Why you usually need fewer chargers than vehicles
One charger per vehicle is intuitive and usually wrong. When vehicles rest for hours, several can share a charger by taking turns.
Last updated 15 August 2026
The natural assumption is one charger per vehicle. It’s intuitive, it feels safe — and it usually means buying more chargers, and more grid capacity, than you need.
Sharing works when vehicles rest
If vehicles sit parked for many hours overnight, they don’t all need charging at the same time. Several can share a charger by taking turns: one charges to full, then the smart-charging system moves power to the next. Because the dwell window is long, there’s time to cycle through a group of vehicles and still have every one ready by morning.
The saving is double
Fewer chargers means a smaller hardware bill — and a smaller grid demand, because you’re not powering a charger for every vehicle at once. That’s often the difference between fitting inside your existing connection and paying for reinforcement. It’s one of the clearest examples of how duty-cycle thinking saves money.
When you do need closer to one-to-one
Sharing depends on downtime. If vehicles have short dwell or run double shifts, there’s less time to take turns, and you move closer to one charger per vehicle — or to faster chargers. The ratio isn’t fixed; it falls out of how your fleet actually operates.
The honest way to size it is to model the real schedule rather than default to one-to-one. Run your charger plan through the Grid Capacity Estimator to see how sharing changes both the count and the connection you need.