Blink Charging’s Seriously Practical Ways to Overcome Range Anxiety

Episode Highlights:

 

(0:00) – Introduction

(0:37) – Episode beginning

(0:47) – Background on Mike and Blink Charging

(2:11) – EV education, what’s missing?

(5:02) – How Blink Charging is playing it’s part in wider EV adoption

(8:01) – Roadside assistance for EVs

(10:19) – Episode wrap-up

 

Links

Connect With Mike Battaglia 

Check out Blink Charging

Transcript

Elena: Good afternoon, Mike, thank you so much for being here. I’m excited to have you. How are you?

Mike: I’m doing great, Elena, thanks very much and appreciate the opportunity.

Elena: We’d love for you to tell the listeners a little bit more about your backgrounds, and how blink charging has kind of played a role in your career.

Mike: Yeah, sure. So I’m one of those few people I think that kind of knew what they wanted to do as early as high school. So that was probably what more than 30 years ago 35 probably. And I knew I wanted to be in the car business way back when, and I didn’t really know exactly in what aspect but I definitely knew I wanted to be in the auto industry. And my first job out of college was working for Toyota Motor Corporation. So that’s kind of where I got my start. And so prior to joining Blink, I spent almost 15 years with J.D. Power & Associates in their automotive division. So what was interesting about that is that we got to meet with automakers across the industry, almost every automaker operating in the US was one of our clients. And regardless of the topic that we were going to talk to them about, the conversation always came back to electric vehicles. It didn’t matter what the topic was, right? They say, yeah, that was that’s great. But let’s talk about EVs right. So I said, man, that’s really something to do this. So then, you know, I was fortunate enough to join Blink about two and a half years ago.

Elena: I was just at the J.D. Power Summit in January. And guess what was the hot topic? Electric vehicles. So it’s still is the hot topic, so the reason why I started this podcast was for EV education. Right. And I think a lot of times we get caught up in all of the really cool announcements that are happening and then I think we also need to like stop and say, Okay, but how?

Mike: I’m going to start with something a little bit contrarian here. So what you see in the press right now is consumer reluctance to purchase an EV because of range anxiety, different things you see, press around the need for dealer training and getting them up to speed and all of those things are valid, but at the end of the day, and I have first hand experience of this, owning an EV is not that much different than owning an internal combustion engine car. And you know, there’s a lot being made about this kind of, in my opinion, being blown out of proportion. And, you know, it depends on who you are and how you’re using the vehicle. Right. Let me give you a couple examples. So if you live in a single family home in the suburbs, and you have two vehicles, what I think you’re gonna see happen is people are going to choose to buy one of those, one of those vehicles will transition to an EV And they’ll keep one as internal combustion, right? And so that’s kind of that transitionary period because in the normal course of someone’s day owning an EV is absolutely no different than owning an internal combustion engine, right. So they probably have a charger in their garage and that’s their gas pump, right as opposed to going to the gas station. So there’s not that range aspect that jumps into it. Now if you live in an apartment building where you can’t have a charger in let’s say your assigned spot, we have a different set of problems, right? And that’s where the infrastructure piece gets into it, things like that. Right. So that aspect is a little more education for sure. So I think a lot of it really hinges on, hey, this isn’t that much different. You need to know you know what the range of your vehicle is, you need to know how I can charge it where I can charge it, some of those basic things. And largely for the majority of the population, we’re on our way at that point. I have another funny thing to mention that as well.

Elena: Go for it.

Mike: All right, I’ll jump right in. It’s maybe not that funny, but that’s, you know, one of the things that’s, you know, was hilarious about buying our first electric vehicle in our household, and I think a lot of EV owners can attest to this. And actually, there’s data that J.D. Power provides that actually shows this. You buy an electric vehicle and it’s your first one, and you plug it in every night. So if you if you have a charger in your garage, you’re like literally every night you’re plugging it in right to make sure that it’s full, right and then as you go through the EV ownership experience, you realize you don’t have to do that at all right? And you’re plugging it in, you know, once twice a week, whatever it is, and you don’t even think about it right? So it’s that initial sort of fear and anxiety and you’re not sure what to expect and then you realize, you know what, this is actually pretty easy.

Elena: To your point, Mike it’s about figuring out is this fitting into my lifestyle and we don’t have to talk about EV subscriptions, but that’s why I kind of like that, to just try it out and kind of test the waters because it’s not that scary, right?

Mike: And I’ll tell you, you know, we actually own a fleet of 100 Chevy Bolts in the city of Los Angeles through a program that’s called Blue LA and so Blink Mobility is a subsidiary of Blink Charging, and we have an EV car sharing service in the city. And that’s exactly what this service allows for regular people in the community to rent a Chevy Bolt for 15 minutes, half an hour, 10 hours, it doesn’t matter three days, right? But they can take it out they can take it for a spin get to know it or just use it in the course of their normal daily lives or if they’re an Uber driver if they’re doing something like DoorDash you know, we have folks that are using it for that too. So it’s a great way to kind of take one first spin.

