Happy Wednesday. This is Electric Avenue. The only e-Mobility newsletter that reads smooth, cool and creamy - like a soft serve ice cream on a hot summer day 🍦

Here’s what we have for you today:

• 1 Poll: V2G in Europe 📊

• Trip Planning Masterclass 📖

• 3 Links 🔗

• Meme of the week 🤡

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Let's dive in!

1 Poll: V2G in Europe 📊

In our last post, ⚡ V2G in Europe - what's the hold up?, we asked you all when you expect commercialisation of bidirectional charging beyond pilots. Fresh from the press - here are the results:

🏆 Most people voted for 2025!

Personally, the indicated tendency matches our optimistic but realistic estimation that the industry and regulators need some more time.

What got us excited was your feedback and insights 😍:

• Voted This Year 🥳: “It would be the third year in a row to be called the breakthrough year for V2X - I mean, three times is the charm, right?”

• Voted 2027: “For all of the reasons you listed, e.g. double taxation. As a CPO to implement it in a commercial setting (not closed loop for your own household), this seems very challenging to implement.”

• Voted 2027: “I do not beliefe German government will enable the baseline for V2x any earlier than 2025. Then it will need another time until the Providers and Industrie are ready to really sell the product. Today pioneers (GridX, TMH etc.) will need a long breath until then. Key Factors - Change in German/EU laws - Availability of V2X DC Chargers for Home Installation (<1.000 EUR) - SmartMeter/SmartMeter Gateway - Vehicles supporting V2x(DC) - Service Provider willing to trade with this energy - DSO willing to allow V2x in their Sub-Grid”

• Voted 2030: “It's too expensive to make a less than 5 yr ROI that most commercial customers demand”

• Voted 2030: “a few years ago we also thought it would take another 5 years”

Trip Planning Masterclass 📖

Navigation and route planning isn’t easy. Over time, Google Maps has damn near perfected it with the use of vast amounts of route and live traffic data which it can generate from its global user base. But route planning for EVs is a whole new ballgame ⚾ - for a couple of reasons:

• Accuracy: The level of accuray that consumers expect for range predictions and energy consumption is extremely high. For gasoline cars on the other hand this was never even a consideration. Navigation providers just assume that you’ll always be able to find a gas station along your route - they didn’t need to know or care whether your car got 12 miles to the gallon (~20 l/100km) or 60 MPG (~4 l/100km).

• Refueling time: Traditionally navigation systems have predicted an ETA (= Estimated Time of Arrival) without considering the 3-5 minutes it may take you to refuel your vehicle on a brief stop. This completely changes with an EV, where charging stops can add up to 2 hours of “refueling time” on an 8-hour trip. This equates to a ~25% add-on to trip time and ETA. EV drivers expect this time to be accurately calculated and transparently displayed on any given route. Not an easy task when charging time depends on factors like battery temperature, available charging speeds given load management by the charging station or other technical constraints, and wait times at busy stations. This brings us to our next point…

• Availability: Drivers don’t just expect to be routed to charging stations that are currently (= NOW) free and functioning (= operating w/o issues), they also expect accurate total trip time predictions. This includes hard-to-predict wait times at busy stations that may have lines of multiple cars waiting to get a charging slot. The only way a navigation provider would be able to do that would be with an extremely large data set that includes all electric vehicles traveling across a highway corridor, information about their current battery SoC, predicted charging curve, final destination, and user preferences for charging stops (e.g. less stops and arrive with empty battery vs. more stops and arrive with a full battery).

• Cost: Another point completely neglected by navigation systems for traditional cars: the cost of refueling. Some drivers may compare prices across gas stations at different rest stops, but for the most part people don’t worry about a 5-10% price difference - they just pull over and refuel. With charging stations however the price of charging at public fast chargers varies widely, and can easily be 100% more expensive at one charger vs. another. This means the incentive to compare is much higher, and drivers will expect their routing system to consider total trip cost vs. total trip time and make reasonable trade-offs.

Obviously, the perfect EV trip-planning software does not exist yet. Companies like ABRP, PUMP, and Chargetrip are working on this and have great ideas, but are still mostly lacking the needed data. Google is slowly evolving Google Maps and adding EV features, but is nowhere near perfect yet.

But there is one company which does a pretty good job already. And it is a company that also has a vast user base of EV drivers and large amounts of data coming in. Of course, that’s Tesla. If you think about it, Tesla really has an unfair advantage in data collection across all of the factors mentioned above:

• Accuracy: Tesla knows EVERYTHING there is to know about its vehicles power consumption. For every single one of its vehicle models, Tesla knows: battery specs, aerodynamic drag, HVAC efficiency, whether it has an optional heat pump equipped or not, rolling resistance for various tire options, and many more static data points. Additionally, using telematics as well as sensors and cameras inside & outside the car Tesla can get live data on things such as: ambient temperature, solar load/cloud cover, humidity and air pressure, number of passengers, traffic speed, and much much more.

• Refueling time: Once again, Tesla knows every vehicle-side detail needed to calculate estimated charging times like battery temperature, predicted charging curve, and battery degradation. But that’s not all: Because Tesla also owns the charging infrastructure in most cases (=Supercharger network), it also knows critical information on that end. Things like site-level load management, de-rated charging cables, and historic data on charging session durations.

