Brightway’s operations team used to start every morning with a list of chargers that broke overnight. Now they start it with a list of chargers that broke, were fixed, and were tested again, all before 7 AM.
Forty truck rolls a month, most for nothing
Brightway Charge runs 412 fast-charging ports across 38 sites in Texas: grocery lots, travel plazas on I-35, and parking garages in Austin, Dallas and San Antonio. Uptime is part of their state grant, and every hour a charger sits faulted counts against it.
Until this year, nearly every fault ended the same way. An alert at 2 AM, an on-call engineer who could not tell from the error code what had happened, and a truck sent out in the morning. In January alone, Brightway rolled 39 trucks. Their field lead estimated that more than half of those visits ended with a technician pressing a reset button.
“We were paying a two-hour drive to press a button. Everybody knew it, nobody could prove which faults were which.”
412 ports connected in 11 days
Brightway kept its existing charging platform. Salve was placed in front of it in proxy mode, so every message passed through untouched and drivers saw no change. The team connected one garage in Austin on a Tuesday afternoon, watched it for a week, then moved the remaining 37 sites in batches of five.
For the first two weeks, playbooks ran in watch-only mode: Salve diagnosed every fault and wrote down what it would have done, without touching a charger. Dana’s team reviewed those suggestions each morning and approved three playbooks: unlock and reset for stuck latches, reconnect for communication errors, and a power-meter reboot.
What a night looks like now
The on-call phone still exists, but it rings only when a rule says it should: three or more ports down at one site, or a fault that two remote fixes could not clear. Everything else waits for the night report, which lands at 7 AM.
When a truck does go out, it goes with a pre-filled work order: the likely cause, the part to bring and the evidence. Brightway’s field partner now fixes 93% of those visits on the first trip, up from about 60%.
What comes next
Brightway is adding 120 ports along the I-10 corridor this year, all connected to Salve from day one. They are also moving their federal NEVI reporting into Salve, so the quarterly filing comes straight from the same uptime data the team watches every day.
“Nobody gets up at 3 AM for a stuck latch anymore. We read the night report over coffee.”
