Transcription

00: 00:11

00: Welcome to the IAA Mobility visionary Club Podcast. Here we explore the intersection of technology, transportation, and sustainability. This podcast is created in collab with our knowledge partner, the Boston Consulting Group. In the Visionary Club podcast, our host is an AI generated voice, but the insights and perspectives shared by our guests are purely human. Each episode features two visionaries who bring their diverse professional backgrounds and personal experiences to the table.

00: 00:47

00: Today we welcome Roger Atkins, founder of electric Vehicles Outlook, and Lars Jacobs, vice president, e mobility service provider and digital solutions at EnBW. Would you like to introduce yourselves briefly? Lars, let's start with you. Hi. Thank you.

00: 01:07

00: My name is Lars. I work at EnBW, and it's not just one of the largest energy companies in Germany, but it's also one of the drivers behind Emobility and e mobility infrastructure. So at EnBW, I'm responsible for the EMSP function, which consists of pricing of product management, not just nationwide for our own charging units, but also for the 500,000 charging site or charging points that we offer in 17 countries in Europe, across Europe, but also the roaming function and the digital solutions element of it. Most notably, part of that is our flagship product, the Mobility Plus app, with over 2 million downloads to date. So we think of great products, think of great pricing, and then deliver great digital tools to make the ease or the transformation into the Emobility realm for our customers as convenient and as smooth as possible.

00: 02:01

00: Thank you. How about you, Roger? Please introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Roger Atkins. I'm a LinkedIn storyteller.

00: 02:10

00: I've been doing that for many years now. I have an audience which works with me. There's a lot of interaction there, so I get to find out about interesting technology, interesting companies, interesting people, and join the dots between all of that, my background has been in automotive for many years, almost 40 years, and half of that has been centered around electric vehicles. So I like to talk about the technology. I like to talk about batteries, building of batteries.

00: 02:39

00: So on the one side, how is the energy going to be stored not just in the electric vehicle revolution, but also in the renewable energy revolution? Storage for intermittent renewables, of course, is pretty central. And then on the other side, understanding where the charging dynamic can work, how that works with whatever battery technology. We've got different innovations in charging technology, such as battery swapping, wireless charging, et cetera. And yes, I talk to people all around the world about that.

00: 03:09

00: And I'm a storyteller by way of then sharing what I learn with my audience on LinkedIn. Nice to meet you. In this episode, our guests will share their knowledge and expertise on topics such as electrification, customer sentiments, and charging networks. They will also provide personal anecdotes and insights that add a human touch to our discussions. Join us as we dive into the fascinating worlds of mobility and discover how it impacts our lives in ways we may have never imagined.

00: 03:43

00: Lars roger, we have prepared questions for you. Please take turns choosing questions. Would you like to start? Roger. Yes, I would.

00: 03:56

00: Yes. Business models, level three, please. What innovative financial strategies or public private partnerships can be explored to overcome the financial hurdles linked with the rollout of charging infrastructure in rural areas? That's a great question. I think the fact that in reality, society is very different.

00: 04:19

00: There are economies of scale, of course there are in cities. But yes, when you get into rural areas and certain other aspects of where people live and where people work, you got to have a different business model. And I think this is the place for government often to then step in and have a process of being able to help support, balance, subsidize, whichever word you want to use. That fact. We need rural communities.

00: 04:43

00: A lot of them are anchored around agriculture and producing food, and that's pretty significant for the whole of society. So I think that there's never a one size fits all in a lot of these when it comes to business models. And I do think there is opportunity then where you have some of these, whether you want to call them margins or exceptions or whatever, where you do need to cross subsidize, cross pollinate, if you like, ideas and innovations to make that work. What do you think? Lars definitely.

00: 05:15

00: And I also think there's many ways to go about it and what we've seen or the way we look at it. If we build our infrastructure, we look at it as a network much more than look at it as a single sidestep for building that makes sense. So we want to make sure that if a customer charges at Force of Disruption, they can navigate through Germany without a pain. That also includes sometimes investing into more rural areas versus just focusing on optimization strategy that is focused around single sites. So it's the network approach that we're building.

00: 05:48

00: We're building a network of charging stations, and that also includes rural areas. Now, what we also do, we partner with retailers. And I think that's a way to think about how do you integrate the charging experience in your day to day world, in your day to day reality? It's different, right, than charging a cart and filling up the gas at a combustion engine car. So what we do is we cooperate with supermarkets, for example, and build charging infrastructure at their parking lots so that people can shop and charge at the same time.

