Addressing the Challenges of the EV Experience with Parkopedia

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Transcript

Elena: Adam is here from Parkopedia and I’m so excited to have you on the show and talk about what you do what you’re excited about in electrification. So, Adam, thank you so much for being here today.

Adam: Thank you for the invite real pleasure. Thank you,

Elena: Adam. You have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening, what’s going on. So we’d love for you to talk about your story, your background, and what kind of got you excited to start working with Parkopedia?

Adam: Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I agree. It’s an absolutely interesting cross section. Now I think what’s happening in the North American market in EV is super interesting. And the speed now which was seeing developments and the amount of companies and startups here is one of the big players who are coming more into the market. from a European perspective. When we look at the US market from Europe, I think it’s taking quite a long time to pick up speed and get to this point. There’s still quite a lot of challenges in the North American market to drive it so distances are much bigger, for example, and I think there’s not so much of a appetite among everyone for EV but you can see it’s changing and you can see it’s coming. And I think that’s super exciting. And I’m really happy to be here to be a part of that. I’m a bit of a veteran now in the EV space, I would say I’ve been involved in EV for 12 or 13 years. A lot of the gray hairs which maybe don’t get picked up on a podcast are responsible for EV I started by co-founding a company back in 2012. They’re based out of Berlin and in Germany. This company was called Plugsurfing and now that at that point in time, it was really early stage concept where we believed that Evie was going to be this massive thing which took off in 2014. And we all thought we would be billionaires by 2015. That didn’t quite happen. But at the time, that was an app which was designed to overcome the whole fragmented European CPO landscape that we have. So you have a huge amount of very small operators in Europe and paying for charging them finding a charging point it was really difficult. And we then founded this company which overcame that which was I think we didn’t know the term at the time but it’s since become known as an EMSP. And that was really the start of my journey to education and seeing how EV really took off and that was incredibly slow arduous work. So in Europe at that point in time as well. No one really, really believed in EV until there was this turning point around the time of diesel gate. And when that happened in about 2016 or so suddenly the floodgates opened and I think governments and industries around the world realized that the transition had to be made towards emission free transport and then that is when the me the EV market started to really take off. I sold that company in 2018, then looking for new challenges and that brought me into Parkopedia, which is a remarkable company in the way that it has such a huge footprint and so many integrations into the automotive companies themselves and I find that really exciting because how can we leverage that to create a really good EV driver experiences? So even though I’ve been involved in the EV industry for 13 years, what I haven’t obviously managed to achieve is fixing all the EV driver experiences at the moment because what we learn from everyone we talked to is driving an electric car wherever you are is still pretty terrible, right? And we need to work on that to fix it.

Elena: And I would love to just pull on that thread a little bit more about the driver experience and kind of the pains and the challenges that a driver will face like inevitably especially here in the US. So talk me through on some of the things that you’re thinking about, you know, you have the consumer, the end user in mind, what are the ways that you think about customer experience in this gigantic framework of electric vehicles?

Adam: One of the main things about EV is it’s a huge behavioral change for people to come to terms with right and we have to remember that some of the characteristics of the EV market is not necessarily always being pushed by desire to drive in the EV. But there’s a lot of government mandates out there. So even in the US has very strict mandates in place for when there’s going to be ICE car phase out. This is the same across Europe and then that means that the people are almost forced to a certain extent to change the EV we come to conferences like this and you end up in your bubble where people love to talk about charging we love to you know really obsess about all the small my money shy around charging but the reality is driver doesn’t care, right? They don’t want to think about it at all. It’s something they would love for charging just to be as simple as fueling up normal gas car and anything away from that is just a complete hassle for that driver who has more and more things to do in their in their day like you know, go to work, go to the dentist, whatever it is that they got to do, right people have normal lives. So we look at it from that perspective. That’s what we need to achieve. This is really streamlined service where people don’t need to think about charging, but so difficult to get through. And the reason being is because behind this huge transition, we’ve got two major industries which are being disrupted, which is the energy industry and we’ve got the automotive industry. These are not used to working together at all. They do not know how to work with each other with literally huge fragmentation of the market. That’s a huge power struggle about who’s really in control of this market. And it’s what we’ve also seen is because frankly, EV charging something which is really needed, but there’s also very little money involved in at the moment which has meant that the market suffered from chronic under investment from say venture companies etc. So you’ve got something which needs to be really streamlined software backed companies, but they’re all running a lot of the time on very immature services. There’s a lot of analog processes behind all the digitalization you know what this really means in real life is is it leads to drivers not trusting the quality of the charging service, not being able to find the charging points. Once they get they’re not getting the service expect or being too expensive, not understanding the process. All of these things can go wrong. And we found out when we did our driver services that we interviewed 1000s and 1000s of EV drivers and non EV drivers and we found out that 48% of people that currently drive a combustion engine car are not thinking of buying a unit right there. No one wants to do that if you send them an EV drivers would also like to switch back to an ICE and that is a huge problem. So on the one hand, we’re saying we need to make this huge transition the drivers need to move electric we know the car companies need to sell these electric cars. But what we’re also sitting in society is so bad that the drivers don’t want to buy them. Right. So a lot of the time that that’s the case. So how are we going to fix that and what are we going to do together and that’s what we need to figure out.

