How to Find Charging for Your Electric Vehicle
By: Mohammed Elmzaghi
Tags: Technology, Entrepreneurship, Electric Vehicles, Charging Stations, Tesla

Photo by Martin Katler on Unsplash

Electric cars are great. They’re fast thanks to the instant torque of the electric motor. They’re clean in part thanks to the lack of a tailpipe. They’re also quiet so no more loud gas guzzlers flying past your house at 4 in the morning. The tech inside them is also pretty neat. Have you SEEN the inside of a Tesla??

But the one thing that isn’t great about an electric car is the battery. Or put another way, the limited size of the battery coupled with slow recharging times as well as limited or hard to find charging stations makes owning an electric car that much more troublesome.

One solution to the battery problem is to have manufacturers include a more energy dense battery. But that’s a question currently being worked on in various R&D labs in industrial and academic institutions such as Joint Center for Energy Storage Research as part of the DOE. In other words, any breakthrough will take some time to go from academic research lab to prototype to an industrial product that gets placed into electric cars that people drive. Life is short.

Another solution is to just build more dang charging stations. However, charging stations are often placed in hard-to-reach locations, have overcrowding, long lines and take a very long time to charge when compared to refueling an ICE car at a gas station. Again, life is short.

How can we solve the issue of electric vehicle so that drivers can find charging stations quickly, not waste time waiting for their car to charge and also get the solution in their hands today, not 5-10 years from now.

One of the best and least-costly solutions to this problem is to leverage the power of software. Software is great because of its ability to scale well. It’s also much cheaper to build than more advanced battery chemistries in an R&D lab. The distribution is also quicker. One over-the-air update gets sent to millions of users across the globe. (Thank you Vint Cerf and everyone that helped build the internet, love y’all ❤️)

So how can software help?

Community building through contribution

If you’re an EV owner, one good way to help other drivers as well as yourself find charging is to share new charging stations that you discover.

Find a cool and adventurous place you’d like other electric drivers to know about, share that too!

Find a great Italian restaurant with nearby EV parking and charging and want to let others know if there’s electric vehicle parking and charging? Just share that with a tap!

You can trust that the information is honest, fresh and never boring.

Intelligent, energy-aware routing

You’re invited to a family get together at your brother’s house tomorrow evening. It’s over 600 miles away and you plan to drive there, stopping only for breaks, food…oh and of course to charge your car! Before you leave your driveway, you have to run through complex calculations in your head figuring out the best highway to take so as to maximize the number of charging stations that are available to you.

Because god-forbid, you get stranded with an empty battery! Good news is that you can utilize a dedicated trip planner, that considers your current range, car type and routes you to your destination without you having to do much thinking. It’ll even tell you how much time to spend at each charging station to make sure you arrive on time at your brother’s house. Problem solved.

Have fun while you charge

Charging your car takes time. Often anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, depending on the speed of the charger. Like we said before, life is short. My goal, at least, is to enjoy the waking time I have on this Earth and that means exploring every square inch of it.

A great way to solve this is to allow you to see different charging stations as well as nearby places that you can visit! For example, I visit a ChargePoint Network station and I think it’ll take me at least 40 minutes to refuel. Instead of opening up another application to check for nearby coffee shops to get a little work done, I can find these places straight from the app!

Maybe I’m not interested in doing work but maybe grabbing lunch or doing a bit of shopping at a nearby shopping mall. Whatever it is, it’s important to be able to explore the opportunities that are around you instead of waiting inside your hot (but good-looking) electric car waiting for it to finish charging.

Hotel or restaurant charging capability

Know whether or not a hotel or restaurant has charging before you get there. No this isn’t another Christopher Nolan film and yes I’m excited to see Tenet. But really, this is an annoying problem. I’m on vacation and I want to see if this great Vietnamese place has charging. Or if the Hilton has any charging available for guests. Why is there no way to find this out?

Being able to see if a hotel and restaurant has available charging as well as the number of charging ports is great! This means, I won’t have to park my car a mile or so at a random charging station and then walk to the Vietnamese place. I can just check beforehand to save me any headache.

Are you reading closely?

Enough of my ranting, something like this already exists. It has all the features I listed above and then some more. If you’d like to download it, go here!

If you use the app and you like it, feel free to let other drivers know. Hopefully you won’t have to think about finding charging ever again. Anyways, thx!

P.S. If you want to chat, hit me up on Twitter!