Good morning Grid Connections listeners.
Today we're thrilled to have Quincy Lee, the founder of Electric Era join us.
In this episode we'll dive deep into how Electric Era positions itself as a leading
charge point operator in the rapidly evolving EV charging landscape.
Quincy will share insights on the current state of EV charging and reveal how
Electric Era leverages hardware along with cutting edge software to differentiate
itself and prioritize customer experience.
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leaders with that.
the CEO and founder of Electric Era.
Our company builds EV fast charging stations for gas stations, convenience
stores, and quick service restaurants that are modernizing their offerings for EV
drivers.
Prior to founding Electric Era in 2020, I was a SpaceX engineer for seven years
where I worked on predominantly the Starlink program.
So SpaceX's constellation of satellites, I was one of the earliest team members on
that.
joining the team in about 2016, early 2016.
And in my final role there, I was responsible for the global rollout of the
Gateway Ground Station antennas, which are the large antennas that provide backhaul
connectivity to Starlink users and the terrestrial internet.
So, you know, our team is very product focused and engineering and technology
focused, and I think we'll touch on a lot of that today during the conversation.
Good to be here with you.
that's great.
And I guess something I should say just personally, Quince, I want to say thank
you for that.
I actually use starling myself.
I had been living in a hood river, Oregon, which is kind of outside of, Portland,
Oregon by about an hour or so.
And where we were, the internet was terrible.
And, we, I think got starling back in, it was pretty early, like 2020, maybe 2021.
when the first users in Oregon, I guess, so we were told.
And then, now I live in bend Oregon, which is actually a lot larger, but we had
actually come with the local internet provider and then it turned out to be
really bad.
I dropped so much more than starling.
So we actually ended up just getting starling again.
And now that's what we're using here in bend, just cause it's so much more stable
than even the local fiber, which I was pretty surprised by too.
So, but that's just a side.
I would love to talk to you more about that.
Yeah.
It's been such great service.
It's definitely a fantastic product.
It's really, I think, opening up the internet to a lot of places that obviously
historically haven't had it.
So happy to hear that you guys have had a good experience with it.
Sometimes, you know, for early adopters, it wasn't always this good in the early
days, but I'm glad it's doing great now.
No, it's, it's funny.
The only issue we ever had, especially here in Ben is whenever thunderstorms,
lightning storms would come through, it would kind of disrupt it.
And then it would like drop down, every so often, but that was really the first year
we lived here.
And ever since then, even when lightning storms and stuff come through, I haven't
had an issue.
So it's, it's definitely better than the local option.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, like back in those early days of Starlink that they
were really just chasing nines, right?
They were trying to get reliability higher and higher and higher.
And I'm having kind of deja vu all over again, because that was what I was working
on and focused on extensively when I left Starlink.
And now I'm focused on it extensively as we scale up our EV fast charging network
and charging stations for customers all over the country.
We're religiously focused on reliability.
We define reliability very meticulously as when you plug in doesn't work immediately.
And we're chasing nines, right?
We're trying to get up to 99 .9 % success rates.
And that's an extremely challenging thing to do.
Not a lot of people are doing it, but that's really what matters to the EV
driver base.
So we're going through that whole effort that we went at Starlink all over again
here at Electric Era as we build out our charging stations.
like an almost perfect segue.
I just want to commend you on that.
Maybe you should be the host, but, no, obviously we could talk about probably
starling for another hour, but what, what I'm really interested in is what we're
interested about too is exactly that, like electric vehicle reliability, specifically
charter and the vehicles themselves.
It's not so much an issue.
It's really the charting infrastructure.
And I'm kind of curious to learn like, what was it that made you
start electric here.
I think a lot of people have had their own experiences, but what really was, was
there any one moment that you're just like, I can't stand this, this someone
needs to step into the space and, improve this experience for EV drivers.
Yeah, I think way back in 2018, from a more existential perspective, I started
Electric Era because I really felt that the world was not making fast enough
progress on decarbonization of transportation.
And ironically, while watching a SpaceX rocket launch, I kind of was looking at
the Earth getting smaller and smaller in the rear -facing camera of the rocket and
thought to myself, man, I should be spending my time and talents
making the world a better place as opposed to sending technologies out into the
cosmos, which obviously I love too.
But it was just that kind of that moment tied in with the existentialism question
that really got me to jump and leave SpaceX in 2020 and start Electric Era.
I think when I started the company, it really was around that premise of, man,
charging's terrible.
It's really expensive.
It's hard to build.
It takes years to build in some cases.
how do we make all that better?
Because it's a key linchpin in the overarching EV adoption motion that we're
going through.
Folks, I hear it from folks all the time.
