Episode 254
254 - The Plug and Charge Update Episode
In this episode of EV Musings, host Gary dives deep into the concept of "plug and charge" for electric vehicles. He explains how Tesla has mastered this seamless charging experience and why other networks are struggling to implement it. Gary discusses the technical, operational, and logistical challenges that prevent widespread adoption, including the need for standardized hardware, software, payment systems, and backend support. He also highlights the efforts of companies like Hubject in creating global standards and the cautious approach of UK charge point operators toward adopting plug and charge.
This season of the podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the free to download app that helps EV drivers search, plan, and pay for their charging.
Links in the show notes:
- Ember Buses - Aberdeen to Edinburgh and Glasgow - Cool Thing
- Zapmap survey reveals UK EV drivers’ top-rated charging networks - Zapmap
- Plug and Charge Ecosystem Overview
- London to Brighton, Paris, and Geneva
Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk
(C) 2019-2024 Gary Comerford
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Mentioned in this episode:
Zapmap
The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers in the UK, which helps EV drivers search, plan, and pay for their charging. Zapmap is free to download and use, with Zapmap Premium providing enhanced features which include using Zapmap in-car on CarPlay or Android Auto and help with charging costs with both a pricing filter and 5% discount*"
Transcript
Gary:
Hi, I'm Gary and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking in great detail at a personal obsession of mine, which is plug and charge. Our main topic of discussion today is plug and charge.
As regular listeners will know, in June of last year, I went with Tim Rault-Smith on the London, Brighton, Paris, Geneva EV Rally. It was a great event. If you want to see the video of this trip, the link's in the show notes.
But for the purposes of today's discussion, the most important part of that video occurs around two minutes and 41 seconds in. That's the point at which the Tesla Model S stops for its first charge at a Tesla supercharger. You'll see that I put a timer on the screen and from the moment the supercharger nozzle was connected to the car until the first electrons flowed into the car was 8.04 seconds. If you're a long-time Tesla driver, this will be absolutely second nature to you. But for those of us who are not Tesla drivers, this can still seem a little like magic.
I like to think I'm something of an old hand when it comes to public charging, and even I struggle to get a charge started in less than about 30 seconds on a really good day. The difference, of course, is plug and charge. Long-term listeners to the podcast will know that whenever I get either a CPO or a charger manufacturer on the show, I tend to move the subject around to plug and charge.
Short of having everything go wireless for charging, plug and charge is the easiest way for a customer to actually pay for their charge at any location. Without exception, all networks and charger operators have agreed that it's the way to go. Most charger hardware manufacturers have said that their device is supported.
So, pop quiz. Other than Tesla, how many other charge point operators working on UK soil can currently do plug and charge? Now, anyone who said Fastned, go to the back of the class, they have an offering called AutoCharge.
It's not plug and charge. It's similar, but different. So, bearing in mind we have variously between about 70 and 100 charge point operators in this country.
How many? It's two. Ionity and Porsche.
Mer, Shell, and BP Pulse also have plug and charge enabled, but not in the UK at the moment. Other than Blink and the rather interesting and confusing operator ChargePoint, who appear to be both a hardware provider, you'll see their branded Rapid units at some Instavolt sites, and a ChargePoint operator, although in the UK, I don't recall seeing them specifically anywhere in particular, correct me if I'm wrong. Other than those two, no other ChargePoint operator is marked as being currently in the onboarding process for plug and charge in the UK.
Although I do know that Applegreen are in the latter stages of onboarding, although it's difficult to actually find information about this anyway. So, today we're going to look at plug and charge, what it is, how it works, what's the reason it's not everywhere right now, who's using it, who isn't, and why. I'll be asking the ChargePoint operators why they aren't looking at plug and charge, given that there's a defined standard in place globally, and what they're waiting for.
I've touched on this a number of times in the past, but just as a refresher, let me take you through the intricacies of how plug and charge works. Let's start by looking at what plug and charge is. Despite the name, it isn't simply the ability of a charger to connect to a car and provide power to the battery in that car.
It's actually a complex chain of hardware, software, authorizations, management systems, payment operations, and security checks. It's linked to the car, the driver, the charger hardware, the payment method, and the ChargePoint operator. And if any one of those parts of the plug and charge chain changes, then plug and charge won't necessarily work.
That's one reason plug and charge works so well on Tesla. They have the same car hardware, the same charger hardware, the same management hardware, and the same payment processing systems. Everywhere.
