Good morning.
Grid Connections listeners.
Welcome back to Grid Connections, the podcast where we explore the intersection of clean energy, electric vehicles, and the evolving power grid.
I'm your host, Chase.
And in today's episode,
We're joined by returning guests, Loren McDonald, the chief data analyst and Bill Ferro, the CTO of Paren We explore what they call charging 2.0 and the new era of EV charging
where data reliability and customer experience are finally aligning with business reality.
From Walmart's bold entrance into charging to the rise of rideshare utilization and the hard truth behind rural access.
We unpack the latest quarter one insights from Paren's industry leading EV charging data platform.
We also dive into why reliability is improving, how rideshare drivers are reshaping demand, what's driving high urban utilization and how the transition to J3400 or NACs is
really playing out.
If you're working electrification policy, CPO operations, or just want to better understand the forces behind charging network evolution, this is a must listen
conversation.
Before we get into that though, I also wanted to share again, the launch of grid connections consulting our new advisory service, helping companies and communities
navigate the electric vehicle transition with clarity and confidence.
Also, if you found value in today's episode, share with one colleague or friend who should hear this as well and leave us a quick review wherever you listen to podcasts.
Plus sign up for our newsletter using the link in the show notes to stay ahead of the curve and clean transportation and energy with that.
Enjoy.
In the unlikely chance that anyone listening isn't familiar with what you guys do
I can just give a quick recap of Paren and what your teams can bring into the market and then we'll get into some of today's great topics.
Go ahead, Bill.
Yeah.
I'll tackle that as the co-founder, I guess.
So what we're doing is working on building the largest EV charging data platform uh in the country and then expand that across the globe.
And we look at charging across many different aspects.
So we look at it at most infrastructure, pricing, reliability, utilization.
all different kinds of aspects and our customers are sort of driving and pushing us in a variety of different ways.
Our eventual goal as a company is to be embedded in the driving experience and take our reliability data, take our pricing data, take some of the other data sets that we have
to...
the driver experience so that no one has to ever visit a broken charger.
That's our ultimate goal.
And as we work towards that, we're building out this data set that our customers find extremely helpful.
think that sums it up perfectly.
And yeah, that's about as good of an end goal as anyone can have in the industry right now with what we're seeing.
I mean, obviously it's going in the right direction in general, but yeah, we got a few different things.
I know you guys just had your quarterly kind of report on uh what you're seeing in the industry.
And I think we can definitely get into that.
But first, one of the things I wanted to kind of talk about was one of the things I know both of you guys have talked a lot about and
kind of came up at the EV charging summit recently that we were both, all three of us were at, around kind of like what you guys have come like charging 1.0 to charging 2.0.
I think a lot of our listeners would find that really fascinating.
So I don't know if Bill, Loren, if you both kind of want to give an idea of, or uh kind of synthesis of what this means to you guys.
And then we can kind of get into what we're seeing in the industry right now with the state of charging.
Yeah, I'll kick it off and then Bill can add some color maybe to some of my points.
Yeah, mean, Bill and I have been using the term charging 2.0 for actually probably a couple of years now and then just with the report that we released, starting to take hold
seeing a lot of articles using the term and stuff.
But the core idea is that
For the first 10, 12, 15 years of the industry, was driven by companies that were either selling hardware or their business model was a land grab and what I call uh not about
making money, but about getting money, meaning incentives, whether it's federal, state, local, utility, et cetera, to offset the cost.
cross your fingers and wait for the day when there was enough EVs on the road that you might actually break even.
Unfortunately, uh sometimes the hardware actually fails by the time you would get to break even.
And what's happened in the last couple of years is several things.
One is um that day has arrived.
of when there's enough EVs on the road.
Like we are seeing, and we'll get into the data in a bit, but we're seeing like off the charts utilization rates in some of the large urban dense markets with a lot of rideshare
drivers and apartment dwellers and stuff like that.
And so it's actually become a business instead of a hope and a dream.
um And so that, you know, one of the pivots, it's just, it's no longer about
You know, that sort of the 1.0 was where can I get money, meaning incentives and things like that to now it's, oh, where can I make money?
Right.
So it's this, it's sort of because, because it's now sort of data driven and there are markets where EV charging, you know, fast charging is actually becoming a business instead
of a hope and a dream.