They're like, man, I don't want to buy an EV.
I can't charge my car anywhere.
And the common retort is, well, what about at your house?
And more people than not don't have good, consistent places to charge.
And even if they did, they still need to be able to charge up their car around
town.
So solving that gap, that infrastructural gap, and actually doing a good job.
It was like the motivation for the business.
And clearly there's so much frustration online.
People are fed up with the charging reliability, fed up with the lack of
uptime, fed up with the cut cables, fed up with the low charging speeds, fed up with
the lack of transparency.
We're aiming to solve all of those problems at Electric Era.
Well, that's, I think, probably welcome news to the people listening to this.
What, what do you like when you started in 2020 to now have been kind of the biggest,
like chasing those nines, like what, what has been the biggest, maybe wins or like
improvements you've seen over the last four years to really help make those big
first early differences, kind of the quick moving high impact.
Yeah, I mean, I would say most of the last four years have really just been about
building the technology stack and only recently have we started to scale up.
But now that the scale up is underway and now we're really in the chase the nines
frame of mind, I think like the things that we did early on from a technology
perspective that gave us the framework to go in effect way to be fast charging
reliably were probably threefold.
One, we were able to solve the grid infrastructure problem.
by building our charging stations with the battery backing the charging station.
Having that battery there actually allows you to ride through a lot of transients
and electrical variations that you might see from the grid and actually keep your
charging station online and healthy when the grid is having challenges.
So that's a big part of it.
I think a more important part is having Edge compute on site.
A lot of people do this.
They don't really do it that well, but certain folks have put site controllers at
their charging stations.
That local low latency compute is super valuable for a bunch of different reasons.
And it gives you, again, a good foundational framework to go build super
reliable charging stations that work all the time.
And then finally, the third pillar is like a vertically integrated software stack.
And that's really where the rubber hits the road.
If you're not owning the entire end to end software stack or you're charging at a
charging company that does not have a vertically integrated software stack,
expect bad things to happen.
Because basically,
everybody in the industry with the exception of like essentially Tesla and
Rivian and and us they outsource all their software they They give this part to that
company this part to that company this part to that company.
They're not actually building technology They're not actually building software.
They're they're pulling it all together from other vendors and that leads to
interconnection handoffs that leads to Finger -pointing that leads to a very poor
user -driver experience That's the most important pillar.
That's I think where we really shine because we own everything in -house
We can go really, really low into the firmware, firmware adjacent software stack
and make the charging experience super good across everything from payments to UX
on the driver's screen or on the charging station screen to the OCP 1 .6 connection
and actual charger activation to everything else that is required to make a
charging station session successful.
And I think that's great to hear.
So let's let's say you are a listener to this podcast and you drive an EV and you
hear all this stuff.
That sounds amazing.
How do drivers find electric era chargers or ones using that technology to really
make sure that they're going to the ones probably with the best uptime.
Yeah, so you can find us on PlugShare.
You can find us on Apple Maps.
You can find us on Google Maps.
And because we're in Apple Maps and Google Maps, we populate in the infotainment
systems of all the major automotive companies, with the exception of Tesla and
a few others.
So those are kind of the most common ways of discoverability.
And you'll notice right out the gate that we actually have good driver reviews.
You go into a PlugShare review of an average charging station and the
driver reviews are terrible, right?
It's like comically bad.
One of my favorite driver reviews in Plugshare was somebody saying, wow, this
is the future.
We need this all over America.
Like, that made me feel so good because it's kind of the manifestation or the
verbalization of the vision of the company.
It's just like, build EV fast charging everywhere that's awesome so drivers can
just get on with their lives and have an amazing experience and not worry about the
frustration of charging their car.
So we have a lot of listeners all over the US as they, as these are rolling out more,
is there anything, are there certain areas that your team's looking at first and kind
of rolling out from that way?
Or are there certain partnerships or others that drivers might be best to kind
of look for to find electric or chargers?
Yeah, I think in our first couple quarters of sales, we were eager to build charging
stations wherever and whenever.
And our initial sales motion and installation pattern was kind of
scattershot as a result, right?
So we have charging stations in Boston and Portland.
We have another one coming in Portland.
We have another one in Southern Oregon.
We have three coming along in Northern California.
randomly one in Missouri and Tennessee and others popping up.
I think as we focus, we're going to put our minds to work on building out specific
concentrated corridors, leveraging our customers' properties and coaching our
customers to go to market with their charging stations there.
I think that's going to be key to provide contiguous coverage of super seamless and
easy to use charging that's really fast.
So, that'll be what we start to shift towards going into the next couple years
ahead of us.
But what will that look like in practice?
