Like any complex system, vehicle availability is the product of the availability of its components. For internal combustion engine (ICE) buses, the availability/reliability of the vehicle itself is the driving factor; the rest of the “components” (fuel pumps, drivers, etc.) are essentially 100% available. For electric vehicles, the availability/reliability of the charger also becomes relevant. Back to our 100-vehicle example, if the vehicle availability is 95%, 105 vehicles would need to be purchased to have 100 vehicles on the road. If the availability of the charger is also 95%, then the total system availability is 95% x 95%, which is 90.25%. That increases the number of vehicles required for a 100 operational vehicles to 111 vehicles – an increase of six vehicles, which increases the fleet TCO by 6% (at a minimum), irrespective of the cost of the charger itself. And unfortunately, many chargers being used for medium- and heavy-duty (M/HD) electric vehicle fleets have availability that is well below 95%. When your vehicles costs $1M or more apiece, an increase in reliability by 1% for a 100-vehicle fleet reduces the acquisition cost portion of TCO by $1M, or about $10K per charger (assuming a 1:1 ratio of chargers to vehicles). This is why increasing the reliability of EV chargers for M/HD fleets is so important!Our market-leading bi-directional EV charging systems (which are designed from the start for the needs of fleet operators) are designed and built in the USA. BorgWarner also excels in the design of high-power smart inverters for next-generation renewable energy and energy storage deployments. Our expertise in energy management system (EMS) software is also embedded in our VectorStat EMS controller and software which is embedded in our EV charging systems and smart inverters. We have built over a thousand V2G-capable high-power, high-reliability chargers and bi-directional smart inverters for a variety of different sizes and classes of EVs.