The Latest and Greatest in Fleet Electrification with Blink Charging

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”

Episode Highlights:

 

(0:00) – Introduction

(0:36) – Episode beginning

(0:47) – Some background on Amy Dobrikova

(1:34) – Work Truck Week, “EV Foundations”

(4:03) – An exciting announcement

(5:07) – Fleet ownership and electrification

(6:46) – Upcoming events with Amy

Links

Connect With Amy Dobrikova

Transcript

Elena: Amy is here, and I’m so excited to have her on the show. Amy, how are you?

Amy: I’m doing great. Thank you for having me on today.

Elena: Please bring the audience up to speed a little bit more about your background in automotive and how you got to where you are today.

Amy: Sure. So Amy Dobrikova Vice President of Fleet Solutions for Blink Charging. I’ve been with the company for about a year and a half. I’ve been in electrification for 15 years now. I studied Business and Entrepreneurship and you know, got a job right out of college working for a startup that was selling into the fleet industry and electric vehicle and so that’s how I got my start. And it’s just so exciting to be here in the forefront of all of these years of hard work and finally seeing the fruits of the labor that everyone in the Evie industry has been investing in over the last few decades.

Elena: Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. I think it’s just such an exciting time to be in this space. would love for you to talk a little bit more about the presentation that you did. I believe it was at work truck.

Amy: Yeah, it was invited to speak at the Green Tech Summit during Work Truck Week and the topic was EV foundations, charging your infrastructure. And so I got a creative idea working with my league team to use Legos as our demonstration and so you know, I passed out Legos to the audience and asked them to put the Legos in the order based on they think the steps are for building out any of the infrastructure and there’s things like you know, selecting your hardware, you know, applying for funding, you know, site visits, and so forth and then throughout my presentation, I presented on the order that I recommend, however, you know, it doesn’t always fit every application, but for the most part, you know, I always suggest start with the funding. Where does the money come from right now? We are in amazing times. There’s so much funding out there to drive EV adoption, whether that’s tax credits or utilities or grants or rebates, or federal incentives that you know, for disadvantaged communities and so forth. So I always tell my customers, let’s look at all the properties and start with the money. So that was kind of the first foundation and then you need to know well what vehicles are you going to be buying? Because if you don’t know what vehicles you’re specking you don’t know which chargers to go with. And so I always work with leads to you know, understand, are you getting, you know, light duty, medium duty heavy duty, is it going to be AC powered or DC powered. All of that makes a decision on what hardware you’re going to select. So you know we’ve kind of went through each of the different steps and once you identify the hardware, then you identify, you know, get a site visit out there. Let’s see, do you have enough power? Are you going to need to upgrade your facilities to increase your power and so forth. So it was a fun time.

Elena: Yeah, it’s such a creative idea. And anytime somebody uses props during a presentation, I always give you a gold star because it just draws the audience in. You can really visualize those steps that you’re taking to build your infrastructure. Speaking of fleet and electrification link just came out with another really amazing announcement around the US Postal Service. Tell us a little bit more about this announcement.

Amy: All right. Yeah. So I mean, the United States Postal Service has been evaluating, you know, what they’re going to do. And I worked with them 15 years ago, when they were still trying to decide which path to go. And I’m glad they chose electrification. And so you know that they were going to be purchasing significant number of vehicles from Oshkosh and Ford and so forth. Well, they’re going to need hardware and infrastructure and so Blink is very excited to be selected as one of the three Evie charging providers to support USPS and their growth for evey adoption. And I think our biggest strength is, you know, we meet by American compliance so our hardware is manufactured in the United States, which is perfect when you’re going to be fueling with electricity or electric vehicle fleet from the post office.

Elena: Yeah, no, so so cool. I am waiting for the day when I see an electric I think my dog is gonna go crazy because he already chases the rental truck there. So it’s gonna be it’ll seem like it’ll be so quiet. Let’s talk a little bit more about fleet ownership and electrification. I know Amy, that you do a lot of education a lot. This whole show is really about bringing Evie education to the masses. And so if you had one message if you had to put a message on a billboard about, well, it would be a billboard for fleet owners. What would you want that billboard to say or what is the message around electrification that you have?

Amy: I would say “electrification is now.” So we always were saying, Well, it’s the future. Is electrification are the future is this or that? No, it is here. Now, when you have automakers producing 100% electric vehicles or making commitments to go fully electric or you know the statistics say by 2030 50% of the manufacturers are going to be producing electric vehicles. 50% So you’re gonna walk into a car dealership, and half the lot is going to be internal combustion engine and the other half is going to be electric. That is a game changer. That means it’s here. Now, they’re not changing their plans. You know, people ask me all the time. Well, the administration changes, you know, are we going to lose, you know, funding is electrification gonna go away? No, it will not because it’s already in motion. The OEMs are building the vehicles. The charging infrastructure is getting deployed all across the nation through different you know, infrastructure programs, through home charging, now it’s readily accessible to get home chargers to, you know, plug a percent of you know, vehicles are charged at home and I have a lot of places that have taken vehicles and we have a home charging program for them. And so yeah, this is the future is here.

Elena: I know you travel a lot you go to conferences. I’m a big proponent of going to conferences and meeting people in real life although this of course, is is lovely. Over zoom. So give us an idea of any other conference that you have coming up in the spring, or folks can even reach out to you.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m kind of known on LinkedIn. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, but we’re going to be at the NAFA conference in April in Baltimore. So we will be exhibiting and having a booth there meeting with league managers all across the nation. And then in May, there’s the ACT Expo alternative clean transportation, which is going to be in Anaheim, California, the first week of May so we’ll we’ll also have a nice large booth there and be meeting with a lot of the commercial fleets. so a lot of fun stuff coming.

Elena: Yes, absolutely, well, I’ll put that in the show notes. So be sure to connect with Amy and talk all things fleet and electrification. So Amy, it’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for your time. I know you are traveling like crazy, so I appreciate you just staying stationary for a couple of minutes here.

Amy: No, thank you. I really appreciate it and you know keep driving, you know, the education and the vision for electrification.

Elena: Will do!