Well, you can kind of imagine where that'll be based off of EV adoption rates.
It's like the West Coast.
Surprisingly, the Northeast is actually getting a ton of usage.
Our charging station out there gets a ton of usage every day.
And I think that reveals that there's a lot of EV adoption in the Northeast as
well.
And then I think actually Texas is going to be a sleeper, but come along fast in
terms of EV adoption rates in the kind of Tri -City area.
So we'll probably focus predominantly on the West Coast, the Northeast, maybe all
the way even out to Pennsylvania and Ohio down to Virginia, and then Texas.
I think those will be our first core focus areas, but nothing set in stone yet.
And we're still trying to figure that out actively internally.
Totally.
And what have, is it been like Nevi funding or incentive?
What, what have, it's kind of like, what makes an area kind of a better focus for
electric era to go after other than maybe electric vehicle driver Density
Well, it all starts with driver density, right?
I mean, that's the kind of leading indicator of the financial health of the
charging station.
A spicy and lesser known fact about EV fast charging stations is you can actually
make a crap ton of money off them and actually have good margins.
So ironically, EVgo and Electrify America, their networks are actually making a fair
bit of revenue and are supporting decently high profit margins in unit economics.
That's a toolkit that we're
to our customers who want to own and operate their own charging stations and
capture share of wallet from a new class of drivers.
And it makes most sense financially from a pure commercialization perspective to
build in high EV density areas because your stations get so much more
utilization.
Outside of that, I mean, yeah, certainly Neve funding is really key.
We have two stations coming online.
If in Delaware from Neve funding, we have an Ohio station.
that we were recently awarded.
We have one in New Mexico actually coming online by the end of the year.
And we have a really, really big announcement that we're not ready to share
about a huge state where we were awarded.
So that'll be coming out soon as well.
But yeah, I know that's, I mean, it's a pretty exciting one.
I don't think we're technically ready to talk about it, but basically that's a big,
that was a big award for us and our customers.
There's lots of good stuff happening all over the country and I think drivers
should expect to see a lot of electric -era power charging stations across the
country in years to come.
So you talk, I mean, we've had a lot of people on the show that kind of talk about
the challenges around the business model for EV chargers.
And you look at the traditional kind of C stores or kind of fueling stations where a
majority of their profit actually comes from selling hot dogs or what they
actually sell in store versus actually trying to make money off gas.
I realized some of this may be a little bit secret saucy, but I'm kind of curious,
is it just,
Does it have to go with the site assessment to make sure you have high
utilization of the site or what are some of the areas that really, especially if
you are like a person with an interest in putting in a charging location, like what
are the kind of the tips and tricks to really make sure you're getting that high
revenue and high margin, return on the electric vehicle infrastructure
investment.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that makes our company so cool is we're
very tech forward.
So we actually built an entire machine learning model just that we actually give
our customers access to for free to help them figure out where their highest
sessions per day will be across their portfolio of stores.
So that is kind of the most important part of the process.
And we actually just released a blog post on our website today about that.
So for anybody that's listening into this, maybe you could add it to the show notes,
Chase.
sure.
There's a blog post that we just put out today about actually the step -by -step
process of how we walk our customers through this.
But the first step is basically ingest the locations, figure out where the highest
sessions per day are, and from there, financially stack rank the locations based
off of the sessions per day, but also the utility tariff and any sort of kind of tax
incentives that they can get.
And then the output of that is a list of stations that are financially attractive
and...
have an associated internal rate of return.
And from there, we can have a pretty financially literate conversation with our
customers and just boil it down to the basics of the business and assess if the
locations based off of the forecast are going to be attractive or not.
That doesn't include things like in -store sales, which you're right is the number
one profit winner of the kind of car refill business.
I think there's like the old expression in the gas world.
where it's like you make a nickel per gallon on gas and then you make 90 %
profit margins on the Coke in the store because you have a captive audience.
So that is going to be true for EV fast charging.
And actually that's another big reason why we're so stoked about retail adjacent fast
charging is because it provides kind of an anchor for the business and ancillary
revenue streams that they'll be relying on for decades to come.
and charging an amenity that complements that and gets new EV drivers to that
location.
So yeah, I would encourage people to check out that blog.
It's on our website at electricaerotechnologies .com.
And Chase, if you wouldn't mind adding it to the show notes, that'd be cool.
Cool.
one of the things we were talking about right before we can record was, and this
is also interesting to me, kind of having more of a software background is as you've
mentioned, really having a software first focus.
And I think that has worked well for others like Tesla and Rivian, but can you
kind of go a little bit more on the actual tech stack and what that might look like
and kind of what separates electric air from a lot of others in the space right
now.
