Who are you making this for? Building the EV ecosystem that works for everyone

It is with zero doubt from the scientific community that we need to make dramatic changes to the way we live in order to stem the effects of climate change. More simply put, we need to stop burning things for fuel. It’s always a dirty practice with emissions ranging from rather simple carbon dioxide to the blood clot creating ultra fine particulate matter from diesel engines.

The benefits of owning an EV are increasing alongside the price of fossil fuels in the western world. Apart from a “blip” in the UK and EU around electricity prices last year, the cost of fueling a vehicle at home can be almost free if you have access to solar panels and minimal compared to the price of petrol. The UK now has 102 EV models to choose from (as of writing) up from 16 back in 2014 and this range will only increase as other players enter the market (China being the main one). 

The battery tech inside the car is now in a more mature level and I’d say that the battery ranges are beginning to enter incremental improvements over the sudden large increases we saw 5-10 years ago (of course there's always the possibility of a brand new tech coming in to sweep the way, and personally I hope there is for the simple reason of recycling those batteries is time and money consuming). 

The EV car has now been around for a while. With the popularity of Tesla driving EV adoption to new and ever increasing levels and predicted growth in the EV sector set to triple by 2035 we’re clearly past the point of early adopters for the car. So why does it feel like the infrastructure around charging a vehicle in public is still running like a minimum viable product? 

What I mean by this, to be specific, is the pain point of public charging in particular. But to quickly mention there are still pain points in owning the car itself and issues with cars during manufacture do happen (but I’d argue the same is true for ICE vehicles, “friday lemons” anyone?). 

In conducting some global research with both EV owners and those who were on the fence and didn’t purchase an EV a clear signal was seen. Public infrastructure for non Tesla owners sucks. 

It sucks for Tesla owners too if they have to use a non tesla charger so they don’t get away from it either. It’s so bad that one participant interviewed said “I won’t get another EV after this Tesla, I’ll probably get a plug-in hybrid as it’s easier to manage”. The individual in question has a house, a charger and is able to charge at home and even gets a discount on electricity for having an EV. But when you need to charge away from home, the EV network in most of the world is terrible. 

75% of our survey respondents said they need multiple apps to be able to charge in their local area. One individual had 16 apps on their phone to be able to charge their Tesla. This is a big pain point for two major reasons: 

1. EV owners are frustrated and the option to revert to less environmentally friendly solutions becomes more appealing. 

2. The barrier to entry for others is massive. 16 apps is 16 too many for people who are not tech savvy. You don’t need an app to get petrol at a petrol station. 

100% of those interviewed afterwards said there was no other reason they have an app that handles charging other than to access a particular charging network. 

So is this a case of the fact that early adopter demographics of EV owners have inadvertently affected the ecosystem and EV infrastructure? 

The demographics of EV owners globally is technologically competent or tech native, affluent, home owning or at least access to dedicated parking and male. With the broadest range of ownership falling in the 25-50 age brackets. Though this is shifting as more young people purchase EVs over ICE cars. 

If you are over 55 years old and own an EV you fall into a minority group of under 4% of the survey respondents in this survey

The problem isn’t just about the number of different networks there are but the ongoing and persistent assumption that people can and will be able to use mobile phones to handle charging their cars. The demographics of the world tell a very different story. 

Add to this that route planning is something I haven’t had to do since the invention of reliable sat nav and yet an EV owner has to spend a dedicated amount of time pouring over route applications to plan where they will charge on long journeys, have to deal with incomplete or bad information around charger availability and have to often deal with fluctuating charging speeds or badly placed charging stations. One participant told me of her long journey where she was forced into having to charge at an out of the way petrol station on her own in the dark.

This then presents an issue converting new and retaining current customers. The original early adopter demographic is fine to put up with these pains and frictions (it’s literally a defining point of the early adopter, will cope with friction of new tech in order to have the new tech). 

The early majority is less keen to deal with the pain points but generally will if they can see improvements happening and those two demographics represent roughly 47.5% of any market. 

The frictions built into the public charging infrastructure will be a barrier to entry for demographics that aren’t as confident with technology. Going to a modern fast charging station today even if it already is contactless would still require the use of apps to manage the charge because if you overrun your allotted time or charge level then you’ll start to incur fees. These fees can be hefty. 

