EV charging equipment is being installed at a pace the electrical trades have never seen before. Much of it is going into buildings that were never designed for continuous high-amperage loads: 1970s apartment garages, small commercial parking structures, single-family homes with 100-amp services. When something fails, whether it is a melted connector, a damaged vehicle, a panel fire, or a service outage, the claim usually lands on the desk of an adjuster or attorney who has to answer one question: was this the product, the installation, the building's electrical system, or the way the equipment was used?
Those are four very different answers with four very different responsible parties. Sorting them out is engineering work, and it starts with understanding where these installations commonly go wrong.
Continuous load is the core issue
An EV charger is unlike almost any other residential or commercial load. A Level 2 charger commonly draws 32 to 80 amps continuously, depending on the installation, for eight hours or more, night after night. The National Electrical Code treats EV charging as a continuous load, which requires conductors and overcurrent protection sized at 125 percent of the charger's rating. Installers who treat a charger like an ordinary appliance circuit, sizing to the nameplate rather than the continuous load requirement, leave a thermal margin problem built into the wall.
The failure that follows is rarely dramatic at first. It is heat cycling: terminations expanding and contracting every night, connections gradually loosening, insulation slowly degrading. By the time there is visible damage, the defect may be months or years old. Establishing that timeline matters enormously for coverage and liability questions.
The terminations are where the evidence concentrates
In the EV charging failures I have evaluated and in the failure patterns reported across the industry, the weak point is often not the charger's internal electronics or the wire itself, but the connection points: the breaker lugs, the charger's field wiring terminals, the receptacle if the unit is plug-connected. A termination that was under-torqued at installation, or that was fine for an intermittent load but not for a continuous one, becomes a resistive heating element. The evidence of that failure mode, including localized melting, oxidation patterns, and thermal damage concentrated at a connection point, tells a different story than a product defect inside the unit.
Plug-connected chargers deserve particular attention. A 14-50 receptacle rated for a range that runs an hour a day is now serving a load that runs all night. Several receptacle product lines have had well-documented problems in EV service, and the question of whether the receptacle, the charger, or the installation is responsible has been litigated repeatedly.
Installation and permitting gaps
A meaningful share of EV charger installations are performed without permits, without load calculations, and sometimes without a licensed electrician. When a loss occurs, the permit history is one of the first things worth pulling. An unpermitted installation does not automatically establish causation, but it changes the negligence analysis, opens questions about whether the panel had capacity for the added load, and often correlates with the physical defects found during inspection.
Load capacity is the related issue. Adding a 48-amp continuous load to a service that was already near capacity can stress equipment far upstream of the charger itself. A failure at the service panel or the utility connection may still trace back to the charging installation.
The product defect question
Genuine product defects do occur: contactor failures, ground fault monitoring circuits that fail to trip, firmware conditions that allow charging outside safe parameters, thermal management failures inside the unit. Distinguishing a product defect from an installation defect requires examining the physical evidence before it is altered, reviewing the unit's fault logs where available, and understanding what the equipment was designed and listed to do. Many modern chargers record charging sessions, fault events, and temperatures. That data can be decisive, and it can also be lost if the unit is powered down, discarded, or returned to the manufacturer without a preservation protocol.
What this means for a claim
Three practical points for anyone handling an EV charging loss. First, preserve the entire circuit, not just the charger: the breaker, the conductors, the terminations, and the receptacle carry as much evidence as the unit itself. Second, get the data early, since charger logs, the vehicle's charging records, and utility interval data can establish what was happening electrically at the time of the loss. Third, involve an electrical engineer before anyone starts assigning blame between the manufacturer, the installer, and the property owner, because the physical evidence usually points somewhere specific, and it does not always point where the parties expect.
EV charging claims are only going to grow. The infrastructure is expanding faster than the installation workforce's familiarity with it, and the equipment is being attached to aging electrical systems every day. The claims that resolve cleanly are the ones where the electrical evidence was preserved and evaluated early.