Yeah, I mean, I think like I talked about it a little bit.
I talked about some of the important parts of it earlier on.
But I'll go a little bit deeper.
Basically, every single EV fast, every single electric car EV fast charging
station has an on -site energy storage system and at least two chargers, maybe up
to four.
Some of our early stations only had one, but basically going forward, we'll always
at least have two or four chargers.
I'm sorry to cut you off there.
What, what was the, what's kind of led to that decision to make sure you have the
battery and then also that two to four charger versus larger sites.
Yeah, that's a great question.
So the two to four larger site configuration is kind of an output of the
learnings that we've seen from the Tesla Diaspora, where all these Tesla people
left Supercharge and they kind of went out in the world and they started to interview
with companies like us.
And one of the learnings from that experience was, yeah, you got to
standardize.
You got to provide kind of configurations that make sense within...
all of your business motion.
So everything from the supply chain team to the implementation team to the
contractors you use to construct the site, having a standardized set of deliverables
really is key to kind of simplifying the go -to -market motion.
So that's part of the reason why we have two or four.
I think we actually technically also have a six sizer, but standardization is key.
It's way better to do that than say three or five.
and maybe sometimes a seven and maybe sometimes at one.
Like that just creates a lot of chaos internally.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a, we think of the product as the whole charging station, you know,
it's, it's, and everything that goes into building it from supply chain to
implementation, to the contractors, to the software, to, of course the charger, the
charge is just a small part.
And I think that's, people need to uplevel their thinking.
It's the whole charging station that matters.
It's not just the charger.
And part of our charging station, to answer your previous question, is a
battery system.
We are one of the first to really take the lead on battery -backed EV fast charging
stations.
There's companies out there, like Formally FreeWire, who I think went out of
business, and or ADS Tech, who I think is still in business, that have a battery
-integrated charger.
For people to have a simple mental model, it's basically the difference between the
two.
to battery approaches is kind of like the difference between a gas station that has
a big gas pump or tank rather underneath it.
That's what gas stations do today versus a battery integrated charger is like a gas
pump with a little gas tank inside of it that runs out really quick.
And we realized that early on.
We built a software system called Power Simulation that is like a full physics
simulator of charging stations.
you know, simulate 10 ,000 days and kind of figure out all the edge cases, et
cetera, from that.
We ran our models and we're like, yeah, like that doesn't make sense.
But battery -backed EV fast charging stations are more technically difficult
and you have to have really low latency power control to do it well.
So that's a challenge and part of the reason we have an edge compute system on
site.
that's all good.
so is the battery backup not so much, I think we've heard, and you're totally
right.
You have some that have kind of done it where it's directly tied to the charger
and then like tests and some others will do it.
So it's a much larger one tied to the site.
And is the reason for tying it more to the site driven to reliability or is it to
avoid like long -term costs due to, charges from the utility and stuff like
that, or is it just kind of a healthy mix of both?
It's predominantly the latter.
It's mainly a means of keeping the total cost of ownership as low as possible, so
keeping demand charges low and also keeping time to market low.
We can install in as little as, I think we've done as little as four months, our
average is probably five to six.
It basically is a way to decrease the grid requirements on site pretty substantially.
So minimize is like transformers and kind of the larger stuff that really can slow
down some of these projects.
The vast majority of EV fast charging here on out will, especially as we head into
the next five to 10 to 20 years, it's going to be battery backed.
And it's mainly a function of the grid being undersized and the supply chain
challenges around transformers.
So I think battery backed fast charging is definitively here to stay.
And we're super happy.
chain for that's much greater right now and then it is for transformers in the
supporting infrastructure.
Interesting.
And it makes sense, but yeah.
Yeah.
know, just use the one that's available and cheap and getting cheaper every day as
opposed to the one that's not available and getting more expensive every day.
Are you seeing an overlap?
It seems like it'd be a different chem, maybe not necessarily different chemistry,
but slightly different supply chain around.
people talk about like year ago, EV batteries really expensive.
And now we're kind of seeing, due to some of the changes with that supply chain that
the prices have come down because there's more supply is that same with the battery
backups that your team is purchasing or just kind of coincidental.
or still kind of niche enough market that you're able to kind of keep up with.
the supply.
I would not be surprised if batteries were anywhere from $20 to $30 per kilowatt hour
from wholesalers by the end of the decade or at latest by 2035.
It basically is getting super freaking cheap and it's largely a function of a
huge amount of production capacity coming online across the world.
Everything from the raw material extraction to the refining to the shipment
systems to
processing and manufacturing of battery cells to the battery pack manufacturing
all the way up.