00: 06:16

00: And I think that's really also one of the key elements, right? Understand where your customers are, understand how your customers integrate the charging experience into their daily routines. And that, of course, involves highway charging units. It involves rural areas. It involves retailers that we need to cooperate with, and also to just also address the urban customer, right.

00: 06:39

00: I think rural area is definitely one important aspect. But let's not forget, a lot of people live in the cities, a lot of people live in rental units, and that do not necessarily have the option to integrate wall boxes or charging infrastructure at their houses. That's all different customer needs we need to cater to. Which is why we say, okay, let's focus on building partnerships with retailers, with companies, build that infrastructure and just not take a single unilateral approach, if you will, to charging and charging infrastructure, but just cover the whole public charging domain. Thank you.

00: 07:15

00: Please choose your next question. Shall I have a go at it, Roger? Yeah, go on customer sentiments. And then I'll go for the safe haven. I'll go for level two.

00: 07:26

00: What strategies can be implemented to overcome range concerns for electric vehicle owners in rural areas where the availability of charging stations may be less frequent? Great question. I think range anxiety is still at the forefront of many people's minds. Right. I think I made this switch from a combustion engine car to e cars two years ago.

00: 07:48

00: And of course, I was worried a little bit in advance thinking about, okay, what's it going to be like? Where am I going to find charging infrastructure? Is it going to work out? Now, obviously, we have an app that doesn't just include the Mobility Plus charging stations or the DMVW charging unit, but we say, okay, no, you can charge with our product. You can charge at virtually any charging point you'll find along the way, just sort of to take that charge with that range anxiety away from the customer.

00: 08:17

00: And at the same time, I also think as an industry, we should be cognizant of the fact that what we promise or that we push in terms of marketing is not necessarily the daily experience of a customer. Right? So when you buy a car, the first thing you'll hear is, oh, charge from one to charge 100 minutes. And then customers wonder the first time they go, charge why that's not a reality. And it reminds me a little bit of the telco background that I have, right, where you have DSL speeds.

00: 08:44

00: And your marketing claim is a little bit different from what the experience is in the end for the customer. And that's also what I see when I talk to customers or when I read the customer feedback from unused blogs. What customers want to know is, okay, how is it different? And how come I do not get that charging speed? Oh, it says there's a 300 kw charger, but then why do I not get 300 kw as a charging speed in the car?

00: 09:12

00: I think we need to be very clear and also honest about what it is we promise our customers and how our customers are going to integrate this or what they're going to experience on the day to day. Yeah, I think a lot of what you said, there echoes my observation experience that a lot of perception people have before they have an EV is very different from the reality. You relax a lot more once you have an EV and you realize you don't have to charge it full all the time, every time. And that you can just operate a lot of the time on a 60, 50, 40% state of charge in your battery without having that anxiety. I think another thing I'd add is there's a huge opportunity with community charging.

00: 09:59

00: I think when we talk about the numbers of chargers, we of course talk about companies like yours and other companies that we've got in Germany, all around Europe and all over the world. But what we also have is a huge resource of domestic private chargers that are now with various business models. I actually went out on the road and saw some of this yesterday. I saw a host and I saw a charge e. So a company called Cocharger who are basically offering up this facility to bring people together so that you can actually help people when the charger isn't being used on someone's drive.

00: 10:37

00: And it's practical to do it at a point in time, whenever to hook up to that. So there are all sorts of ways in which I think society can be more collaborative. You've mentioned that before in some of what you've talked about, Lars. And I think there's a big opportunity here with electric mobility to not just deal with the technology differently, but take a different approach to it, a much more collaborative community approach. And I think that's really quite exciting.

00: 11:08

00: Yes, I agree completely. And at the same time, I think we should just be very realistic about what we tell our customers or what we tell the people that are our new customers, what the daily realities of a charging experience will like. And one of the things that sometimes irks me a little bit is when we do stuff like we have a hardcore community of early adopters right in the emobility industry. And then sometimes we tend to illegitimize the concerns people have about range and about convenience because it is different. And obviously when you say something like you've seen the statistics many times, I think, Roger, we only drive on average 6 km.

00: 11:47

00: Therefore range of 300 km is not an issue. But it's not really the point is the point is I'm driving to my parents daily at 140 km away. And before I would go drive back and forth without thinking about it, now I need a charging stop. It's an inconvenience. It doesn't matter how you phrase it from my perception, it's an inconvenience.

