EVSTAR Part 1: Who Carries the Risk When Chargers Fail?

EV chargers fail. That part isn't up for debate. The real question is who pays when they do, and most of the industry still isn't answering it when the deal is being made. In Part 1 of a two-part series, Jason Cortes sits down with Hubert Kim, Vice President of Business Development at EVSTAR, a provider of insurance-backed extended warranty programs for EV charging infrastructure. Hubert spent nearly a decade at Asurion underwriting warranties on consumer electronics, then led sales at SK Signet. There he watched one charger on the New York State Thruway go up and down for six months: remote diagnostics, four or five truck rolls, a firmware engineer flown in from Korea, and more than $20,000 spent before it was fixed. That charger shaped EVSTAR's thesis. Plenty of companies can put a technician in front of a broken charger. What the market is missing is someone to underwrite the cost of the fix. As utilization climbs, power modules cycle harder, failures rise, and the cost of keeping a site online gets harder to forecast. OEM warranties typically cover parts for two years but not the labor, the travel, or the triage that happens before anyone rolls a truck. And when a manufacturer exits the market, its warranty can go with it. Hubert's argument: warranty belongs in the procurement and financing conversation, not after the hardware is already in the ground. In this conversation: • The $20,000 charger, and what one bad unit taught Hubert about life cycle cost • Applying the consumer extended-warranty model to $20K–$100K+ charging assets • Deployment-first to utilization-first, and why higher utilization means more failures • NEVI's 97% uptime requirement and what it asks of operators • Why warranty is a finance and risk management question, not just a CapEx line item • A $3,000 cross-country trip for a two-hour fix: the labor gap in OEM warranties • OEM self-insurance, and why it gets harder to sustain at scale • What happens to your warranty when a manufacturer leaves the market • Who fixes vs. who pays: how field service partners fit into an underwritten warranty • Financing, funding, and proof: the three forces pushing warranty into procurement • Revenue reimbursement when service SLAs aren't met • Two questions to answer before the RFP: what's covered, and who's backing it • Accidental damage vs. vandalism: where coverage starts and stops • Why self-insuring is rarely as cheap as buyers expect Buying the charger is one decision. Deciding who carries its life cycle risk is another. Part 2 moves from strategy to execution: what it takes for coverage to actually convert to uptime.