How we use our Tap AvailabilityNet to help you charge your car

Tap Electric introduces charger availability predictions, powered by Tap AvailabilityNet, as the next step in creating the perfect car charging experience.

You arrive at the business park early, but all chargers are occupied. That’s not a big deal normally, but tonight you have a long trip to make and ideally you do not want to visit a highway fast charger. Somehow (why though?) the people charging there don’t use Tap Charging Groups, so there is no way to reach them to negotiate your own charging moment later that day.?

If you depend on public chargers to charge your car, you may recognize this scenario. Your immediate response may be ‘this place needs more chargers’ and you’re probably right. We cannot help you with that (Tap Electric does not own or operate any of the chargers in the app), but we can increase your odds at successfully charging your car.

The first thing you see when you open a charger in the app, is the normally expected charger availability for that day. While this is not exactly rocket science (we call it socket science..), it helps you estimate when that charger would be available to you under normal circumstances.

If you frequently visit the charger, you can join the charge location’s Charging Group. These groups are open to everyone in the app and let you quickly communicate with fellow users of the chargers on that location. Often it’s easy enough for someone else to quickly decouple and move their car during the lunch break, giving you the opportunity to charge.

Tap AvailabilityNet

Recently, we took it one step further. Tap Electric now uses Deep Learning* (a form of Artificial Intelligence) to estimate when an ongoing charge session will end. This can help you make decisions on the spot: either wait a bit longer, decide to park and charge your car elsewhere or leave early so you have time to stop and charge along the highway. This technology was developed internally and we call it the Tap AvailabilityNet.?

Perhaps the best thing about our Tap AvailabilityNet is that it doesn’t use any personal data. All it knows is when the charger is occupied historically (not who’s occupying it) and from that, combined with environmental factors such as weather and location, it learned to predict how long the charger will stay occupied.?

AvailabilityNet is our next step towards making charging your car easy and affordable. The feature is in beta - your feedback helps us improve it. Download the app here to give it a try:?https://apple.co/362c0K1?(iOS) or?https://bit.ly/3wSuKHj(Android).

How else can we make charging your car easier? Let us know in the comments or via [email protected].?Are you a charge network operator and do you want to offer this experience on your network? Reach out to [email protected] and we'll make it happen!

* To be more precise, AvailabilityNet uses a deep neural network architecture and was trained on millions of charge sessions with Tensorflow, Keras and ML.NET.?