It doesn't matter whether you swap cars, drivers, or charger locations, they're all in the same ecosystem known to Tesla and ready to do plug and charge. But when it comes to things that are outside the Tesla walled garden, things become a little trickier. That's why EV on the move, which uses Tesla hardware in their V4 superchargers, cannot do plug and charge, and their charges are currently being started through the Tesla app.
It's also why you can't take your Polestar 2 to a Tesla supercharger and do plug and play, even though a Model 3 using the adjacent charger at the same time can. Here's another couple of examples. My Volkswagen ID can do plug and charge, or at least it could if I'd upgraded the operating system to the latest release.
Ionity hardware can do plug and charge. Octopus Electroverse can pay for plug and charge. So as long as I'm using a specific Ionity charger on my upgraded ID.3 and paying via Octopus Electroverse, I can plug and charge. But if I want to pay using ZapPay, I can't use Ionity plug and charge because it's not set up to work with that at the moment. Although ZapPay is coming to plug and charge.
If I took the MG Cyberster, I test drove at Everything Electric Live in Farnborough last year, to an Ionity charger and tried to pay using plug and charge, it wouldn't work. Nor would it work on a Porsche charger. But an ID.Buzz would. So as you can see, it's a bit of a mishmash of different things that need to align. And that's the issue.
One of the pioneering companies in the plug and charge space is Hubject. They're working to put together standards, accreditation and testing facilities to allow plug and charge to be rolled out globally. A quick look at their website shows the scale of the problem and I'll put a link in the show notes as well worth having a look.
The link page splits the plug and charge ecosystem down into a number of different segments. And for you to be able to plug and charge, you have to have one from each of these segments connected across the whole of your charging chain. So we'll start with the charger manufacturers.
The list shows all those manufacturers who have aligned to the plug and charge standard. It tells you which version of the standard they're on and which of their hardware units work. So if we look at Kenpower, for example, we see that they're on OCPP, which is the open charge point protocol, version 1.6. And their T-series, C-series and C and S models are all capable of running plug and charge. So next, let's have a look at the vehicle OEMs, the original equipment manufacturers, the companies that make the cars.
The list shows all the manufacturers who have implemented plug and charge. It's mostly the Volkswagen Audi Group, BMW, Mercedes, Ford and the Korean manufacturers alongside Lucid, Polestar, Volvo and surprisingly MAN, the truck manufacturers. Good move, MAN.
But again, the devil's in the details. Firstly, there are no Chinese manufacturers on the list, other than Polestar. Even then... it's not the whole Polestar range, it's just the Polestar 3, despite the fact that the Polestar 4 is as new as the Polestar 3 and the Polestar 2 recently had a facelift. The next group on the list are the mobility providers. For want of a better definition these are the roaming services through which you can pay.
You'll see Octopus Electroverse, Shell Recharge, Elli which is part of VW, Charge EV and a couple of brand specific payment options with companies like Ford and Porsche and this is where you open an account with that OEM and that's linked to your vehicle for payment purposes. Think of this like a charging specific debit card linked right into your bank account it takes the money after each transaction usually. Next on the list underneath are the actual charge point operators who are signed up to plug and charge and this is where the Applegreens, the Porsches and the Ionitys of this world live alongside a chunk of companies with whom we are unfamiliar here in the UK.
BayWa anybody? Note that many of the CPOs in this list have implemented plug and charge but not in the UK as I mentioned earlier Mer and BP Pulse for example. Unfortunately on the list there's no ability to filter by country so beware when you're looking at the data on here.
Then we get to the next segment on the list which are the back-end providers. These are the companies that underpin the charge point operator systems. They provide the software that manages the charger back office themselves.
You'll probably not know any of the names on here other than Spirii who were guests on the show a couple of seasons back but companies like Greenflux, Fuuse, Monta, Verta are industry leaders in this space. So you can see how it becomes something of a rabbit warren when it comes to working out which is which and who's who and this gives rise to the situation where companies like say Mer in mainland Europe can plug and charge a VW ID3 on a Kenpower unit but not a Vauxhall Mocha E on the same charger or Ionity can charge any of the Volkswagen Audi group cars on their network but none of the BYD cars. There are a couple of interesting names missing from this list and I want to talk about them for a moment.
From a charge point operator point of view here in the UK a number of the larger ones are missing. If we look at the recent Zapmap customer satisfaction survey results we see that the top five large operators, 300 units or more, were Tesla, MFG, Osprey Charging, Be.EV and Gridserve slash Instavolt who were in joint fifth place. In the medium category which is 100 to 300 rapid or ultra rapid chargers the top five were Fastned, Ionity, Applegreen Electric, Mer and Evyve.
