Cracking the code on level 2 home charging with treehouse
Episode 39
What was once a complete burden for any new EV owner, “at home” Level 2 charging installation has now been simplified and transformed into an amazing experience, courtesy of the brilliant minds at Treehouse. Press play to hear Alex David, Co-founder and COO of Treehouse discuss their innovative solution to a problematic EV retail experience through the use of their machine learning algorithm that provides price certainty for home charging installations right inside the dealership’s F&I office. Oh and by the way, they can also integrate a payment for the charging installation right into the vehicle purchase process, reducing burden and expenses for customers and increasing profitability for dealers.
This episode is sponsored by DriveItAway. Whether you’re looking to rent, buy, or simply test out an EV, DriveItAway puts you in the driver’s seat. Visit driveitaway.com for more details. OTC: “DWAY”
Transcript
Elena: Welcome to the show!
Alex: Thanks so much for having us. Yeah. Great to be here.
Elena: I’m excited to just talk about Treehouse, what you’re doing, your background, and how your path has led to what you’re doing today. So, talk a little bit more about your story.
Alex: Yeah. I like many folks in the mobility or mobility adjacent space. I grew up in Detroit. So I started my life in and around cars and so my earliest memories were my parents, you know, getting dressed up and what for the West Wing fans is President Bartlett would say the penguin suit headed to the auto show at Cobo Center and every August watching all the exotic cars start rolling down Woodward. So you know, mobility was a part of my life and a part of my community. From a very early age. But if I were to kind of describe the niche of the industry that I’ve spent my time focusing on I would, I would describe it as sustainable mobility. Before Treehouse I spent about four years building and scaling a peer to peer car sharing company called the Avail that was built out of All State helping people to share their primary vehicle and other Airbnb for cars as cars are 5% of the time – on average.
Elena: That’s crazy. We should get back to that but I’ll let you finish that it’s crazy.
Alex: It’s a really it’s a really low number, especially for how much we spend on them and how car I’d say car obsessed in our country. Is but anyways, we were working on that problem. Had a blast and ended up linking out with with my five person co founding team at Treehouse to focus on a different part of mobility and making mobility much more sustainable and that’s where I’m at. You know, the EV revolution spent a lot of time getting to know the space, the customer journey. And we felt like you know, the part that we really want to tackle is is charging and the installation of charging. There is so much public discourse on level three, charging and importantly so many of your guests have spent a lot of time working on this problem is hard. But it’s also in some ways, really secondary from a experiential perspective to level two. Right? I mean, we have you know, I think the common refrain is 80% of charging is done at home. We actually just chatting with an OEM last week about this their onboard data than 95% for their customers. Three out of four customers are upgrading to home charging within 30 days of getting an EVs and so much of the experience of owning an EV the convenience and the cost of it which we can talk more about is all at home, yet we have this extraordinarily fragmented base of contractors who are being tasked with actually fulfilling the last mile there so we decided to tackle that problem head on what I love about the treehouse gotten team is very much not afraid of hard problems. We just dove right in and building a 21st century electrical contractor and we were licensed electricians we’re sending w two electricians in customers homes, combined with all kinds of really cool technology which we can talk about how that’s changing the auto retail experience. But that’s that’s our story and how we decided to focus where we’re focused.
Elena: It’s so great. I love to hear the backstory of Treehouse because you’re solving a very specific problem and it’s just great to see that innovation at work. So let’s talk about the retail level. Let’s talk about the dealership. Let’s talk about the problems that you and your team are helping to solve at the dealership level. So kind of walk me through if I’m a dealer and I know nothing about Treehouse. What are some things that you would like I would love for them to know?
Alex: Absolutely. We’ve talked about how much of charging is done at home. Today. So many customers are walking out of the dealership focused on level one or level three charging is what they assume will be their default de facto mode of charging their vehicle. And dealers aren’t really well equipped to have a conversation with them about how they might actually get level two in their home in some version of go figure out and you see this even in luxury stores. I mean, I was just visiting one of our delivery center operating procedures telling customers to download Plugshare still go to Google Maps and look for gas stations. That’s the equivalent of that right? A lot of folks would point to gold standard gear and the Tesla experiences online Yellow Pages of finding an electrician it really has been a customer driven problem to go sell to date. And that does a couple of things. It drives down customer satisfaction with the vehicle that they’ve just purchased because they can’t do it overnight. That leads to a spike in return returns early on in the Evie buying journey because you are not pleased with how they’re having to charge their car. It’s driving up out of pocket expense, because they have the second bill that’s coming due to an electrician and it’s just it’s just placing a lot of burden on customers because it’s very much a two step transaction for something that is so foundational to enjoying the car. So what we have done at Treehouse is ask ourselves how can we integrate the purchase of home charging into the retail experience? So what we’ve done is built a machine learning algorithm that tackles what we believe is the reason this hasn’t happened yet. And that is giving customers and dealers certainty around price of a home charging installation. So without getting into you know all the complexity, what’s underneath the huddle, basically predicting is this customer going to need Do they have enough capacity on their panel to put in the charger? And if so, you know, here’s here’s the quote, and if we determine they don’t get to see then we’ll add what’s called a load management device provide a quote rather than there. We’re pulling in municipal specific permit pricing, we’re allowing the customer to purchase hardware so we’re giving a fully accurate instant guaranteed down to the penny quote to customers in an auto retail setting. They don’t need to be you know, we don’t we’re not asking customers to set their electrical panel and in two minutes they have a guaranteed price. And that lets dealers and empowers them to have a conversation with customers about home charging. And really importantly it allows them to finance that as part of the vehicle transaction. So now you can have this conversation with customers where instead of that, go figure this out. Maybe they’ll spend $2,000 cash in two weeks after a frustrating journey. Now it’s like what’s actually before he dollars more a car payment over five years, and that we found really changes the dynamic of the purchase and integrates this really critical accessory in some ways into the purchase of the vehicle.
