.