00: 12:07

00: I don't do that every day, I don't do that every month. So it's not necessarily a problem, but it's something I need to think about. It's something where I need to change my daily routine in order to make it work. And I think that's the one thing, I think, as an industry, as frontrunners and early adopters, we need to be a tiny bit mindful of the whole mass market wave is still ahead of us. It's new people, people that are new to the whole concept of driving an EV and how that charging experience looked like, what that experience looked like and what it feels like.

00: 12:38

00: And so, Japanese, let's be real about the difference in experience of charging an EV car, charging the battery, integrating it into your routines. It's different. It's not comparable to a combustion engine, fuel refill. There's a German word I'm going to use richtig. Thank you.

00: 12:55

00: Please choose your next question. Okay, let's do another question. Electrification of future mobility. Level three again, please. As the rise of mobility as a service is predicted to dissuade individuals from personal car ownership, leading to more constant usage of shared vehicles, how do you think this will influence charging habits?

00: 13:17

00: Furthermore, how should such changes be incorporated into the planning and development of EV charging infrastructure? I think this is a hugely significant question, in that if we simply design a charging infrastructure that in a way reflects the last hundred years, we're going to get it wrong. The world is going to change. We are seeing more collaboration in so many ways, and we're certainly seeing a shift towards sharing or another phrase would be circular economics, whereby we maximize the utilization of very expensive assets. And electric vehicles, however you want to describe it, have a lot of money spent on them in terms of research and development, and certainly the battery in particular, there's a lot of resource involved in that.

00: 14:09

00: So we've got to maximize the utilization of that as much as possible. So I think we have to reflect very carefully on how we do this. I think we have to have a longer term view rather than simply looking at dates three or four or five years out. I think it's important maybe to go 50 years out and reflect and consider, do some I suppose you'd call it reverse engineering in our thinking, and then maybe think about 30 years and then 20 years, not just keep fixated on dates like 2000 and 32,035. And again, for infrastructure, it's never a short term investment.

00: 14:44

00: You've got to be looking at a number of decades to get these things right. So that would be my sense. What about you, Lars? I think definitely a lot of what you said resonates well with me. And look, we are at the early stages of the whole e mobility transition.

00: 15:00

00: Yes, we're growing. Yes, it's matured, or the industry has matured a lot since in a few years, but the best is yet to come, I would almost say, because there's so many customer inflow that's coming, there's so much infrastructure that's still going to be built, and I think the world tomorrow will look different than the world today. But you build for not just tomorrow, but for the day after tomorrow, almost, right. We're building an infrastructure that's going to last decades and that's going to provide our customers the support they need to make this whole transition into emobility work. And that's why we also, to give you a concrete example, we build sites, or we acquire sites and we build them with a couple of charging points, like six or eight charging units on there.

00: 15:45

00: But we already think of them or plan for them to be expanded in the future, because we know what's coming ahead of us. We're not just acquiring plots of land or sites that are small enough or big enough to fit today's demand or tomorrow's demand. But we do really adopt this long term perspective, which is a little bit of a challenge, right? Because you always have this return on invest. How much do you invest?

00: 16:06

00: How much do you invest in advance? But, yes, it's a great thing that's happening business wise. And also it's such a change in the way we approach mobility. I think that's Roger, something that tom like mobility, the concept of mobility changes the concept of what it means to be mobile and to own a car and to share a car, maybe with multiple people. All of that is going to come.

00: 16:32

00: The infrastructure needs to be built to match that. Yeah, absolutely. And I love it. The fact you said the best is yet to come, that almost sounds like a song, Lars, but I agree with you, that's a great sentiment. Thank you.

00: 16:47

00: Please choose your next question. Works. What do you think, Roger? I think charging networks come on, we've got to talk about that. We've been dancing around it a little bit.

00: 16:59

00: You pick a level, then let's do level two. What strategies can be employed to address the issue of charging infrastructure equity and ensure that charging networks are accessible to all communities? Look, in any country, you have two kind of aspects of where people live, how they live. Some live in houses with drives so they can have their own private charger and many people don't. I know in the UK, it's something like 40 OD percent of people don't have any facility at home to charge.

00: 17:33

00: Now, there are solutions to deal with that to some extent, whether they're charges in lampposts, whether they're charges that pop up out of the pavement, et cetera, and they're all good. I say to them, bring it all on. If it can work and be sustained and it's a solution, great, let's have it. But I think the real opportunity is in this community charge facility that people are seeing, for sure. But I also think technology is going to come along and help us.