What if you’re not a homeowner and/or have a dedicated space? 

Then reliance on the public charging network with all its frictions are justifiably a turn off. This poses another risk to the EV market, the potential of artificially reducing the total market size. If you can’t charge at home easily, and you can’t use the public charging network for any number of reasons then you simply will not buy an EV no matter how much it might be a better option for the planet. 

The weird thing is though that since the mass production of the car the option to have a petrol station at your house has not been there. We as drivers are used to and prepared to drive to a petrol station to refill. But for EVs alongside the technological boundaries of plug charging and power transmission restrictions and battery limits the additional frictions make it a hard sell to the late majority and impossible to move the laggards. This restriction in the total market hurts the car manufacturers, the Charge Station Operators (CSOs) and the Mobility Service Providers (MSPs aka the provider of the apps).

Charge Station Operators and Mobility Service Providers

So if the frictions cause pain for the driver is the infrastructure and ecosystem working for the operators and providers in the network? 

Apparently not. BP Pulse in the last year has reduced its operating markets from 12 to 4 markets and laid off 100 people. Tesla has done some weird things with firing and then reinvesting in its supercharger team and many other companies have either reduced operations or merged. Some of this is normal market balancing but there's also an underlying issue and one that a lot of the operators have claimed in their financial reporting, ROI is not at the level they were expecting. This is a bad sign, if business cases begin to fail because ROI on continued roll out of charging stations will slow or stop this will then further impact the EV market. Imagine if you bought an EV only to find out that your local BP pulse is shut down and there's no alternatives. 

That EV is going into the second hand market pretty quickly. 

And the signals are there already in the EU. Despite needing to build on average 1.2 million chargers on average each year to hit the 2030 target of 8.8 million (a number set by the industry bodies) they achieved only 153,000 new public charging points in 2023. 

So what problems is this current infrastructure causing for the main players. I believe one is that the original 1-1 relationship of CSO to MSP is definitely a cause of additional pain now. Yes you get “lock in” between the MSP and the CSO but as mentioned above there's no retention as there's no differentiator, drivers aren’t choosing you because they like your product they are choosing you because you’re the nearest/cheapest charger and when you’re not then your custom will disappear. Land grabbing only works for a limited time and is no sure fire way towards the continuous growth required from investors.

The next is lack of access to the car battery state information. I’ll go into detail later about what potentials having this data would unlock for MSPs but suffice to say it’s like having a black hole in the middle where some of the most important data (the user data) is and no one really has access or seems to be doing anything with it. 

Then finally and perhaps the big one for a lot of CSOs is bad placement strategies. I cannot begin to fathom why pod point decided to put 7kw chargers in my local Tesco car park. I do not plan on spending 4-5 hours to get a recharge and why only 4 for one of the largest Tesco in my city. Why put super chargers at the gym that once you’ve got your 80% in 20 mins is going to start charging you a hefty fee for still being plugged in, given the classes at my gym are 45-60 mins or you have to leave your workout mid sesh to move your car is it any wonder I rarely see them being used. Then let's talk about putting chargers behind the forecourts of petrol stations. Of course the average EV driver relishes the chance to breathe in diesel fuel and sit in a car waiting for a charge in a dimly lit area.

Why put them next to the petrol station at motorway service stations and not in the main car parks? Are EV drivers not allowed to go to the toilet and to the mini M&S or eat at the Nandos while they charge? 

These placement strategies were not made with a driver and jobs to be done focus, the ones that were are far more successful than the ones that haven’t. Shell for instance in partnering with Waitrose in the UK is on to something, there’s a few fast chargers, a rapid chargers and a few hyper rapid chargers. The rapid and hyper are nearly always occupied when I go shopping, the fast 22kws are in use but not always as much. The thing they missed here was that you can’t use contactless on the 22kw chargers so if you’re the average demographic age for my Waitrose (retired) you’re confronted with a QR code to figure out how to operate the white box.

So the pain for the MSPs and CSOs and decisions made mean slow ROI and because the car manufacturer is holding a lot of the data the chance to innovate is limited. Rinse and repeat offerings abound in the UK and EU. China on the other hand is thinking a little outside the box with options like Battery as a Service (BaaS) through innovative car manufacturer NIO (swap a battery out in under 6 mins to a fully charged one). 

