Notes on an EV charging nightmare
By: Richard Hackforth-Jones
Tags: Electric Vehicles, Digital Product, Porsche, UK, Charging

I recently read a Guardian article about a couple who took 9 hours to drive 130 miles from Bournemouth to Kent in their new Porsche Taycan. They had the full house of charging mishaps: chargers not working when the app says it should be, plugging in to too slow a charger, realising the charger they wanted to use was incompatible and being unable to get any meaningful support from the helplines or from those on site.

I got sent this article by concerned friends and family, who were suddenly doubting whether their next car should be a fully electric vehicle. Their logic was, if a luxury car worth £80k can’t do a routine 2 hour drive then there is no chance something more affordable would be able to do so.

Linda Barnes and her Porsche Taycan 4S. Photograph: Linda Barnes

“Our car is lovely to drive and electric cars are the future. However, someone needs to get a grip of the charging infrastructure,” says Linda Barnes, the owner of the Porsche.

Her faith in public charging appears to have been broken. As an EV charging product manager I was concerned to read about her experience and have been thinking about how we might provide a delightful charging experience for Linda to restore her faith in the car’s ability to drive long distances?

The answer is to ensure that the digital products are designed with a new EV driver in mind.

The 2030 ban on sales of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles will have a dramatic effect, bringing a huge number of drivers in to EVs. Currently, less than 1% of the total registered vehicles in the UK are electric. These new EV drivers will need support to make use of the public charging landscape.

Digital products need to help them in two ways:

1. Keep it Simple

Don’t overcomplicate things

The vast majority of new EV drivers will base their understanding of refuelling from their historic experience at petrol stations. Although pretty simple, there are still variables at play with refuelling:

- Different fuel types. 150,000 drivers each year put petrol into a diesel vehicle or vice versa causing damage of up to £5000 each time.

- Price. Petrol prices can vary by up to 20% depending on whether you charge at a service station by a busy motorway or at an out of town supermarket.

So these new EV drivers understand that there are trade offs and certain things you need to know to ensure a smooth refuelling experience. But there are variables with EV charging which new EV drivers won’t be familiar with.

When it comes to EV charging the most important variable is time — do I need to wait a long time or a short time to recharge? Unfortunately it is currently too complicated for EV drivers to determine this key variable — often I have seen a lot of confusing visual language on charging maps, where the icons are so complicated that they become meaningless with a plethora of plug types and usage symbols.

What does it all mean?

There is no need for EV drivers to know whether the charger is 7kW or 11kW, 50kW or 70kW because ultimately all they what to know is do I need to stay here a long time?

From my personal experience, I define the cut off between a long charge and a quick charge as the amount of time it takes to order and eat from a quick service restaurant and freshen up before being ready to return to the car — about 25 minutes.

From the article it looks like Linda was presented with plenty of information about the location of chargers, but this didn’t help to ensure that she used the ones that would make the most sense for her journey.

Some may counter my suggestion to ‘keep it simple’ with a view that we need to show the variations in plug types (CCS, CHAdeMO and 43kW AC) used by different EVs. This misses the point as it is focusing on the present state and catering to the 1% of existing vehicles (including a fair few Nissan Leafs who use CHAdeMO or pre 2020 Renault Zoes who can charge on 43kW AC). But looking ahead to the future the EV charging standard question has been answered (in Europe at least) when first Tesla and then Nissan moved their vehicles to use CCS. The other standards will not be relevant and will remain niche.

CCS will be the standard for rapid charging in Europe

For all future EV drivers these plug types will not matter, so why bother to teach users things they don’t need to know? One of the most popular charge point finder apps in the UK even allows you to see Hydrogen filling stations… Why? How is this beneficial to people like Linda? Sure, I find it interesting (13 apparently in the UK) but I’m an emobility nerd who works in the industry. Most people aren’t me (thankfully).

2. Prioritise reliability

How many times have you tried to fill up at a petrol station and not been successful? I can count on one hand how often this has happened over a decade of ICE driving. Yet from just 12 months of driving an EV I have experienced this at chargers dozens of times. This is an incredibly frustrating experience, and you start to make mental tallies of the charge point operators who have let you down and note not to use them again in the future. New EV drivers like Linda shouldn’t need to go through this pain, and it is not in Porsche or other EV manufacturers interests for this to happen. So how should Porsche or another EV charging services rectify this?

The answer doesn’t need to be as time and capital intensive as the Tesla solution (i.e. building and operating your own charging network). There are already more than enough 3rd party rapid public chargers in the UK (3200+ compared to Tesla’s 571) to build up a significant footprint that can offer your drivers coverage across the country. Car brands such as Porsche can build their own virtual network through B2B agreements and act as an aggregator (much like Deliveroo or Just Eat do for restaurants). New EV drivers who sign up to this service would not need to create multiple accounts for brands they haven’t heard of before, instead they would be able to access chargers across multiple operators and be billed through one account.

What is interesting is that Porsche have actually done this, yet Linda still had an absolute nightmare! Unfortunately, this is either because Linda didn’t sign up (a different problem for Porsche to focus on) or that they have prioritised the number rather than the reliability of chargers. They have struck B2B deals with multiple charge point operators to build a large network but who aren’t managing their charge points effectively. If most of the restaurants available on Deliveroo were rubbish you would stop using the app and go direct to the restaurants you know are good. The same thing happens here and the charging aggregator model Porsche offers becomes pointless to the user. For a luxury brand like Porsche, they must avoid referring customers to companies that can’t provide the level of service they expect.

Linda said that “someone needs to get a grip on the charging infrastructure” — she wasn’t complaining that there were too few chargers, but that the ones she encountered weren’t reliable.

So by Product Managers keeping it simple and prioritising reliability over numbers of chargers, new EV drivers will adapt to a significant behaviour change of moving from ICE to EV, and experiences such as Linda’s will be history.

I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

All views are my own and not those of my employer.