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, CCS 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 differing 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. Electric cars and charging works 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 a non-Tesla 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 to, 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, most 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 EVs from the legacy car manufacturers 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 EVs today have enough range (average 300km) for 90% of your daily needs and long journeys are 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.

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 pre-register in advance – sometimes days in advance – before you can use it. And of course, as per my last blog, arriving at a charger to find it’s occupied, sometimes even by a gasoline car or a big diesel 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 don’t want to waste time because of someone else’s poor user interface design. Sadly, this is the case with EVs 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.

It’s not about range or the number of chargers it’s about CONNECTIVITY coupled with the certainty of a good user experience.