The New Frontier

THE WILD WEST

Yee-haw!!! Here’s a sample of the good, the bad and the ugly with EV charging today. AC or DC?, Level 1, 2 or 3?, Charging Speed? Slow, Fast, Superfast, 22Khw, 120kHw, 150kHw or even faster? 800volt charging systems, J1772, CHAdeMO or DC Combo, 16amps maybe?. Bear with me this is just the start…hundreds of different Charge Point Operators (CPOs - with new ones popping up almost weekly), different connector types, various payment methods, multiple different charging apps, some apps don’t show all networks, some show different networks, some apps have some real-time charger status, some don’t! Different charging cards, pre-registering, a single charging card for all? – yes but not really. Wildly different electricity prices, your car is mostly blind so no pre-warning if a charger is not working, some different cars have their own charging networks, you can’t just pay with your credit card, what’s OCPP2?... ‘error something went wrong’!!!!!! Welcome to the world of charging today – this is what greets a newbie to the new electric car world, welcome to the Wild West!

If you’re confused by the above – you should be. This is what greets most newcomers to the world of electric car charging. The end of the ICE age is upon us, electric cars work today for 90% of use cases, they are great and without doubt, the new future. Charging also works, is more widespread than you may think and capable of servicing even the longest journeys in Europe and the US…but this doesn’t mean it’s easy. When you are sold your new electric car, the guy selling it to you has probably only sold a handful of EVs versus hundreds of ICE cars. The ‘product handover’ is light, to say the least. You will normally be handed your car key and if you’re lucky a charging card, then sent on your merry way – off into the wild west on your new horse alone to find your way! If you buy a Tesla, you are lucky enough to have access to a simple to use, easy to navigate towards, Supercharging and destination network – which will cater for most of your long-distance needs…but not all. 

This is not a Tesla promotion, it’s just a fact of current charging life. They have, so far, the easiest to use, simplest, hassle-free charging solution in place. No buttons, options or payment cards, just plug and play. All the battery range in the world or all the luxury features on new model EV’s, from the legacy car manufacturers mostly, will not matter if the charging user experience hasn’t been properly thought-out! I can give you story after story from my own experience traversing Europe in various EVs and the experience of a few of UFODRIVE’s early first time EV customers plus many others that have told me their charging horrors stories. Range is the number one concern of new potential EV converts. It needn’t be. New EV’s today have enough range (average 300km) for 90% of your daily needs. Better still, long journeys are absolutely workable, with a little advanced planning. How much planning is required depends on which EV you buy, the available networks and where you’re going. 

To encourage people to make the electric leap, charging should be as simple as, or even simpler than, filling your car with gas. Today this is sadly not the case! When you buy a gasoline car the subject of where and how to fill it up never arises, it doesn’t need to. You can fill up pretty much anywhere you want. How to find a gas station, if they sell fuel compatible with your car, if you need a special fuel card in advance or if your new car is allowed to use all gas stations and if they are even signposted sounds ludicrous, but this is how it is today with charging. EV range, despite all the hype, is largely irrelevant. What’s known as ‘Range Anxiety’ should be renamed ‘User Experience Anxiety’. Arriving at a charger that’s behind a locked gate, arriving at a charger that’s out of order, arriving at a charger that’s marked fast – only to find it’s been downgraded to slow for some unknown reason. Being routed by your car way off your intended journey only to use a third-party app to get another, better route. Arriving at a charger to find your charging card isn’t working or worse, you need to preregister in advance – sometimes days in advance – before you can use it. And finally, but not an exhaustive list, arriving at a charger to find it’s occupied, sometimes by even a gasoline car (whose drivers are known as ‘Gasholes’) or a big diesel, climate pointless, SUV Hybrid, this all happens daily…why? The reason … lack of user experience design thinking and legacy brought from the ICE days into new electric cars. We all want simple, hassle-free, time-saving user experiences. We are all time poor and don’t want to waste time because of someone else’s poor user interface design. Sadly, this is the case with EV’s today. We need to stop talking about how big the range of new EVs are, or even if there are enough chargers and focus instead on whether the experience is simple to use. I have lots of personal stories trying to use third party chargers, I’ll share just two in the interests of brevity…

My experience number 1. I was low on charge, with around 50kms left on the battery. We were going camping the next day (I planned to charge up at home that night in advance), it was a Saturday and I realised we are short a sleeping bag. It was an hour before the sports shop’s closing time and I lived 40km from the store. Good news though, the well known European sports outlet has chargers in the car park, it’s a new store, just a year old. My car even showed the chargers on the in-car screen, so no need to use third-party charging apps. I can make it there, charge up for 10-15mins and make it home, right? Well, the first risk you take with a journey like this is knowing if the chargers are working or occupied? Most ‘destination chargers’ like these, even brand new ones don’t have live connectivity to apps or your car so there’s a small risk something will go wrong when you get there, a risk worth taking, otherwise I’m sleeping in my coat! 