And then the second part of it, Chase is as the players are changing.
Right?
Like we had initially, you know, putting Tesla aside, Tesla's like the big asterisk, et cetera, because they've been doing charging 2.0 since day one, but everybody else has sort
of been different.
But the second piece of it is, is the players are different, right?
We now have major automakers and retailers, you know, everything from Iona, Mercedes, Rivian, uh GM, and all their partnerships to Walmart, to, you know, the, the, what,
what the industry calls fuel and convenience players, right?
The convenience store chains, the travel stops, and the oil companies.
So you have everything from 7-Eleven, Circle K, Loves, Pilot, BP, Sheets, Wawa, these companies.
And the difference for them is why they're in the business, right?
Sort of like the pure play charging 1.0 players.
We're in it to sell hardware or fees or eventually, hopefully to make money from utilization.
The goal was to have it become a business.
But for these 2.0 players, the automakers, it's to sell more EVs.
I mean, they don't want to lose money, but their goal, just like Tesla and why Rivian got into this space, was they understood that
We can't rely on the electric version of the gas station.
It wasn't working.
It was not a great experience, et cetera.
So we had to enter the market, control that brand experience, that customer experience, and take it to another level.
And then the retailers, whether it's the convenience store chains, the travel centers.
uh
and stuff like that, it's about incremental revenue, right?
It's about our fueling revenue has probably peaked, especially in like markets like California, New York, and places like that where there's high EV adoption rate.
So it's like, crap, our historical high volume fueling business is declining.
EVs are the future, so we have to start building towards that.
But secondly, all the executives at these companies woke up a couple years ago and went, oh my God, these people in EVs stop not for five minutes, but they stop for 15, 20, 30, 40
minutes.
And if we can get them to go inside the store and spend, you know, $15, $20 on a $5 latte that has like a $4 margin on it, right?
Like.
This is the business we know and understand because they already made that transition when they went from being gas and service stations to convenience store chains that, by the
way, had gas pumps out front.
I know that was a lot.
There's sort of more to it, but I'll stop there and let Bill sort of chime in.
let me just add one more thing.
I think the announcement last week of Walmart entering the space big time, And don't think for a second that this was a simple decision, right?
They actually had the perfect platform to watch and see what their customers were doing with the existing partnership they have with Electrify America.
And there doesn't seem to be any changes in that partnership, except they've now discovered uh and I'm sure measured
down to the minor detail that they can make a lot more money by branding their own stations, having it as a more integrated experience between their Walmart app, the visitor
coming in the store again for that dwell time for 15 to 20 minutes.
Walmart's aren't always.
in the, you know, along the corridor, but they are in convenient places for folks to stop potentially on road trips or as a destination.
I know on one of my road trips, there's a Walmart at the end of it.
That means that I don't have to be fully charged when I get to my destination because I know that it's there and I can charge if I want to.
So I think that to me is a perfect example of what we call charging 2.0, uh
CPOs, which look differently than CPOs looked uh two years ago, five years ago, getting into the space to provide a better experience, overall experience for their customers.
Driving sales.
Yeah, and really a lot of it, you think about a company like Mercedes that's in the space.
Mercedes has this incredible luxury brand.
And if you're spending $100,000 on an electric Mercedes and you go to a charging station in the back corner parking lot,
with no lights and no bathrooms and, you know, next to the trash cans and stuff.
Like, that's not what your customers expect.
Yeah, that's not a Mercedes.
motto is the best or nothing and I can think of a lot of things that are much better than them.
Yeah, yeah.
so, so, you know, like every company has a slight different tweak to why they're entering, you know, the, the, the charging business, but, but, you know, Mercedes is like probably
right at the top.
It's about controlling and delivering on, you know, a superior luxury brand experience.
And, know, I was always, you know, I had a chance a few years ago to spend a lot of time with the executives at, at Lucid, uh, both a couple of times at their headquarters.
and down at the Casa Grande uh factory opening and stuff.
And, you know, I talked to them about partnering with Electrify America, no offense to anyone, but it was sort of like, it just didn't feel like giving up that control, if you
will, to Electrify America was what I would want if I was buying a loose, like it just seemed like they were.
letting go of too much of that experience.