So China is doing what China does really well, which is they are pushing the price
curve down and down and down and are essentially commoditizing the offering.
We saw them do this with solar and now we're seeing it with battery cells and
they're also actually doing it with power electronics, which is something we're
starting to think about more and more.
But basically,
I think it's broadly good.
I know there's a lot of discussions about what do we do with China, what do we do
with China.
At the end of the day, China is making a lot of really important technologies that
are important to the energy transition.
They're drastically cutting the price down and down and down, and that makes the
products more accessible for others.
I think it's honestly, we need to figure out how to keep that relationship moving
in a good direction, in my opinion, especially as it pertains to the clean
energy technologies.
For sure.
So you're looking at primarily, I mean, I haven't heard about it as much lately, but
obviously one of the other big kind of grid tied battery backup systems was kind
of like redox batteries and some of these other things more usually utility scale.
But it sounds like everything that you've been doing or like, like utility solar
scale sort of stuff.
It sounds like it's all just been lithium ion based grid tied batteries.
Yeah, 100%.
So lithium iron phosphate, that's the specific chemistry that we use.
And we use it for a few different reasons.
It's typically a higher power chemistry, and it's capable of longer cycle life.
And it's actually kind of become the...
It actually, I think, is definitely the lowest cost chemistry on the market.
And that's largely coming from the fact that the majority of EVs are using it as
their primary chemistry now.
Like, we don't really need cobalt, alumina, nickel.
solutions anymore.
We can just use lithium ion phosphate and get the range that the average driver
expects.
So that's, I think, a big win for the environment and also for the cost
structure of the product.
I think actually there's some pretty interesting news coming out of China
around sodium ion battery cells.
I actually haven't studied that extensively, but technically the bill of
materials costs
from a raw materials perspective is cheaper for sodium.
So if China and other manufacturers can figure out how to productize that and
scale it up and achieve economies of scale, then theoretically we should even
be able to go into another big step down in price for dollar per kilowatt hour,
which would be sweet.
And sodium ion has longer cycle life, which is really key for our application
and others.
So we're keeping an eye on that and pretty exciting stuff coming.
No, that, I mean, that's great.
And that's been such a big, I mean, I, there's definitely been more talk of
sodium mine and unfortunately it just seems to be, it's been mostly focused on
the Chinese market than anything from the domestic manufacturers.
And it does kind of feel like it's where LFP was only just a few years ago.
So I think there is a large potential for it, especially in these kinds of, grid
related things where weight density, or energy density by weight isn't as critical
as it is in automotive.
And it's been impressive already just seen.
how many of these different battery technologies have increased in that energy
density too so quickly.
Yeah, the energy density is an interesting one.
And I think I haven't studied sodium ion closely, but I suspect with the vehicle
level efficiency and range benefits that are kind of that companies like Tesla and
Rivian and others are unlocking, we'll be able to unlock and continually use lower
and lower energy density capable cells.
And that's basically what happened with nickel, right?
Everyone was like, my God, we got to put a
crap ton of energy in these cells because everything's so expensive and the arrows
package is not good and thermal control and it's not great and the powertrain
isn't as efficient yet.
And then over five to 10 years, Tesla got all those things figured out and they were
able to unlock lithium iron phosphate.
So perhaps they'll be able to do it again.
So it'll be interesting to see.
for sure.
So we talked about kind of the battery side to it.
So what in this stack is kind of like the next part.
It goes from the battery to then obviously the actual charger itself and have there
been any things in particular with that charging hardware that you guys really
look for or that you've noticed is a big part of the reliability.
I mean, I know from some it's kind of been charging cords and the cables to really
get kind of down to the parts and pieces of it.
But I'm just kind of curious what your team has seen.
Yeah, let me share my screen.
I don't know if people can see this on their screen, but if you're on YouTube or
you're watching this, you'll be able to see the following.
So here's a good slide on just like how we think about reliability.
I think everybody and anybody in the entire industry needs to understand this
fundamental concept, which is why I'm gonna start here.
So there is a very big difference between just is the station online, which is one
part of reliability, and does the station successfully charge?
Really all that the driver cares about is that second part.
They care about that the charging session was successful.
They plugged in.
They quickly tapped their credit card or Google Pay or Apple Pay.
Boom, they're off to the races.
And the power starts ramping up, and they can go inside and not even think about it.
Like that walk away moment of I trust that it's charging and I don't have to fiddle
around with my app anymore is like the delight that we are trying to capture with
our drivers.
So that's what we do.
I mean, we're actually quite good at that second part.
We're also very good at the first part.
So the first part is just basics.
It's like, can you tie your shoes?
It's like, is the station online?
Is it up?
Is it operational?
