One widely accepted reason that digital ventures from the United States and China have the edge is their ability to focus on simplicity. This popular wisdom may originate from culture and tradition, and it affects not only the structure of product portfolios but also the ability to be customer-centric and display excellence in this area.
With money and manpower limited, focusing on doing one thing really well rather than attempting to be a jack of all trades is the way to go for a new business. However, the majority of the European EV charging participants became entrenched in their bloated multi-layer ecosystems: planning, installation, asset management, operations, maintenance, CPO and EMP backend, smart charging service and V2G, dynamic pricing, multi-service architecture and APIs… The list is not exhaustive. And this holds for B2B, B2C, and B2B2C.
If you’re busy juggling balls or customising your solution to suit too many individual clients, you could lose speed dramatically. Whilst you continue to work this way, it is hard to build mindshare in a particular business niche with the aim of distinguishing your product from others. Let’s face it; you will end up becoming a random project house for software or hardware development, not the cool venture you dreamt of becoming when you first started your business.
Most EV charging companies built the Swiss pocket knife before they understood how to develop a simple bottle opener. Meanwhile, ambitious competitors focus on developing razor-sharp blades. Eventually, we find more immature pocket knives than single blades in the market, which makes it even easier for highly-specialised ventures to compete. Remember: Amazon started selling books online, PayPal became successful by creating a niche as a digital payment provider for eBay – then they set sail to conquer the world.
The interconnection with other EV charging players that might be your competitors has been one of the most polarising topics of recent years. Many companies have claimed the software gateway to provide interoperability as their battlefield of choice. They have put a lot of time and effort into the religious “war of words” on roaming protocol standards and possible market models. As they were putting all their energy into this holy crusade, they forgot that their end-users still couldn’t use a single station from third-party CPOs via their EMP solution.
In the meantime, tech-agnostic service providers found a pragmatic way by leveraging the interoperability solutions that were there and functioning (Hubject, Gireve, OCPI, centralised, decentralised, open standards, proprietary API for example). The result of this approach was a fast(er) network coverage, happy customers and eventually, a stronger market position.
Are the existing interoperability solutions such as roaming platforms or P2P protocols already perfect, and is that the end of the story? Not by far. Is the mix of parallel interoperability standards and frameworks destabilising your IT ecosystem and creating an overhead? Probably so.
However, they say getting something done to the best of your ability is better than failing to do so because you want it to be perfect, and the market is evolving rapidly. Your competitors might be more decisive and less idealistic. So better walk the talk.
In the continuing public discourse on how to charge an electric vehicle, the main object of reflection has been public charging. The lack of public chargers has often been (mis-)used as the biggest justification for the slow rollout of electric cars and the long-lasting hibernation of the traditional auto OEMs to switch to an electric powertrain. This has put public charging in the spotlight for many years.
In nine out of ten charging business cases I have seen over the course of my career, public charging has been considered as the no.1 revenue stream. While both the size of electric car batteries and the provided charging power of charging stations are continually increasing, the characteristic use case for public infrastructure is about to change without prior notice drastically.
Higher range and shorter charging times increase the utilisation of a charger up to factor 15X. With the rollout of ultra-fast chargers and the number of car batteries which can take up to 350+kW, less public stations will be needed in comparison to the number forecasted by experts and politicians.
Besides the first pillar of public charging – home, workplace and electric fleet charging have been the main business drivers for successful players in EV charging. Probably every company in the industrialised world will have to electrify their fleet within the next five years at least partially.
Different studies calculate a market potential of up to two-digit billion dollars – for the electric fleet software alone.
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