Hopefully, someone will put them out of business with a decentralized system. They would sell standalone chargers that accept credit cards, and publish their busy/not-busy/broken status to some standard database.
Ideally, the database would be run by the government or nonprofit service. It would provide GPS coordinate based bounding box queries of each charger's status.
I think the whole US database would fit on a raspberry pi that's stuck behind a CDN (with a second raspberry pi elsewhere for disaster recovery).
Obviously, it would be run on something slightly beefier, but I can't imagine the server costs exceeding a few thousand a month.
Esso stations, still found all over the US, come from the name “Standard Oil” - “SO”.
It took the Sherman Antitrust act and government intervention for the economics of a decentralized system to make sense. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/337/293
If past is preamble, we should expect a monopoly of crappy charging experiences followed by trust busting and regulation that make a decentralized system possible.
In my uninformed opinion I see a Wild West of taking the risk to find the right charging standards and business model, with a terrible user experience. But that is how many industries have gone before too.
A bit of poking around suggests that esso is ExxonMobil and would therefore be sold in California under the Mobile brand.
Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?
In NZ they have a government list of every fast charge station.
https://www.journeys.nzta.govt.nz/ev-chargers-list-view/
Probably wouldn’t be too much more effort to add chargers status to it. Or even an API that others can develop apps against (like what we do in Australia for fuel pricing).
My guess is a harebrained idea at monetizing your charging data.
Since Australia hasn't set any legal targets for EVs, companies like Volkswagen have no incentive to sell their limited production of EVs in Australia.
Considering the solar and mineral resources they have, this is a tragic waste. Presumably they'll catch up soon though as it becomes unavoidably obvious how dumb they are being.
edit: only thing I missed was discussion about getting cheap electricity prices by acting as demand response and/or virtual power plants, possibly with colocated storage. I'm assuming that's part of the big players business plans but it doesn't get talked about a lot in public. Just hints from Tesla.
I’m not convinced EVs as grid response or virtual powerplants will be as important as people think. No EVs on sale right now can do it except the Nissan LEAF and the hardware required (a rectifier) is not cheap (approx A$10k). I’m also sceptical car owners will get much value out of it. Is it worth the hassle just for a few bucks on your electricity bill every month?
Fleets however represent much more of an opportunity. Buses, heavy vehicles (garbage trucks, delivery trucks, etc) and general fleet cars that are idle at night in a depot could be quite lucrative.
You can look up the details of what a home charger needs to do to get UK government funding support. I'd imagine Australia will follow suit.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-electric-vehicle-sma...
https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/origin-energy-electric-v...
And a grid operator has been experimenting with special tariffs that are “free” during peak solar times:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/networks-test-time-of-use-appeti...
You’re right - it wouldn’t surprise me if there becomes a standard for EV chargers in Australia that makes it so they have to be centrally controlled to protect the grid/take advantage of excess renewables. Good to do it now before too many homes install EV chargers (probably only 30-40,000 in the country right now).
I did however, learn a fair bit about EV charging - the software that runs them, choosing locations, the electrical needs, how to install chargers, etc. - that someone else with a bit more business sense and access to capital might find useful.
You mentioned some missed out on the government grants - was that the main cause?
For Park N Plug, missing out on the grant from ARENA was a big kick in the balls as we had investment depending on receiving the grant. When the grant didn’t happen we had no capital. To make things worse, we were relying on the R&D tax incentive to come through on our software platform, but the tax department said it wasn’t eligible despite earlier guidance it was.
That left us out of pocket on developer costs and deflated from the setback. We probably should keep at the software stuff and pivot the business, but my co-founder and I have other businesses we are busy with so the energy hasn’t been there.
This blog post and the reaction to it has been quite positive, so who knows, maybe I’ll try a third time to get something EV charger relate going.
I think this model could work if car owners don't own those replaceable battery packs, but they just pay for the energy inside them instead. I guess it would be easier to install 1 automatic ramp in a gas station that services a client in < 5 minutes than to build charging stations that service clients in hours.
LE: not referring to the whole battery capacity, these packs could offer ~100km range depending on the vehicle.
Gogoro scooters used this model, and it might still have niche uses, but generally not as good as our current solution.
Also with pricing, pricing transparency is a real PITA.