• Availability: Here we have the ultimate reinforcement loop: Tesla does not offer Android Auto or Apple Carply —> A lot of Tesla drivers use the native navigation system —> Tesla gets more data about things like their final destination —> Tesla can deliver a better routing experience —> more Tesla drivers use the native navigation system. This flywheel allows Tesla as the only OEM/CPO player today to actually make some-what accurate wait time predictions at its Supercharger stations, especially in the US.

• Cost: Tesla does not only KNOW the price at every Supercharger, it actually SETs the price. Historically Tesla has just eliminated the desire of drivers to compare prices by setting extremely competitive rates at its fast chargers.

If you wanna know the dizzying amount of input factors Tesla currently considers for its routing, charging and range predictions check out this post:

Crazy right? And here’s what all that looks like for the customer sitting in their vehicle:

So if you’re a Product Manager at an EV OEM working on Trip Planning look no further than Tesla as your benchmark. Start writing those JIRA user stories for your backlog now :)

But where do we go from here? A couple of predictions on the future of EV route planning:

• Tesla will remain the benchmark: Even with other OEMs building charging infrastructure, it will take them a long amount of time to get the data set, collect the data, and accurately use the data to improve their own EV trip planning. Tesla is just extremely far ahead here.

• Tesla will face new challenges: With the opening of the Supercharger network to 3rd party vehicles Tesla will lose some of its data advantage. Non-Tesla vehicles will provide a lot less static and dynamic live data to Tesla. Tesla also has no way today to provide feedback like alternatives to crowded supercharger sites to 3rd party vehicles where it does not control the navigation experience. All of this could decrease the accuracy of predictions Tesla can make, even for customers that are still fully locked into its native ecosystem (Tesla vehicle, using Tesla Navigation, charging only at Tesla Superchargers).

• Ways to catch up: If they want to stay competitive, other players will need to cooperate. At this point the alternatives to Tesla are mainly betting on a fully interoperable ecosystem of various charging networks (eg. EVgo, IONITY), vehicle OEM brands (eg. BMW, Nissan) and navigation providers (eg. HERE, Google) that can seamlessly exchange data and work together. We are definitely not there yet, but we can imagine a world where we can get there. But it will require a lot of data sharing and definition of standardized interfaces to facilitate this.

We’ll definitely be keeping tabs to see how this space evolves. One interesting development is the adoption of Google Maps as a navigation provider by a large number of brands like Polestar, Volvo, Renault, General Motors, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Nissan. Google could be a very suitable player to acquire, combine, and process the large amounts of data needed. Stay tuned!

What are your thoughts on the future of EV trip planning?

Leave us a comment on the web or reply to this email!

3 Links 🔗

• Stealthy chargers 🕶️: Back in April of last year we published a post on Goodbye gas station 👋 - The Evolution of Retailer charging 🛒. The occasion at the time was Walmart’s announcement to build a network of branded charging stations across thousands of its US grocery stores by 2030. This was a stark deviation from its previous strategy, where the company had partnered with third-party networks like EVGo and Electrify America. Now we are starting to see the first Walmart-branded chargers go live on Plugshare. Users are reporting that despite being Chargepoint hardware, the Walmart-branded chargers are currently not visible on the Chargepoint mobile app and are still free to use. We assume that this is a pilot site and will keep close tabs on this development to see what the official Walmart-branded charging experience will look like.

• PBVs, Canoo and Uber 🚌: At CES 2024 in Las Vegas KIA shared its upcoming vision for lightweight, flexible and electric Purpose Built Vehicles (=PBVs). These vehicles are essentially commercial vehicles that can be used for ride-hailing, delivery, logistics and other small business uses like for tradesmen. For ride-hailing, the company signed an MoU with Uber to collaborate on PBV design. The first vehicle, the PV5, is expected to launch in 2025 in South Korea. Of course the whole PBV concept including the modular vehicle top-hat design has a strong resemblance to the Lifestyle Vehicle (=LV) platform that EV startup Canoo first presented in 2019. Canoo even signed a vehicle development cooperation with Hyundai/KIA in 2020, but that agreement has fizzled out. It looks like the KIA designers took some inspiration nevertheless.

• Formula-E gets mid-racing charging with up to 600kW 🏎️⚡️: DC charging is going to be incorporated in Formula-E from this season onwards in selected races (debut in Misano Adriatico ePrix in Italy in April). Under the name “Attack Charge”, drivers will do a mandatory 30-second charging stop in the middle of the race to charge about 4 kWh (~10% worth of charge) at up to 600 kW. This energy will be usable as a power boost, temporarily increasing vehicle power output from 300 to 350 kW.

Most-clicked link last week: Post about Tesla’s Fleet API extension for powerwall, solar, and wall connector (Link)

Memes of the Week 🤡

🤣🤣🤣

That's a wrap for this week! Let us know how you feel and leave some feedback (We read every single one of these 🙂 ):

Reader Review of the Week

Selected ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️ Freakin´ awesome on ⚡ V2G in Europe - what's the hold up? and wrote:

“well done.....”

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. The Electric Avenue team may hold investments in or may otherwise be affiliated with the companies discussed7