Well, we know down to the millisecond if it is at our stations, because we have
that edge -compute system, and we have an LTE antenna, and we have a team of five to
six engineers on our network operation center.
We actually literally staff a network operation center, which is pretty crazy
and pretty wild, but it's like a...
cultural defect or a cultural carryover from our Starlink days.
No, I think that's huge.
You just don't see, I think that's where a lot of others struggle at first.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, I don't know if this is true, but I heard the other day that Electrify
America has 80 people on their network operations team, which is crazy.
So we're able to basically have one person on call and monitoring the fleet at any
given time.
And we actually expect to, because we leverage so much software, we expect to
continue, maybe slightly increase, but predominantly continue that single source
coverage.
Yeah, that's why.
Even as we go and build eventually more charging stations than Electrify American
EV Go, which I actually think we will go do.
So that's a key way to just discern if it's up and operational.
Some of the more challenging things are like, okay, did the cable get cut?
Well, you have to be able to tell with your software if the cable got cut.
And if it did get cut, then you need to alert the network operations center
operator immediately, at which point they can go and look at the telemetry and
figure out, yeah, it got cut.
we need to trigger a technician to go out there.
So at that point, or let's say if the screen breaks or if there's like a pump or
some power module, something like that that fails, we can see all of that.
And we then go and trigger a maintenance technician to go out and fix it.
So we're very much in the monitor early, monitor often, and monitor with software
frame of mind so that we can stay ahead of downtime issues.
The more challenging part is the charging session reliability.
So in order to successfully charge, you have to oversee and successfully initiate
everything in the following sequence.
Car shows up, they plug in, they tap their payment, their credit card, whatever.
The charger actually connects and starts talking to the car.
There's about 10 step to 20 step process that they go through.
There's a checklist of electrical safety tests.
Things like ground isolation and faults that they need to go and work through
together, the car and the charger.
And then if that all passes, then the session initiates.
At which point you start to ramp up power and the car says, give me more, give me
more, give me more.
And at which point you'll kind of reach your peak power and then you'll then start
to do the longer dwell.
And of course, as everybody knows in our industry, like then the power rolls off as
you get to higher and higher states of charge in the battery.
You also need to be able to be ready for a driver to come by and quickly rip out the
connector because drivers do that all the time.
So you need to be able to safely turn it off really quick.
And if anything in that sequence goes wrong, you need to have kind of...
Well, first off, you should just design your software such that it doesn't go
wrong.
If the payment doesn't work, you failed.
You failed the charging succession reliability test.
If the power doesn't initiate or the car can't talk to the charger, you failed.
So designing the software at a lower level to make sure that those don't fail is
super key.
But if there is a failure, you need to be able to quickly recover it in software so
that the driver doesn't notice.
For example, power cycling some power module so that it comes back up safely and
is ready to then deliver power into the car as an example.
All that to say, that's the brains of the operation.
We started this conversation talking about our technology.
That's the core technology.
It's really this vertically integrated software that makes Tesla really good at
what they do.
It's what makes Rivian really beautiful, really good at what they do and all the
fancy controls that they have in their cars.
And it's what makes electric era really fantastic at charging our customers, EV
drivers cars.
Yeah.
One of the things I hear a lot from EV drivers is like, why, why don't they work?
This just seems so simple.
It's been solved in so many other industries in a way.
And I think the more you learn about the industry or the technology, especially you
realize it isn't the concept of what you're trying to execute is pretty simple,
but there are a lot of things involved with making sure it's done efficiently and
then also safely.
And in your opinion, is that.
just because a lot of others have struggled with having a really strong kind
of software first approach with kind of making the experience more difficult for
EV drivers and kind of reliability in general.
I think the very like...
A very skeptical and pessimistic person in me says, man, I just don't think they
care.
I think that one of the core cultural things that makes our company so
exceptional is we're just super obsessed with EV drivers.
And so is Tesla, and so is Rivian.
There's an element of love in their products and an element of love in ours.
And you look at Electrify America, you look at the origin story, they came out of
the diesel gate scandal and it was just this big corporate thing that got stood up
out of a government...
payout mandate and how could you have love for anything in that situation?
Not to talk bad about Electrofair America, I'm sure there are people that very much
care about EV drivers at that company, but I just think if you're a startup or
you're, which Tesla was and Rivian was obviously, you have to have an obsessive
approach to high product quality experiences.
So I think it's just like almost a metaphysical answer to your question.
The technology on top of it.
There's a lot more that I'm not talking about that also has to go right.
So it's like, you got to get all of these things together, working seamlessly, whose
value is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
And the way to work yourself through that pain and chase those nines is really just
coming back to the labor of love that is electric era.