Now I'm not necessarily saying Lucid needed to go the Rivian Tesla route and Mercedes and build their own network, but you know, it's like.
was definitely kind of a product fit and kind of experience fit that I think you're talking about that makes a lot of sense and it surprised me that in some ways they didn't
do that after pretty quickly seeing just what kind of the current state of that experience was.
I'm kind of curious because you brought up lot of interesting things with everything you said so far but especially with kind of like the Walmart example.
I know that they can be the
To some people, maybe the bane of their EV road tripping experience.
what I think is really interesting, like talking about this 2.0 charging, to me, what it really is more about is not necessarily the person who's on an EV road trip, but it
addresses a lot of the multifamily home kind of experience, where you're doing your weekly shopping or something else that you can kind of be in there for half an hour to an hour
anyway, doing whatever you need, and then the car's charging during that.
I mean, I've got to imagine that's probably a large part of these conversations that your team is having around that about like trying to approach that from some of these new
larger retailers that are in the space.
Well, I think there's another thing about the Walmart that ties into kind of what's going on in the country today, right?
With the pause on Nevi, we potentially have lost the government funding of charging stations where it may not be feasible, right, uh from a business standpoint.
But when you look at the Walmart map and where the Walmarts are, they kind of fill some of those gaps that Neve was trying to fill.
So I think that does bring another interesting uh dynamic into the picture as far as a place where having an EV becomes a better solution uh if I have a reliable charging spot
that I can pick from.
Yeah, mean, uh and, you know, Walmart's locations are sort of different around the country where I live out in the, you know, San Francisco Bay area and stuff.
We, we're, you know, we're more target country than we all worry.
are Walmart country just cause we're not like rural, you know, for lack of a better term.
mean, there are some Walmarts in there.
I mean, the closest one to where we live is like, you know,
20, 15, 20 miles away, et cetera.
But I think, you know, so in sort of the more suburban environments where they're all our Walmarts, it's probably less solving the apartment uh market to some extent.
But I think to Bill's point, like when I think about where a lot of the Walmarts have been to like where my uh parents lived up in the mountains and down in the Central Valley and
things like that, it actually
could have an impact on EV adoption to a market that is not necessarily inclined towards buying an EVs.
If they start seeing that Walmart is normalizing EVs by seeing these eight fast chargers out front and things out in these more rural areas, it's a stamp of approval, if you will.
so I think in addition to your point about apartments, think it
it could sort of democratize almost uh charging and make it seem sort of more normal uh out in the country.
mean, one of the things, uh you know, there's a Midwest chain, community store chain called Quick Trip that's getting into the, you know, the charging business they already
have, Bill, what, think four, I think uh four, you have three or four.
uh
stations, right.
Navy stations open and stuff and they're out in very sort of rural areas where uh the nearest Walmart is like, you know, 40, 50, 60 miles away.
So they're solving the problem of, you know, people can go and buy all their groceries and stuff, you know, during the week.
And then every two weeks, you know, they drive an hour away to the nearest regional Walmart to do their shopping for like the month or whatever it is.
Right.
And so.
For those people, like knowing they can go to that Walmart and park and charge up and make it back, you know, it's like that adds uh sort of additional level of confidence that um
probably doesn't exist for people out in those more rural markets today.
Yet I know one of the things we wanted to talk about today was around reliability improvements.
And I think that's kind an interesting point to kind of make that segue because you're totally right.
Like that, as you were talking about the stamp of approval for Walmart to have starting to EV chargers and some of these other larger, well-known brands that I think one, one of the
other things also that just stood out to me so much from the EV charging summit was how
people were having the realization that so many of the issues that were solved by visibility of EV chargers and getting butts in seats to experience EVs a decade ago is
still probably one of the best things we need to do as an industry right now.
And that visibility of having it at a Walmart is such a big kind of impact, I think for a lot of the country, like you're talking about, whether it be due to kind of location or
just kind of exposure to electric vehicles and
it's we just see so many times like if one person in a suburb or something or in a cul-de-sac gets one then you start seeing other people.
Well if you're in a place where maybe your neighbor some mile down the road kind of like where I grew up.
Yeah.
That that's probably a more rare occurrence.
So I'm kind of curious as we can I talk about that like is the reason the uh companies are making this pivot finally into electric vehicles or electric vehicle charging.