There's also a link to the Zapmap survey results in the show notes. So that's 11 CPOs rated highly by the EV driving public and of these there is only one who does public plug and charge. Ionity which is in the medium category and I'm not counting Tesla because their plug and charge isn't open to every car just Tesla's even though the chargers are.
If you have a non-Tesla vehicle at a Tesla unit you'll need to use the Tesla app to start and stop the charge. This is particularly applicable in the UK. If you're in the US and you are driving a Ford you can use plug and charge on Tesla superchargers out there.
That's a specific instance where Tesla and Ford have decided to collaborate to make that work. The most popular operator in terms of charging sessions here in the UK, Gridserve, has standardized on ABB hardware across its network. ABB is not plug and charge compatible yet so we won't be seeing them anytime soon, being able to plug and charge at Gridserve.
Instavolt has various hardware types on its network but they're starting to standardize on the BYD devices. These are not plug and charge compatible yet either. Osprey Charging runs multiple types of hardware including the Kempower units but they've not gone down the plug and charge route yet and we'll hear from them a little later.
Which brings up an interesting question. Would it be better for companies like Osprey Charging who have both Kenpower and non-Kenpower chargers to implement plug and charge on their network for the Kempower units but not the other units or wait until all their hardware is compatible before making the switch? With the first approach you get plug and charge working for some cars on some chargers but not all cars on all chargers.
With the latter approach you get plug and charge working for some cars on all chargers but not all cars on all chargers either and both ways are going to be confusing for some users. And that's the key issue I have with plug and charge and a lot of the announcements going out from charge point operators and OEMs. Mer recently announced that they were plug and charge compatible on their network.
True. But they didn't mention that if you had a Tesla, Stellantis, BYD, Renault or an MG it wouldn't work. Renault however are on the onboarding process for plug and charge at the moment.
This will be for presumably the Renault 5 and maybe also the Renault 4 when that gets released. Volkswagen and Audi group announced that their range was all plug and charge compatible but they didn't mention that if you try to use plug and charge on a Tesla unit, Gridserve, Osprey charge, Instavolt, BEV or any of the dozens of UK networks that aren't plug and charge compatible it won't work. And nobody mentions that even if your car is compatible, the hardware is compatible and the network is compatible you can't just plug in and expect it to work.
You need an e-mobility provider to handle all the payment processing. If you're used to paying with contactless then this means you'll have to sign up to either a roaming operator such as Shell Recharge, Octopus, Electroverse or Elli or ZapPay when that comes online. Or you'll need to have a contract with your vehicle provider to deal with the payments.
Things like Ford and Porsche provide and some of the Volkswagen and Audi group at the moment. And the reason for this is due to the concept called tokens. Each network and each car has to establish a payment token.
The network has to be able to establish this uniquely for a given car and is linked to a specific charging network and payment method. This means that my ID3 needs a token to work with Ionity's hardware and my chosen payment method, a token to work with Porsche's hardware and my chosen payment method, a token to work with BP Pulse's hardware and my chosen payment method, a token to work with Shell's thardware... you get the the idea. These tokens are linked to payment methods so that when the charger connects it says ah you're this token linked to this car in this payment method.
All the complex transaction processing goes on behind the scenes and the charge initiates. The reason Tesla can do this is because all the cars, all the chargers and all the users are known, is the identifiable and have tokens linking them to a driver and hence a Tesla account and payment method. Not only that but this has to happen for every vehicle on every charger with every network and if one of these fails then plug and charge won't work on that device.
rclay card with digits ending:In reality, if I was using 4 different networks, I'd need 4 different tokens even though the data on these tokens would be the same. If I had 2 cars in the family, check me out, 2 EVs, I'd need a different token for each car and for each network. Over time, this is a lot of tokens to deal with.
Plus, if I sold the car or gave it back at the end of the lease, I would then need to ensure that the token was scrapped and replaced with another one for the new driver with his details and payment method. There has to be a better way of doing this, right? Well I've long been of the opinion that a lot of these payment aggregators who allow one app or card to pay across multiple charging networks would be in an ideal place to provide this service.
a Barclay card, digits ending:When I connected to the charger, it would link via the roaming network which would have a token that connected the payment to the charging network. Hi, I'm token ZuluZula999, I'm Electroverse and I'm representing payment for any charge linked to Gary's ID3. The roaming network would manage the linkage in between the networks and my payment rather than the car.