OEMs (The vehicle manufacturers)

In 2021 it was incredibly difficult to get an EV due to the semiconductor shortage and the rise in fuel prices demand was high, supply was low. But now that has changed and the car manufacturers are seeing another symptom of a suboptimal ecosystem. Used EVs are incredibly cheap to get hold of now, what would have cost £650 a month for a Skoda Enyaq in 2021 I can in 2024 for £347 get a 2 year old Mercedes EQC. The industry is claiming it’s battery degradation anxiety and I have to say that some of it probably is (or at least the perception is). But I suspect and the numbers and research supports this assumption that it’s also the practicality of owning an EV. If everyone was Rapid charging their cars on public chargers each time then battery degradation would be a major issue, but we know they are not. If they were, CSOs wouldn’t be worried about ROI. So while battery degradation is a concern (one that I feel can be/already is solved) I think the other reason goes back to the friction. This means a glut of used EV cars is available and that is a problem for the Car Manufacturers for a very simple and hard fact. 

Most of the time they don’t get the benefit of the second or third hand sale and EVs are actually easier to maintain and have less failing parts so the OEMs don’t even get the benefit of parts sales for repairs that they would with ICE vehicles. This is why you are seeing an increase in direct to consumer pushes amongst brands and subscriptions for heated seats. The profit for decades hasn’t been on the car being sold to you it’s been on all the spare parts needed to keep it going and there just isn’t that many on an EV to go wrong (the ones that do are normally covered by an extensive warranty like the battery and these aren’t easy to replace anyway). So with the glut of perfectly good second hand cars the incentive to buy new is diminished amongst the late majority buyers and for the OEMs that's a potential blow to the bottom line. 

Conclusions and solutions

So if the current ecosystem isn’t working well for drivers or potential buyers and it’s not working for CSOs and it’s a problem for car manufacturers. Then who is this being designed for?

Well in short, it’s not being designed really, that would imply a centralised governance that is directing how things are deployed and in fact one of the reasons we are where we are is that it’s largely been left to companies to work it out. 

There are regulations now in the EU (AFIR) and others coming in different countries to help with some of the bigger issues. But I liken it to the chaos of when electricity was first being rolled out in the UK and there was a different plug and socket depending on where in the UK you were and it didn't always correspond to a different county or country. Regulation is good but what would be better is for the industry to look holistically and be extremely end customer focused. 

If it does then that I believe is a move to a frictionless experience for the driver, the ability to plug and charge vehicles without having to present any form of payment at the station. 

Change public charging infrastructure so that it embraces that it can be deployed almost anywhere and appropriate chargers are deployed based on driver patterns and expectations at locations. 

Take a jobs to be done approach for the driver with the placement of charging stations, most chargers should not be placed on service station forecourts these only represent a small fraction of the need from drivers. 

Destination charging that looks at the destination to determine the appropriate charger, how much time does the venue want that person to spend there or how much time would a car be there for. Trust me, theme parks like captive audiences and to keep people inside the park so don’t force the driver to go move the car halfway through the day because of fees for having to use a 250kw charger. 

If car manufacturers allow better edge processing and integration with peoples mobile phones (or indeed allow MSP apps to be installed in the car) so that payment handling and route planning is handled by the car or the drivers phone, that marks a significant step in the right direction for accessibility and also just makes it easier for all. 

If you’re inspired by this article, that's great. I encourage all of the players in EVs to step back from day to day and take a look at the end user and the ultimate provider of cash in this ecosystem, the driver. 

If it’s good for them then it’ll be good for you. 

Glossary

MSP - Mobility Service Provider - Providers of the applications and services Drivers use to access charging networks

CPO/CSO - Charge Point/Station Operator - The companies that run the charging stations

CSMS - Charge Station Management System - A Backend system that CSOs use to manage their Charging Stations. MSPs communicate to these via OCPI

OCPI - Open Charge Point Interface - A communication standard and method to allow MSPs and CPOs to communicate

OCPP - Open Charge Point Protocol - An open standard for communicating to charging points, normally used by the CSMS to communicate and manage stations

OEMs - Original Equipment Manufacturers - Car makers basically

ICE - Internal Combustion Engine - Pretty much all vehicles pre Tesla

AFIR - Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulations - Came into force April 2024 and is the EUs way of standardising public charging ecosystem and making a better experience for the Driver