00: 18:00

00: There's a German company that have just been connected to Tesla, which is quite fascinating, offering wireless charging. And I think wireless charging potentially offers a lot of opportunity to charge a little and often out on the roads rather than just have, if you like, destination or a charging set up where you're there for a number. Of hours. If you can maybe charge a little and often, and that creates a much more ubiquitous charging proposition for everybody, then maybe that's going to be one of the solutions. But there are no silver bullets.

00: 18:36

00: There's not one thing that's going to solve this. It's a combination of all these things working in collaboration. Would you agree with that, Lars? Yeah.

00: 18:46

00: You mentioned the whole community idea and the whole sharing idea. I think for us, when we are building infrastructure, we're building public infrastructure that's accessible to everyone. So it doesn't matter which car you drive, you can charge at our side. And I think one thing is sharing the openness to share within the communities, the topic you touched upon. The other thing is I think we should also make sure that we avoid building closed ecosystems that do not give access to all the players and to all the infrastructure components that we are bringing to the table.

00: 19:17

00: So I think it's important to have this public accessible infrastructure and this general openness to share technology, to open your business models to open our technologies, if you may. And then I'm not talking just about the CPOs, the infrastructure providers, I'm also talking about the car manufacturers. So everybody involved in the value chain to adopt this general approach where you are open to share open to share technologies to make sure that for the customer, in the end, we're building the best user journeys across all our ecosystem because the customer won't understand, I think, if we try to build little walls around. Yeah. Thank you.

00: 19:57

00: Please choose your next question. I'll go back to business models at level two. How might alternative methods for charging electric vehicles such as battery swapping stations, shape the future of the industry? There's a lot of elements to touch on that, right? I mean, battery swapping, we work together with battery swapping units from Neo at some of our sites.

00: 20:20

00: That's a new element to it. Roger, I would be interested in getting your perspective on the general international trends you'll see in that perspective. Yeah, look, battery swapping has been around, believe it or not, since the 1920s. There were fleets of electric vans, I think they were Ups delivery vans back in New York City in the 1920s that swapped out lead acid battery trays. So it's not a kind of new concept, in a way.

00: 20:45

00: Why did they do that? It was to keep vehicles on the road for as long as possible. Fast forward to 2007. You had better place an Israeli startup that embraced that proposition, worked closely with Renault, tried to work with other people. That didn't work out.

00: 21:01

00: And I think a lot of people then felt, well, that's the end of battery swap. This shows it doesn't work. But like many technologies and solutions, it's the timing of things and sometimes it is the approach in whatever fashion you want to describe that. And here we are today. You've mentioned Neo, Nio, Geely, several other, certainly Chinese operators are now using this.

00: 21:25

00: And the intriguing thing is it isn't just about if you like the ease or the speed of being able to swap out an empty battery for a full battery. It's about where the battery sits as a kind of service both to the user of that vehicle and to the grid. The grid. Either National Grid or Community Grid. And I think where you see now the collaborations particularly quite mature in China between people like Neo and China State Grid and China's Southern Grid illustrate that this isn't just a convenience proposition, it is much more than that.

00: 22:01

00: It's about putting batteries, groups of batteries in switch stations that then will operate there in a dual function, be of course, ready to go an electric vehicle, but also be connected with the grid. So I think this is where we're seeing if you like timing and maturity of technology and certainly business models coming to the right moment in time. Whereas, yes, it didn't kind of work in the past, but it is working now. That would be my perspective from a kind of global overview of things. It's all a timing issue, right?

00: 22:38

00: There's so many new technologies, yes, and I think we sometimes are a little bit faster declaring technology debt or to look at something as the silver bullet. I think with the whole broadness of the market and how many different use cases there are, there might just be a solution that works for a particular customer group or for a particular segment of the market that we didn't yet think of or some new technologies that may arise. I think that's the whole part of what makes this industry so exciting and this whole transition into emobility so exciting because we have put up the guardrails if you want, we know where the journey goes, we know in which direction the journey goes, but we don't really know what the end state will be. Right? In many ways it's such a massive change and I'm very interested to see how all these alternative technologies can contribute to that.