Instead of having a many-to-many relationship between the car and the networks, I'd have a one-to-one relationship between the car and the payment aggregator and they'd have the linkage to the different networks on a many-to-many basis. So how would that work? Well, that's where Hubject come in.
rge protocol based on the ISO:So far it's paying dividends, however it's a little like the old pools forecasting back in the 70s and 80s where you had to perm any 8 from 10 to win. Apologies for anyone who's too young to understand that reference. At the moment if you're with Ionity driving a Skoda paying via Electroverse and they're using Greenflux as a back-end provider on an Alpatronic hypercharger or a Kent Power charger then you can use plug-and-charge.
So it's a little bit complex. We wanted to include one of the major industry players subject in today's discussion however they were unable to make anyone available to talk with us before the recording deadline. Now I promised earlier on I'd see what the charge point operators were doing with plug-and-charge.
Now we spoke with Be.EV last season and Adrian Fielding Gray told me at the time.
Adrian:
Something we're actively looking at I think is what I would say. There are I'd say almost as seems typical these days not in this industry but there's more than one option I think is the thesis not just a case of actually there's one version of it that's going to be the future and you either say yes or no of whether you want to do it.
Actually there's a number of options out there both from a customer experience but also for an implementation perspective. Some needs updates to the actual site themselves, some need updates to your back office or your app. So again all of these needs a full review but yeah it is something we're actively looking at at the moment and there's also kind of which partners are doing it best.
Tesla's a bit of a different world I think isn't it given that you know Tesla start with a car and then they started building charges to support their car sales whereas we're coming from this slightly opposite direction of building charges and then trying to make sure we offer the best customer experience to all electric vehicles. So yeah got to make sure that we're thinking about in the correct way before we don't roll out something and then find out it's not giving a good customer experience.
Gary:
I asked Osprey charging what they were doing about plug and charge and Olly Cooper the chief technology officer from Osprey charging told me.
Olly:
At Osprey a simple and intuitive process has always been core to every development that we make and we look forward to the moment in time when drivers can arrive at any charge point in any car plug in and just walk away but there is a problem. In reality if we launch plug and charge today our message would have to be plug and charge is now live across our network as long as you're using this specific roaming app have this type of vehicle from this model year and only if you're on firmware version 3. 46 but you'll have to ask your dealer about the updates.
Only one in three electric vehicles sold last year are compatible with plug and charge and hence an even smaller proportion of the 1. 3 million EVs on the road today. Plug and charge might indeed be the future but it certainly isn't today.
We closely monitor developments in the area and some operators have begun supporting auto charge in preference to plug and charge. There is unfortunately very little overlap in vehicles which support both technologies making it impossible to develop a clear customer experience for all EV drivers. We're installing hardware which can support both plug and charge and auto charge and our proprietary software platform Osprey Iris means that we are in complete control of how and when we flick the switch.
Gary:
I caught up with previous podcast guest Dan McLaren from BP Pulse and this is what he had to say about plug and charge.
Dan:
We don't have any immediate plans to roll out plug and charge it is something that we're assessing and it will form part of our future product and tech roadmap. It's worth noting though that obviously there's different standards of plug and charge, auto charge, plug and charge and I'm sure Barry you'll cover this in the episode and also it's heavily dependent on the charger technology capabilities as well and our network has a split of what could and couldn't right now so we're focusing on getting our network upgraded and then we will look at plug and charge in the future.
Gary:
So there does appear to be some level of consistency around why the charge point operators aren't going to plug and charge. Different protocols, auto charge versus plug and charge, plus the fragmentary aspect of the ecosystem where you'll end up with some chargers that can do it, others that can't, some cars that can etc. Niall Riddel from Paua which a company that is on the Hubject page as onboarding told me that we've done he said quote we've done most of the work on our side but cannot yet run a complete test because there need to be certain parts of the chain in place.
It's a pretty complex equation that we orchestrate in the background to enable the driver to have an easier experience end quote.
But it becomes a little more interesting when you look at the problems that people have with charging. A recent consumer report survey in the US found that 8 out of 10 charging sessions across the whole of the US had no issue at all.
So let's make that 80 out of 100 sessions for ease of maths. So 20 sessions had issues. Of these 20 sessions just under 7 were due to hardware issues which was mostly a poor or unreadable screen.