Elena: Are you seeing a lot of collaboration, even within like startups? You know, we’re here at MOVE America. There’s a whole you know, startup row here.

Adam: I don’t think we’ve seen enough of this to be quite frank. So I think you can hit the automotive company into two different groups. These are the ones that really genuinely care about the driver and they understand EV. These might typically be the new EV companies that are out there that are EV from the ground up the pure play, they know they need to fix problems, they are very keen. On the other hand, you’ve then got the more traditional OEMs who know that somehow they need to get into EV in the future or they’re doing it now. Right but the bulk of probably their revenue and their sales are still traditional combustion engine cars. And for them a lot of the features which they’re building now have had to tick the box they know that they need to get POI data in the car to help drivers find charging points. But are they concerned whether that data is correct or not? How concerned are they? They know that they have to help provide USPS so that payment services to help drivers pay for EV charging but are they willing to give that driver more choice? Or are they maybe obsessing over complete ownership of that customer just to help fulfill their old legacy business models? So I think we’re seeing like some collaboration needs to happen. It’s moving to the area of smart charging for example, if the grid is able to cope with EV in the future, which it is right if you get it right then that collaboration often needs to happen. But we’re not seeing it fast enough. And we’re not seeing enough of it. And I think you know all of these true more traditional companies need to sort of unbutton the top of their collars and loosen their ties a bit and then open up to collaboration in much more friendly ways which agile startups can then get involved in.

Elena: What are you really excited about to work on in the next year, the next five years?

Adam: I think we sort of outlined the problems with the industry now right we focused on the problems which is the huge fragmentation which exists between all of the players. I think the reason that that I got out of bed to work on Parkopedia is because I see the we play a role in bringing together this fragmentation and then overcoming this for the driver. If you look at you know what is a good EV experience today. I think everyone would probably agree that it’s a Tesla right and the way it has been able to achieve charger and if you drive a Tesla you never worry about charging everything about any of it. It just the systems are so integrated, that means that you can just turn find a charge of what you know is going to work and then you can just charge your car and get on the reason of course that tests are gonna have huge investment into building up a big vertical stack which which means that I have control over revenue. Now, what we need to achieve is how we get this Tesla-like experience for non-Tesla drivers and that is bringing together all of these fragmented partners and that’s something which I think Parkopedia as an independent, relatively or completely neutral partner in the middle between these different industries is able to achieve so we already have, for example, all of the integrations with most major car companies globally. We work in China, the US and North America and Europe. We’re building up now all of these connections and OCPA integrations with all of the different charging point operators and MSPs across the globe. And this means that with our attention to the quality and the more of the integrations we have, we can leverage that to make sure that we can provide for example, very accurate POI data in the car. So the driver knows where they have to go in order to charge we can then make sure that the driver is aware of how much it’s going to cost to charge we can then provide choices for income payments so that they can pay for charging as well as paying for parking from that head unit of the car as well and bring all of this together in a much more streamlined user journey. And I think if we can achieve that contribute towards that we’re gonna see those figures are reduced when we’re talking about whether EV drivers want to buy an EV again, right? We said 30% of EV drivers don’t want to do that. Can we bring that down? Can we make that EV driving experience so good that drivers just forget about the pains of charging and that’s an objective that I still think is unfulfilled in what we’re doing.

Elena: Thank you for being here. Adam. This was a lovely conversation. I also wanted to give you a chance to talk about how people can reach out to you if they want to either follow up with you learn more about Parkopedia, where can folks do that?

Adam: Yeah, thank you very much. So in LinkedIn is probably the best places to take care about. I’m always on LinkedIn. So Adam, will ya find me on that. It’s also the Parkopedia web pages on there, sign up, follow us and then get in touch. We always love to hear everybody so that we can learn much more about the market and make sure that we develop a great, great product.