00: 23:24

00: Well on that point, talking about alternative technologies, talking about how hopefully technology can help us, there's a phrase called being a cornucopian that's essentially believing that technology will solve everything. I guess it won't, but it's going to play a big part. So let's finish on technology as the last sort of section of questions and let's go for a toughie, let's go for a top one, level three. So let's have that question please. What role do you envision bi directional charging and vehicle to grid technology to play in the future, especially with regard to the energy transition?

00: 24:02

00: What would be required for a broad adoption? Lars, I'd love to hear your thoughts first because I'm always fascinated by this arena, the fact that CHAdeMO and the Japanese were all over this well over a decade ago, yet here we are with CCS, NAX and all these other standards and protocols, and not much has happened. So you go first, because you're right in the thick of all this. I think it's a super complicated topic, right? There's many aspects to it.

00: 24:30

00: Bi directional charging is a very interesting thing to look at conceptually, I think, when the question is, why has it not been widespread? Why have we not seen a widespread spread adoption of this technology? It's because it's technologically relatively complex, right? Obviously, we have a very large battery in the car, and maybe the first step to that is to see dynamic pricing, et cetera. I do think when the energy transition progresses and we see more people, more households investing in technologies like solar, like the capacity to store the energy in your own house, then to connect it to a whole box smart metering, I think all of that creates a potentially very interesting ecosystem.

00: 25:14

00: But it's still, I think, technologically difficult to combine that into a customer product that is ready to be mass market adopted. So there's many components to that. Bi directional charging, I think is very interesting, especially if you combine it from a customer perspective with dynamic prices, giving people the opportunity to sell back the energy they collect through solar or through, we'll say through solar, going to sell it back to the grid. We've seen early stages of that. I don't think we've seen the widespread adoption yet, but it's very interesting, and I think the more the energy transition progresses, the more widespread the adoption of this technology will be.

00: 25:55

00: I completely agree, and I think it's absolutely essential. I would say that without bi directional charging, we have a huge issue because the finite resources, the minerals that go into making batteries, we need to get the very most out of all of the electric vehicle batteries. And if they are like most cars are typically sitting around parked for most of the time, that's not good enough. They have to have a dual function like never before. The fuel tank, fossil fuel tank, petrol and diesel does nothing when the vehicle is stationary.

00: 26:29

00: And the massive advantage with an electric vehicle can be it is now an active part of either your home your home energy system or the grid itself. So I think it really must come. And whatever the challenges are, well, like I said a moment ago, the Japanese seem to have overcome them with Chattanoog. So I do think we need to get on with it, to be blunt, because I think it's going to be absolutely essential. Question with this is, as with so many things as a customer, what do I have from it?

00: 27:00

00: And I think once you're managing a complete ecosystem which allows you to optimize your energy consumption and to optimize the financial component as well as the usage component. I think then for customers, it makes sense. Then for customers, it's easy to use, and then customers will enjoy playing around with it. But we need to give our customers a purpose to use it and to start building it. It's time for our last question.

00: 27:23

00: What are your expectations for the next IAA mobility, and what are you looking forward to? Well, I'm looking forward to meeting people because for as much as the technology is interesting, these big companies that we hear about all around the world, this technology that we've talked about, finding opportunities between different people, listening to other people's opinions, being challenged about your own view on what you think and maybe reflecting a bit, maybe changing your mind. That's the arena, I think, in which coming together with people is very, very important. And to understand that whatever differences that we've got culturally between nation states, between continents, within companies, we are all essentially focusing on the same challenge, which is to deal with the monumental issue of climate change. To tackle air.

00: 28:14

00: Quality in our towns and cities and find a way in which we can find a neat balance between yes, being competitive that's part of our nature, but also being much more collaborative than perhaps we've been in the past. So that's absolutely what I'm looking forward to at coming to IAA. What about you, Lars? Collaboration, in the sense I'm very much looking forward to seeing all the new innovations when it comes to the cars and the car manufacturers, what innovations in terms of electric vehicles they'll bring to the table, because at the core, we need great cars and we need great infrastructure. We're building the infrastructure, and I'm very much interested to see what the car manufacturers bring to the table in terms of the next generation e BEVs.

00: 29:05

00: It's going to be super interesting for me to see that and the ways we can work together. And it's also to get inspired. I mean, I would like to get inspired by different people that work on that energy transition, that work on the mobility transition, see what they're doing, get a feel for what's innovative, not just in Germany, but across the world, and to align our thinking and to get inspired. Powerful insights. That's all the time we have for today, unfortunately.

00: 29:33

00: Thank you so much much for being here. You're very welcome. Thank.