Happy Monday. Welcome to Electric Avenue, where we always got the good stuff cooking. Call us the Gordon Ramsay of e-mobility news 👨‍🍳🤌 

Here’s what we have for you today:

• The EV Product Community Experiment - why you should join! 🧑‍🔬

• Poll Results: Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Congestion?📊

• 3 Links 🔗

• Meme of the week 🤡

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Let's dive in!

The EV Product Community Experiment - and why you should join!🧑‍🔬

Hey friends, Janek and Julius here.

As some of you know we’ve been working in e-mobility and EV charging since 2016/2018 respectively. And for the majority of that time we’ve held roles in Product Management.

During all those years we’ve gotten enourmous value from exchanges with other folks in similar roles within our small, but fast-growing industry. We’ve also gotten feedback from folks in our readership that get similar value from the topics we cover in our newsletter and our personal takes.

So we’ve been thinking about doing a little experiment: A community for our readers to engage with us, exchange ideas and build connections amongst each other.

To start, we want to keep this community small, focused and invite-only. Our initial focus will be on folks that work in the industry - either as Product Managers, or as founders of startups that are regularly involved in Product Strategy decisions at their companies.

If that sounds like you, get in touch and apply here to join:

We’re looking forward to connect with y’all!

Cheers,

Janek & Julius

Poll Results: Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Congestion?📊

In our last post,⚡Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Station Congestion? 💰, we asked you all if we need more charging networks to introduce some sort of overstay, idle or blocking fee. Fresh from the press - here are the results:

🏆 Most people voted for YES!

But it was very close (9 out of 17) and we also had a number of comments from y’all:

• Voted No❌: “They'll just make more money for the provider. How about incentives to get off the charger when you're done, instead of penalties for overstaying. The only real solution will come when charging is fast enough to keep people in their cars, like gasoline.”

• Voted No❌: “I think fees are one aspect of a solution but let’s look at the set up of a station, one or two parking bays per station is a limited. Why not allow at 100% SoC the cable to be released (if tethered of course) so that another driver can park alongside and move the plug to their car. Now imagine if you put the chargers in the middle of car parks so four cars can access a charger. There’s also a host of issues with putting the wrong type of charger at the wrong locations (5kW at supermarkets and 250kW at gyms) where the charge time is far greater or far less than the average time a person would spend at the location.”

• Voted Yes ✅ : “Yes - blocking/overstay fees need to be applied! BUT - the CPOs shall take the location into consideration. A HPC next to a restaurant? Well... 60min or better 90min would be nice to finish your dish without a rush. A HPC in an industry area? Maybe 90min is the minimum to stop parking between meetings. A HPC at a city location? 60min should be super sufficient as everybody might be on the run”

• Voted Yes ✅ : “I was waiting for a Lyft driver the other night, in the only Chademo spot in the lot while he was at 99% SOC - waiting to get to 100%. It was infuriating and we decided to leave and go to a L2 charger down the road. My friend is convinced that he was loitering and trying to interact with us to sell us something. Yuck.”

• Voted No❌: “Such fees only exist because the charging infrastructure doesn’t meet the user needs (and I’m a firm believer of ‘the customer is always right’). Solve such issues by adding more plugs and distributing power dynamically. In addition, charging to high SOCs is sometimes also coming from the ‘fuel station’ mindset especially propagating in Germany due to a lack of affordable AC charging options at destinations (including close to home). Again, CPOs should solve their problems, not burden EV users with penalties, fines and what else.”

Thanks for voting and submitting your opinions 🙏

3 Links 🔗

• The 8th Power Ranger from Japan 🇯🇵 : IONNA, the upcoming North American fast charging joint venture by several automakers, just gained a new shareholder. Toyota joins its fellow Japanese automaker Honda as the 8th car company involved in IONNA. We originally reported about the joint venture a year ago in⚡ The Power Rangers conquering North America 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 (Link to PR)

  

• Battery prices in a free fall🔋: A recent report from BNEF illustrates a drastic reduction of EV battery prices , especially LFP cells in China. Prices of those types of cells fell by 51% in 2023 alone (in China), to an average of $53/kWh at cell-level and a low of $75/kWh at pack-level. This is the leading reason for the fact that now already close to two thirds of new EV’s for sale in China are cheaper than their gasoline equivalents (where applicable). Cited reasons are overcapacities, as the average utilization of battery plants in China fell from 51% in 2022 to just 43% in 2023. At a total LFP pack size of 60kWh, the base Model 3 RWD battery pack in China could cost as little as $4500 per vehicle. (Link to BNEF)

• British Petroleum for US EV’s 🔌 : From Hubs, to Fleets to B2C. British Oil major BP continues it’s charging business BP Pulse’s expansion in North America. Back in early 2023 the company announced a deal with Hertz to build charging hubs near major US airports (we reported), mainly for use by ridehailing fleets but also open to the public. Then, earlier this year BP announced a deal with Tesla to buy >$100m worth of v4 Superchargers for deployment in North America. Now the company signed a deal with US shopping mall operator Simon Malls to build more than 900 public fast chargers across 75 locations in the US. (Link)

Most-clicked link last week: Was the Press Release for the German eTruck Charging Network (Link to last week’s post).

Meme 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⚡Can Blocking Fees Help Solve Charging Station Congestion? 💰 and wrote:

“keep going guys”

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