Shift Magazine - July 2021 - 14

After a clunky beginning, companies work
to give EV drivers a seamless charging experience
POWER PLAY GOAL
BY SEBASTIAN BLANCO
I
t's becoming a staple of electric vehicle
sales: Along with your new EV,
you get some sort of public charging
assistance.
With
some vehicles,
such
as
the
Hyundai Ioniq 5 or Mercedes-Benz EQS,
you get two years of complimentary fast
charging through Electrify America,
a
nationwide network of more than 600
public stations.
"
Then
" You used to ...
have to join a club
to get a charge. "
Robert Barrosa, Electrify America
there
are
programs such
as
General Motors' Ultium Charge 360, introduced
in April, and the FordPass Charging
Network, which give drivers access to
thousands of charging stations across
multiple third-party networks through a
single app.
It wasn't always this way. The first
mass-market EVs sold a decade ago certainly
didn't come with any free charging
plans - not until Tesla offered no-cost
sessions at its Supercharger stations in
2012 and Nissan created No Charge to
Charge in 2013. In the intervening years,
access to public charging in the U.S. has
been hit or miss, with any individual's personal
access dependent on location and
local EV support.
" That's what you've seen over the last
eight years, and that gives the impression
that the infrastructure out there is
horrible, " said Robert Barrosa, Electrify
America's senior director of sales,
14 shift * july 2021
Mercedes EQS: The sedan comes with two years of complimentary fast charging.
business development and marketing.
For EV drivers, public charging " solutions "
often required membership in a
multitude of charging networks such as
ChargePoint, Blink Charging and EVgo,
each of which had a unique access card or
app login. In some places, stations were
rare and regularly inoperable. Without
home charging, which is how most electric
vehicle drivers fuel up, EVs may never have
taken off.
Jay Friedland, senior policy adviser at
Plug In America, has seen all of this chaos
in his years of EV advocacy. Now, he said,
it's the best of times and the worst of
times for EV charging.
The way automakers are bundling highpower
home chargers with their new EVs
- the Ford F-150 Lightning can be ordered
with an 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro,
for example - the increase in workplace
chargers and the long-awaited arrival of
"

https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/gm-launches-ultium-charge-360-simplify-ev-charging https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/ford-taps-ev-charging-networks https://www.autonews.com/mobility-report/ford-taps-ev-charging-networks https://www.autonews.com/article/20120925/OEM05/120929936/tesla-creating-100-station-ev-fast-charging-network-in-u-s https://www.autonews.com/article/20140723/OEM05/140729942/nissan-to-add-l-a-to-no-charge-to-charge-leaf-promotion https://www.autonews.com/article/20140723/OEM05/140729942/nissan-to-add-l-a-to-no-charge-to-charge-leaf-promotion

Shift Magazine - July 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Shift Magazine - July 2021