I have a ‘universal’ charging card, I won’t mention the name but it’s fairly well known in Europe…so what can go wrong, off I went. I arrived, with 8km of car battery remaining, at the store and sure enough there stood the shiny new charging posts sunk into fresh white concrete, they were brand new and with lights on…but was anybody home? I reversed up, took the big blue charging cable out from the trunk and connected the car and charger, now to the touch screen. It’s in Flemish!, I was in the French-speaking Wallonia region of Belgium but for some reason, the screen was in Flemish (for non- Europeans Flemish is a mix of Dutch and French, from northern Belgium, sounds a bit like the Swedish chef from The Muppets – sorry Flemish friends!). Nothing was happening (as is normal before you swipe your charge card). It was easy enough to figure out to press number 1 for the number 1 charging plug I chose. I pressed and swiped my ‘universal’ charging card. Nothing. No juice! I tried a few times then pressed a few buttons randomly but still no juice, it was lightly raining by the way and unlike Gas Pumps, EV charging points are rarely covered, again for some unknown reason. 

It’s now 15 minutes to store closing time, so I temporarily abandoned and went into the store to solve it later. Now getting dark and raining more heavily, I went back to solve the charging problem. No joy… and I couldn’t unlock the charging cable from the charger no matter what I tried (this is normal until you close a charging session to avoid someone stealing your cable). The only option was to scan the QR code on the charger and try to figure it out. The website that popped up, on my phone, was also in Flemish and French, I speak neither. Last resort, call the website number…so I did. It took around 15mins before I finally got an answer and luckily the chap on the other end spoke English. He explained that I needed to pre-register to get one of their charging cards in advance (which needs a Belgian address which I don’t have) and it takes a few days. He also explained that he wasn’t sure if this network was ‘on’ the ‘universal’ charging card providers service yet. There was nothing he could do, dark, wet, I was juiceless and marooned. The only way to remove my cable was to perform an unusual ‘hack’ the guy explained over the phone. It involved pushing and pulling the charging cable in a certain sequence to cause an unlock (I’m not going to tell you exactly how as I promised him I wouldn’t and it’s only for emergencies). I managed to crawl to a nearby guesthouse and the manager very kindly let me plug my cable in the window to a standard 220v socket – where I stayed almost two hours to get enough charge to get home. Nightmare experience, three hours lost, brand new hardware which was totally unusable – this happens daily in the Wild West. 

My Experience Number 2. I was bringing a brand new, €100k, well known German brand electric SUV from Amsterdam to Luxembourg, a distance of around 400kms. The car’s route planner picked a ‘fast charger’ roughly two-thirds of the way in Eindhoven. I arrived at the charger, with about 30k left on the battery, to find one brand new fast charger installed, but not turned on, and a second supercharger that was a big electrical cable sticking out of the ground. I’m not going to tell you how I got out of this one but hopefully, these sample stories paint the picture, it’s not about range or the number of chargers it’s about CONNECTIVITY coupled with the certainty of a good user experience. 

With Tesla, you arrive at a supercharging station then plug and play. There are no touch screens or options on the charger, you know in advance if they are working or occupied and the experience is consistently simple. Other, even faster, supercharging networks are popping up all over Europe and the US, and in the main, they are pretty good but the new car interfaces are not. Different car makers are doing different deals with charge point operators, some cars show different chargers on your route and pricing for electricity prices varies wildly. To highlight this, try playing around with some charging maps online or charging apps – you will get very different results. I pick one, abetterrouteplanner.com. If you choose a Tesla and a similar equivalent EV and pick a fairly common highway route, say Chicago to Washington DC or Paris to Amsterdam or Berlin, you will in most cases see the Teala arrive earlier, sometimes by hours. This is not because it’s got a better range, is faster or even has the fastest charging network, it’s because the UX is simple and universal. Competitor cars will route you to multiple COPs and you get there later – in most cases. 

I don’t write this to promote UFODRIVE’s technology which has mainly solved most of these issues for our customers with our tech following years of user experience. We only route customers to working, connected and available chargers. I am writing this as a plea to OEM’s, Charging App providers, Charge point operators, governments and service stations. If we want a massive shift to EV’s…make it a pleasure, make it simple. Some work on universal roaming charging is underway and a single charging standard, Open Charge Point Protocol, by the Open Charging Alliance (OCPP 1.6 – 2.0). While these standards are more on the physical hardware side there is still a lot of work to bring a common charging UX to fruition. Here’s my top 10 must-dos for charging.

1. Bring the Car, the driver and the charger together – let the car do all the work! Not you!*
2. No charging cards
3. No touch screens, choices, buttons or options on chargers
4. One routing standard for all OEMs**
5. Ability to pay with a credit card / contactless for now (although I know longer term this will be phased out once no.1 is fully in place)
6. No more third-party charging apps – a single in-car interface
7. Provide a choice between the fastest route or cheapest route
8. Put simple EV charge point signage on all highways, in Airports, Hotels, etc.
9. Ban Hybrids from using public charging points (another story for a later day)
10. Share all charging networks – no exclusivity to any OEM.

* The solution needs to be that the car does all the ‘talking’ with the charger and makes the payments (by assigning a payment method to your ‘car account’ when you buy it - just like Tesla) and then you have zero figuring out to do. 

**All OEMs agree and choose a single routing standard (if they are worried about competitive advantage, they needn’t be, as with all new tech, it will eventually standardise and will be solved one way or another anyway, so whoever doesn’t sign up will be out of the club)