It's that mentality that we have every day that causes us to approach our jobs with
intensity.
Because we really truly believe that we got to get EV charging infrastructure out
there that's awesome if people want to drive EVs.
Yeah, that's great.
And we've definitely been talking about kind of like looking back on the charging
space and how electric areas started and grown.
I'm kind of curious on your thoughts looking forward, like what do you see are
some of the interesting trends in the space and kind of ways that you're looking
to help stand out even further or like possibly even accelerate the rollout for
electric era.
Yeah, so of the things that we're comfortable talking about externally, I
mean, I guess there's a lot.
So we have a very comprehensive and almost, I think, 10, at least, year view
of our product roadmap.
And it is pretty technically intense.
Like, we're aiming to do to EV fast charging what NVIDIA did to GPUs.
Like, we're thinking that deeply in that...
afield about the problem.
And obviously, we're early in that planning exercise.
So it's not like we're going to commit to doing one thing or the other.
But of the things that we've identified that are really interesting, it really
kind of comes back to solving some of the core points that we hit on the pod today,
which is power access, power efficiency, power delivery.
Reliability, instantaneous and low latency control.
Product and customer experience, the driver experience at retail locations.
We're going to announce some really cool stuff there down the road as well.
So I think EV drivers are going to be really, really fired up about our product
roadmap.
And I truly think we're going to be the cutting edge technology in this space.
I think that's a pretty bold statement, but with what we see coming, I think it's
actually true.
I think Tesla is very split focused.
You know, they're going to go build optimists and they're going to go build
like new EVs and FSD.
They don't really have a whole lot of bandwidth to think about the charging side
of things.
And that's the beauty of focus in a company is you can go in compound value
around a specific niche of customer value that is highly differentiated.
It creates a highly technical and cutting edge solution.
So I would just say, stay tuned.
I mean, we got a lot of stuff coming out over the next year alone and, and, and the
years following that are going to be even more exciting.
That's great.
And I think just looking at the broader EV market right now, there's, I think a lot
of narrative around that it's EV sales are slowing when in fact, other than kind of
Tesla slowing down their sales overall, it seems like a lot of the auto manufacturers
are growing and increasing in their year over year sales.
What do you see is the best way to kind of get people over the hump if they're
skeptical about EVs or
anything that's really kind of stood out to you as like the experience of it.
Cause I think there are so many narratives, but when you live with it day
to day, you realize, this is so much easier.
And there's a lot of benefits over the others.
I'm just kind of curious with what you've done and your experience, what you've
found to try to
Get people interested.
I think the most common and easiest way is usually just get butts in seats and drive
an electric vehicle.
But I'm just kind of curious if there's anything that you've seen that has been of
interest or kind of changed that perspective for others that might be
skeptical or kind of leery of making the switch to electric vehicle.
Well, I mean, as somebody who's watched
Rockets land themselves and satellite constellations take fold and new
technologies in the automotive space emerge.
It's just inevitable to me that better products and better technologies are going
to come out.
I think the framework for people that are considering EV drive in EV is you should
select a very good EV car company that is reputable and has a lot of ...
excitable fans like Tesla and Rivian specifically.
And you should go buy their cars.
I think a lot of EVs are just not that exciting.
They're just kind of like, eh, it's our attempt.
We're not really good engineers and we don't really care.
And here's the thing.
Here's a concept car.
Let's see how it does.
Like those cars are terrible and I would not buy them.
I think like Kia is good.
Rivian is great.
Fantastic.
Really.
I love their cars.
I think Tesla sells incredible cars.
There's others as well.
Then there's a lot that are not good.
The ones that are good are incredible.
EVs are just so freaking sweet.
It's basically the difference between a flip phone and an iPhone.
It's the difference between a horse and buggy and a car, an ICE car.
It's a quantum step improvement.
You are in a rocket ship that accelerates extremely fast, that has extremely low
energy and maintenance costs, that drives you everywhere.
It's just a quantum leap forward.
And there's nothing really worth focusing on than that in the EV adoption sector.
Like we should just be talking about how the product is better because it is a
fundamentally superior automotive experience.
And yeah, if anybody else is, if anybody in the audience is interested in driving
one, yeah, go get in it, go get your butts in your seats as Chase mentioned and go
experience it for yourself.
Cause once you sit in the car and you press the accelerator, you'll know exactly
what I'm talking about.
No, I think you're spot on.
I mean, it's interesting you mentioned Kenaki and Hyundai, because I think of the
traditional automakers, they have been the best at making that transition with their
product portfolio for making compelling EVs.