Elena: It’s so brilliant, because you’re really solving this key question in people’s minds as to okay yes, I just bought a Volkswagen ID 4 yes, we’re doing an episode in the Volkswagen ID 4 later today. But yes, so I just bought this but by the way, I now have to figure out how to do level two at home. So it really makes it so that it’s almost a no brainer. You guys have really cracked the code on it.
Alex: A little bit of like, oh my God, we’ve been seeking that price certainty. And now that we have it, you know, how fast can we go? That’s it. There are a couple of areas where we tend to spend more time with our retail partners or in our, in our discussions with them. One is is fulfillment, how long it’s going to take between the work and I think we’re talking a lot about the software that we’ve built to enable the in store retail experience but equally as importantly, as I mentioned earlier, we are licensed contractors, we are actually sending w two employees of ours into customers homes to fulfill this work and that has given our partners tremendous peace of mind because what they don’t want is you help me price this and then you farm this out to some network of, you know, contractors have no relationship with me, don’t value our share customer and that just lacks trust in their mind. So that’s been a really important piece of it. Then the second is is practice obviously right people are always really keen to understand how much it’s gonna cost. And that’s really where the financing piece comes in. Is okay, how can we work together and partner to take this historically large out of pocket cost and roll this into real estate and I think that those two, those two experiential unlocks, are really where are we seeing our partners get the most excited.
Elena: Yeah, that makes so much sense and I love how you kind of break it down and making sure that yes, it is a shared customer, right and you want to have a great experience across the board. And also to been talking a lot. Just a ton of people at the conference. And you know, this is the one theme that keeps coming up over and over again is customer experience. How can we make it better? How can we just surprise and delight and get folks just again, excited to try something new and I feel like this is just such a great way to put somebody’s mind at ease and just take care of before it’s just oh my hit the easy button that’s done.
Alex: We’ve actually heard that refrain a lot. You’re the easy button. Ah Staples has done a really nice job that’s stuck in our brain. So that’s exactly how we view it. All of those points. I think you’re spot on if we do view it as our shared customers and we absolutely feel like this is such a critical a such a critical experience to deliver to customers, especially now as we transition from, you know, these early adopters to the more mainstream consumer where people were excited to research home charging options they were looking they were reading you know inside EVs reviews of different charging harbour that’s not today’s customer. Today’s customer wants this taken care of they want this done give me and some of these customers and state especially as we try to grow into the sale forecasts that we’re seeing on EVs. There’s going to be more selling done for customers in terms of an ice versus an EV. I think historically it was EV versus EV, right? Am I gonna go with this or that? Now we’re going to actually need to be empowering our retail partners to sell against a gas equivalent. And this is there’s so much data we will see here. This is such a big hang up for customers. How am I going to charge this thing and the ability to keep that customer in the store and say this is how it’s gonna get done. This is how much it’s gonna cost me you are going to walk out of here with this – it’s a total paradigm shift.
Elena: I think it’s also to a weight is lifted. A weight is lifted off of the customer and the weight is lifted off of the salesperson or whoever’s in the F&I office, so that it’s just it’s there, and you’re and you’re not having to do any of these, you know, crazy song and dance around it. Because a lot of the feedback I’ve also heard too, is you know, if I sell this EV, I’m gonna get 1000 questions after the fact. I don’t have time for all these questions. I need to go back. So I need to sell cars. So I think again, it’s solves so many issues just right up front there. So I gotta ask you, Alex. 2024. Where are you excited to work on you and the team at Treehouse? What are some really cool things that you got coming up?
Alex: First and foremost is geographic expansion. Right? We were as I mentioned, we’re a licensed contractor. That means we have to go through licensing processes, and we’re licensed today in 10 states. We plan to end 2024 with effectively the entire contiguous United States covered as well as parts of Canada. So that’s a huge part of our roadmap we’re really excited about not only you know where we stand with our current footprint, but also the fact that we have these regional and national partners who are can’t wait to pull us into these new markets together, and partner on that expansion. So we’re really excited about geographic expansion. And we’re also we’re of electrification services business. We don’t only have an eye on an Eevee charging, no one was talking to us today. So I’ll leave some of those details out but we’re eager to also expand our service offering to our customers.
Elena: That’s super exciting. All right. Well, obviously we will need an update. Right. We’re gonna we monitor next year. Yes. And I think even sooner though, because there’s going to be so many opportunities for you guys to just keeps growing and expanding. I’m excited to just follow the journey. It’s going to be it’s going to be incredible. So Alex, thank you so much for your time. If there’s any place on the internet that you would like people to reach out to you?
Alex: We would love to love to chat but to help you the installation if you need one. You can find us at Treehouse.pro (pro is in short for professionals), if you want to get an estimate for installation. Or if you want to reach out to me via our partner form or you can also ping me directly at alex@treehouse.pro
Elena: Perfect. All of that information is going to be in the show notes. Alex, it was so good to meet you. I’m so glad you’re here at Used Car Week. This has been awesome. I’m excited again to see what awesome things you guys are up to at Treehouse in the next year.
Alex: Thank you for having me and thank you for all the work that you’ve done to keep keep us up to date on the latest and greatest in the industry.