Just over 4 were because of payment problems. Just under 3 were power issues and the remaining ones, 5, were undefined. If we accept that the charge speed issues are usually because the ambient temperature is too low, the battery isn't warm, the car is too high on the charge curve, etc.
etc. It means that screen issues and payment issues make up the majority of the problems. If you implement plug and charge, that solves those issues immediately and it leaves just 5 charging sessions with unknown issues.
And funnily enough, that's very very close to the 4 charging sessions with errors that Tesla drivers report when they get to do their supercharging. So if you look at it from that point of view, plug and charge is a solution to charger reliability.
Now, are there any downsides to plug and charge?
Now on the face of it, for an EV driver, the answer is going to be no. But that's not entirely true. There are two aspects to look at that may or may not be relevant to deciding if plug and charge is the best way to go for you as an individual.
Let's look at those now. Firstly, we have receipts. If you claim back your charges from your company, there are several ways to deal with this.
Firstly, you can grab a receipt from the charge point operator for the charge and submit that as an expense claim. Or secondly, you can use the payment method linked directly to your employer. Previous podcast guests, Power, are an example of this.
They provide an RFID card for you that's linked to your employer and all the charges on that are consolidated and sent regularly to a central invoice location ready for payment. Simple. As a side note, the manner in which different charge point operators provide receipts for your charging varies.
This is another area that Sara Sloman and I discussed on our episode last season on payments. As a second side note, Paua are actually, as I mentioned earlier, one of the payment e-mobility providers that are currently onboarding the object plug and charge system. But, dropping back to receipts overall, with plug and charge, receipts become an issue.
As a rule, a plug and charge session will not produce a receipt for you. It may produce an invoice at the end of the month showing all the charges that have taken place, though. You then have to work out which are private, which are work-related, and then deal with your expenses that way.
And obviously, that's not ideal. Now, the second quote-unquote issue with plug and charge is from a pricing point of view. Certain charge point operators try to encourage you to use a charge point operator-specific app to get lower price charging.
Ionity are an example, as are Instavolt and BEV. But if you're starting and stopping your charge using plug and charge, this removes the ability to take advantage of cheaper rates that may be offered by the charge point operator. If you're looking at a couple of pence per kilowatt hour, you might be willing to swallow that for the inconvenience.
But if, for example, you're a big user of Instavolt, you'd be losing a massive amount of money by going for plug and charge. They offer, at the time of writing, a huge discount from 85 pence a kilowatt hour down to 54 pence a kilowatt hour between 9pm and 7am. That's a 36% discount.
But it's only applicable if you start and stop the charge through the Instavolt app. If you used plug and charge, as and when Instavolt implement it, you'd still be paying 85 pence a kilowatt hour, or whatever the non-app rate is at the time.
So let's wrap up now with a couple of takeaways from this discussion.
Plug and charge is a complex, intricate and involved process that needs lots of different pieces of hardware and software to work together. But once that's done, the actual benefit to the end user, the driver, is immense. Quicker, less involved charger initiation, a more streamlined process.
place for plug and charge, ISO:But the reticence of CPOs to move across because of the fragmented nature of the ecosystem and because they lose control of the customer is slowing things down. So what are your thoughts? Do you want plug and charge implemented everywhere?
Or does the thought of not being able to take advantage of discounts like the Instavolt night rate make you hesitate? Let me know. Info@ evmusings.com
Now it's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to show your listeners. Ember Buses in Scotland have launched a number of bus services that run on fully electric buses. They cover Aberdeen to Dundee and Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Now what sets this service apart from others is that they're cheap. Aberdeen to Edinburgh for about £16. They run buses regularly, 24-7.
They're wheelchair accessible, Wi-Fi enabled, comfortable, and most importantly, they can do runs such as Aberdeen to Edinburgh, 130 miles, without stopping to charge. The other key differentiator is that they have bookable request stops for towns and villages along the routes. So if you're in Northeaster Bridge, south of Aberdeen, and you want to get to Edinburgh, you can order an electric bus to take you there.
Cheap, comfortable, and they also allow bikes to be transported to let you do the first and last mile emission-free too. Great work, Ember. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show, put together this week with the help of Olly Cooper, Dan McLaren, Adrian Fielding-Grey.
Thanks for their input. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info@ evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on bluesky atevmusings.bsky. social. I'm also on Instagram at evmusings, where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly.
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Thanks, as always, to my co-founder, Simon. You know, I had two words for him after his latest falling off the electric unicycle incident. Rider safety. He told me
Adrian:
something we're actively looking at.
Gary:
Thanks for listening.
Bye.