And then otherwise it's kind of been the completely new startups that really go
back to that focus and kind of love on product that have really been able to get
people passionate about cars who either haven't been or even convince people who
have been traditional car enthusiasts.
to kind of get out and board the EV bandwagon as well.
Yeah, they have like a classic, some of the traditional legacy companies, they
have a classic innovators deliver problem.
They don't want to have one product line cannibalized their other product line.
So it kind of expects corporate strategies to reflect that constraint.
there's definitely some, there's definitely been proven to be the clean
sheet design versus kind of these platforms from the traditional auto OEMs
that are trying to serve a bunch of different platforms.
I think they've done better than I thought they would, but it's also still a clear
difference in a clean sheet design for an electric vehicle versus some of these ones
that have to do is hybrid all of the above and kind of don't do any of them.
Well, or not even that it's just like, they're not inspiring when you drive one,
but,
I realized we're kind of coming up on our time.
And so I, one thing I wanted to ask you about is around, we definitely see like a
lot of different.
Evie charging some like peak and then kind of take off and tamper off.
Others kind of might not go to the highest peak number, but we'll hold there for
quite a while with electric era chargers.
Are there like specific, is it going to be a three 50 kilowatt system station?
So if I roll up with a Hummer, Evie or whatever I have, or what, what are kind of
like, what should I expect?
It's kind of like the base.
minimum usually charge rate and kind of expect for a charging experience for those
kinds of road trips.
Yeah, so currently everything that we have in market right now is 200 KW peak.
Without sharing too many details, we're going to be a lot higher than that for our
V3 product, which people should expect to see next year.
We'll do an announcement probably early 2025 timeframe, if all things are nominal.
So peak power capabilities are going to go up quite a bit.
On the kind of rollback question that you talked about, like the way that our
software works is we will give as much power as the car can accept.
And so we're always car limiting the charging station power flows as opposed to
holding back.
Unless there's extreme high utilization and we expect like a large surge coming,
then we'll start to kind of...
peak shave here and there and split power and more intelligently allocate power to
cars so that we have enough energy and reserve for the forecasted demand.
We don't really do that at all that often.
But so that's kind of our current...
But rather it is something that might happen in the event that there is extreme
usage at the station.
So outside of that though, we just give as much power to the car as it can take.
No, that's great.
I mean, even 200 kilowatts is great.
So many of these are, I'm seeing you in like 50 to a hundred kilowatts.
And I just don't think that's like really a number that's truly like future
-proofed.
So to, and then there's still so many EVs that can't even hit that.
So I think that's, that's definitely great to see.
And then to hear you're doing even more down the future, I think it's going to be
great for a lot of drivers.
Yeah, one thing I noticed briefly is just like this trend line, which is peak power
rate over time.
In 2008, the Roadster, I think, had only a 27 kW peak charging rate.
And over time, the leading power charge rate has increased to about, I think, a 17
% annualized growth rate.
This is like the Moore's law for fast charging.
I call it the law of the electric era, which is...
which I think will hold true until we get up to cars that can charge at about 1 .2
or 1 .5 megawatts for light duty vehicles, at which point you're basically on parity
with the time that it takes to fill up a gas car.
So I don't know how long that'll take, and if the 19 % annualized year over year
growth rate will continue, but that is certainly an observation that's driving
our product roadmap, and we think about a lot.
That's great.
Well, thank you so much for coming on today, Quincy.
I would be respectful of your time or coming up at the top of the hour.
But for anyone who's listening, what's a great way for them to learn more and kind
of reach out to you to look at possibly installing some electric air chargers at
their facilities.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think if you're an EV driver, I'll answer your second
question first.
But if you're an EV driver, I would just encourage you to follow us on our socials.
So we have a large amount of people that follow us on LinkedIn.
You can find us at Electric Era.
We also have a large following on Twitter.
You can follow us at Electric Era Tech.
You can follow me on Twitter as well at Quincy Edmund Lee.
And then generally, if you're a customer and you're interested in adding the fast
charging, just go to our website, click in the upper right hand corner, request a
demo and schedule time with
one of our amazing team members to just kind of help you figure out how to
navigate this next big transition in car refill.
There's also a great amount of material on our website if you're not yet ready to
take a call with our team.
Just go to our blog under our website and feel free to peruse around and see what
you like and then give us a call when you're ready.
Thanks so much, Quincy.
We'll have to have you on soon.
I've been really excited to follow what Electric Era has been doing and some of
the upcoming announcements as well.
I'm sure we'll have to have you back soon.
Thanks, Chase.
Good to be here.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Grid Connections podcast with Quincy
Lee, the founder of Electric Era.
We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into the world of EV charging and learned how
Electric Era is making a mark with its innovative software and customer focused
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