NIO Day 2022, Tesla adding 3rd party chargers

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• EV & Charging Funding News

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EV & Charging Funding News

Last week we reported on the EV & Charging SPAC performance, which did not look pretty for 2022. This Monday we´re bringing you the latest funding updates in the EV & Charging industry - it´s Money Monday, baby:

• Powerflex secured $100M funding to advance its Powerflex X software which coordinates on-site solar, EV charging and battery storage. Powerflex was a university spin-off from CalTech university and is now majority-owned by French utility EDF´s renewable energy division.

• EcoG got a €6M Series A for their operating system solution that lets charging station manufacturers develop and run DC chargers. The company claims a 10% market share for DC chargers in Europe and its customers include companies like Siemens.

All funding updates are listed in our EV & Charging Funding Database.

1 Pic 🖼

While the western world celebrated Christmas, China celebrated NIO Day on Dec 24th. The annual launch event by the Chinese EV startup included some interesting stats on their charging products & services. Of course we have the highlights for those of you that don´t want to sit through the nearly 2hr event recording:

• >160k NIO home charging stations installed vs ca. 273k cumulative vehicle deliveries

• >13k NIO public DC fast chargers across China, planning >20k by end of 2023

• largest OEM-owned DCFC network in China

• 80.5% of energy charged on the network has been Non-NIO EVs

• NIO DC charger 3.0 can do up to 500kW/660A

• 1286 Power Swap stations across China to date, planning >1700 by late 2023

• since late 2021 >50% of energy re-fills by NIO drivers have been Power Swaps

• 15M swaps to date, on average 40k swaps per day

• 68.7% of NIO users live <3km from a Power Swap station

• Swap Station 3.0 uses bi-directional 62.5kW charging modules, ready to use the battery assets for V2G when convenient.

3 Links 🔗

• Tesla adds 3rd party POIs - with conditions: For the past years, EV OEMs and eMSP have been chasing vanity metrics in terms of charging station coverage. Just recently Elli (the Volkswagen-owned charging provider) proudly claimed aggregating >400k charge points in their MSP service for brands like VW, Skoda and Audi. But little attention has been paid to the actual quality of these charging POIs (= points of interest). What´s the uptime? What % of charging attempts end in success? Tesla on the other hand, has up until now focused on quality over quantity and limited charging stations displayed in their vehicles to the Tesla Supercharger network. But now Tesla started to integrate non-Tesla charging stations in the EU + Israel into their Navigation system - if reliability and performance standards are fulfilled. Qualified third party chargers (as defined by Tesla) must be reliable by showing an average charging success rate of at least 90%, and must have been used by Tesla drivers at least once every four days over a period of sixty days. Tesla is once again taking a contrarian approach here - enabled by the enormous amounts of telematics data which their fleet is collecting. Will other OEMs follow and focus on public charging experience quality over quantity of stations displayed to users? Note: One downside of Tesla's approach is that vehicle functionalities like automatic pre-conditioning of the battery are not accessible if the desired fast charging station is not included in the vehicle's navigation system.

• V2G Down Under: Who knew that a Winery using a single Nissan Leaf EV in combination with rooftop solar for V2G could turn a $6k/yr electric bill into $2.5k in profit? Nissan Australia reports that a pilot site in Southern Australia achieved just that. The hardware used here is the Qasar DC wallbox with a ChaDeMo connector. The installation and operation of the project was done by Australian Charge Point Operator (CPO) JETCharge, in collaboration with the local grid operator SA Power Networks.

• Lucid Europe deliveries: Roughly 14 months after starting deliveries in the US, Lucid Motors has now entered Europe and delivered its first vehicles to German and Dutch customers. We´re looking forward to the first video reviews by media that take the Lucid Air on the German Autobahn and test the vehicle performance at top speeds. Stay tuned!

Meme of the Week

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