EVSE Technical Advisory and Product Due Diligence

Product and architecture

Whether the design is coherent and documented, or functional but understood by one person. Whether the architecture supports the roadmap being sold to investors, or would need replacing to get there.

Firmware and protocol maturity

Version control, release process, update safety and rollback, security handling, and whether protocol behaviour is verified against real platforms or asserted from the specification. Firmware is where undisclosed liability most often sits, because it is the least visible to a commercial review.

Manufacturing and supply

Whether production is repeatable and documented, whether test coverage would catch a bad batch, and where the supply chain is concentrated. A product built by one contract manufacturer using one sole-sourced controller carries a risk that does not appear in the accounts.

Compliance exposure

Whether certificates cover what is actually shipped today, and whether the change history since certification has been assessed. Drift between the certified configuration and the built configuration is common and is a real liability rather than a paperwork issue.

Continuity

Who can maintain this if the current team leaves. That question determines the cost of the asset after acquisition more than any single technical finding, and it is answered by documentation quality and knowledge distribution rather than by headcount.

What the report says

Findings separated into what is broken, what is undocumented, what is concentrated risk, and what is simply immature for the stage. Each with an engineering view of remediation effort, so the commercial side can price it rather than discount for uncertainty.

What we will tell you not to do

Advisory work is worth paying for mainly when it prevents something. These are the recommendations we give most often, and each of them comes from having watched the alternative.

• Do not accept an OCPP version as evidence of integration. A customer of ours bought a charger sold as OCPP that was not interoperable with their chosen backend, and the datasheet was accurate throughout.
• Do not deploy onto a shared platform you cannot leave remotely. We resold one, and the change that eventually had to be made was made by visiting every charger in the field.
• Do not size a site for simultaneous full-rate charging until you have tested whether the load can be scheduled. In apartments that assumption alone can add a transformer.
• Do not order volume before sampling properly. One or two units tell you a charger switches on and nothing about variation or field behaviour.
• Do not treat internal cabling as a commodity. Cable quality and routing produce failures that pass end-of-line test and appear months later.