Elena: Yeah, absolutely. And experience it and experience the quietness and the acceleration I love it. Anyway, the more people that I talked to on the show, it’s like I had this crazy road trip and like some of the chargers along the route were not working and I was running on battery fumes and it was the whole thing. So we’d love your thoughts on this Mike.

Mike: Yeah, so the education piece is you know, that’s like multifaceted, right? That’s blank. It’s all the other you know, EV charging companies out there. It’s the manufacturers all of those constituents, you know, government to some degree right coming together. And, you know, making sure that the messaging is, you know, correct on this that is helping consumers to understand what it’s about and what it’s like making that jump from internal combustion to electric and so at blink, you know, we use a lot of social media right? We do a ton of social media on, you know, tips and tricks and consumer education. And, you know, we have over 400,000 drivers that are Blink members in our database. And so, what we do in fact, I just got a marketing message from our team today, right, because I’m signed up as a blink member that communication was around hey, here are some benefits to charging at home and here are things to keep in mind when you’re you know, installing a level two charger at your home and it’s things like hey, if you know if you charge at night, you know, most likely you’re going to the electricity cost is less than if you charge during the day right in some of these just little things that perhaps consumers are doing anyway. You know, so I live in an area where there’s four different electricity rate tiers, and overnight it is most definitely less expensive to charge the car. So I think just helping people understand things like that and the dealers are definitely going to be key to stuff like that. Right. So bringing the conversation back to the dealers role here, right, and they have an extremely important role. So number one, obviously it’s about knowing the product and understanding it and communicating its benefits, right for sure. But secondly, what consumers are really curious about, which is what we’ve discussed is what is this ownership experience? Like what do I need to know? Right? Tell me what I need to know. So that I don’t regret this decision or, you know, give me something to help me get over the hump of my, you know, fears and anxieties about the potential of owning nav right. So, you know, one of the things that’s interesting is this whole concept of roadside assistance. So what happened right, that’s a real fear for potentially EV drivers, right? What happens if I’m going down the road, and there’s not a charger nearby, and I run out of battery juice, right, I pull over the side of the road, what happens right? So there’s a couple different options, right. One of them is I call, you know, my roadside service provider. And I get to tow to the nearest charging station. Well, that kind of stinks, right? Because I don’t have to do that today, right with an internal combustion, right? They’ll show up with gas or whatever it might be. So we for instance, have introduced a mobile charging station which can be you know, fitted on the back of an f150 pickup truck or you know, in a in a van on a tow truck. And believe it or not, it is gasoline powered. So I know that that’s anti green and all that stuff, but it’s super cost effective. And what happens is roadside assistance company roll up to somebody I turn on this generator, and there’s a level two charging station hooked up to it. And I give that person enough juice to get to the next charging station. Right. So there are the solutions that are out there that need to be communicated right because it takes away a lot of that sort of base level fear.

Elena: Yes, Mike, thank you for filling me in. I had no idea that there was roadside assistance that Blink was involved in. Okay, so we need to really publicize this episode because people need to know about this.

Mike: Right and I’ll tell you, you know, one of the crazy aspects of this and I’m gonna you might have some listeners out there that are EV purists and they hear me say it’s a gasoline powered generator. And they’re freaking out right now. But let me tell you, here’s the key. The cost to it is a fraction of what a full battery solution is right? At some point, someday we’ll come out with a full battery solution, but when you’re stranded on the side of the road, you don’t care at that moment, what is powering the electricity into that car you just want to get to the charging station get off the highway, right so let’s let’s kind of keep it real folks.

Elena: Exactly. It is solving my specific problem that moment to get me to where I need to go. No, I love it. That’s awesome. Yeah, more people need to know about that because I follow the EV space pretty closely and that’s new. Well, Mike, we might have to do a follow up episode because I feel like I have way more questions now that we had our conversation, but in the interest of time, I would love for you to share where folks can go and connect with you. And also where they can find out more about this awesome roadside assistance with Blink.

Mike: Yeah, so obviously, blinkcharging.com give you kind of all the information you need. You can fill out a contact form we can get in touch with you. I tend to be on LinkedIn a fair amount so if you’d like to shoot me a LinkedIn invitation and we can connect there as well.

Elena: Perfect I will add Mike’s information on LinkedIn in the show notes, this has been great. I’m so so thrilled to meet you again. I wish I could have met you in person at NADA but it was not to be, but all good. Thank you for your time, this has been amazing. Thank you so much.

Mike: I appreciate the opportunity.