Is that a big part.
Is that due to the
ability to buy reliable charging infrastructure?
it business plan?
all of our business models is just kind of all of the above that we're seeing with this change?
I would put it more in the all of the above category.
I do think that there certainly we know that there's new players coming into the space, know, Kemphower and Alpatronic specifically with a really good track record in Europe.
And that tells us that they can, know, it becomes then more of a sales issue.
How do they get into the pipeline?
And a couple of them have done a very good job of doing that.
And so if we can start to bring that better hardware, more reliable hardware into the picture, then it becomes more about an experience, right?
And so that's really, you look at what IANA is doing and ensuring that the driver experience is there.
Walmart's the same way.
Walmart has said their goal is to get to no farther than 200 feet from the door of the store.
That puts them out front, not back, not in the back, not far away from the parking lot where the trees are, you're getting close to the road.
That puts them close to where you park if you don't have an EV and you might want to chat with somebody who pulls up with the latest Lucid Gravity and you think that's a cool car
and you want to know what it is.
And so that's, again, another way to build the adoption.
it becomes uh more about the uh capabilities and amenities at the specific level.
locations and the experience that they're going to give the driver, including the software experience, which I know that...
all the new vendors are working so carefully on.
I got invited, I'm missing that today for you, Chase.
I got invited to another user experience test uh in my region and it's something that they're constantly doing in order to make sure that the latest versions of software will
work for experienced and non-experienced EP drivers.
You know, and Chase, you know, as Bill said, it's sort of all the above.
There's probably, you know, a dozen reasons we're seeing reliability improve and, you know, and both gradually and significantly.
And, you know, one of them is, as I mentioned, is that in many locations, it's actually becoming a business, right?
So, you know, before, if you spent, you know, $800,000, a million dollars to build a fast charging station,
and you had 5 % utilization, right?
You weren't highly motivated to have a uh more expensive uh agreement with a hardware provider, maintenance contracts, have people getting truck rolls out there within 24
hours.
You're like, well, I'm going to build another station.
uh
you know, to get the money, et cetera.
But why do I care if, you know, a charger is broken when, you know, it's not even being used, you know?
And so when it started becoming actually economical in a viable business, then it's like, oh, if, you know, a charger or two are broken, we're actually losing money now because,
you know, somebody can't charge or they're going to a competitor, it's hurting our brand long-term, they can't trust us.
So...
It sort of went from the old days where people were just happy to find a charging station.
Now there's competition.
Now there's brand.
Now there's expectations.
There's choice.
And so we've talked to some of the executives at the hardware companies saying their customers are asking for and paying for higher levels of uh
of maintenance contracts and SLAs.
That was the acronym I was blanking on.
But yeah, they're seeing a pivot into actually paying for and expecting higher service level agreements and things like that.
So we're seeing this sort of move up for people caring more about uptime and reliability and things like that.
So I think that's a piece of it.
And as Bill said,
They're also, we won't name names, but everybody knows who they are.
There were, know, some of the major charging networks sort of ran through several hardware players.
And, you know, they were new, they tried them out and some of them didn't work out so well.
Some of the companies went bankrupt, some of the companies exited the US market, et cetera.
you know, now, um you know, there's enough...
players where people kind of know who produces a quality product, who stands behind it, et cetera.
And so we're seeing, you know, again, a few players starting to sort of dominate, if you will.
There was one more piece, if I could just add real quickly, to our infrastructure data, which is that the average number of ports per station has gone up from like 3.2 to 3.7 or
3.9.
And uh that is, I think, equally important from a reliability perspective.
We know stuff happens.
And so if one of one
charger is not working, that's bad.
If one of two is not working, that's not great.
If one of four, one of six, one of 10 is not working, now you've got a shot at moving to a different stall or not waiting as long.
uh And I think that's a big thing.
And we're seeing that, again, it's one of our key features of charging 2.0 vendors is they're putting in stations typically of six or more simultaneous uh vehicle charging
capability.
Yeah Chase, Yeah, go ahead.
I was just going to say that that's a great call out.
But uh what were you going to add, Loren?
I, yeah, I was just going to add, mean, the, the, port to station ratio was something I started tracking.
Uh, you know, I don't know about eight, nine years ago, something like that.
And, know, the, difference between Tesla and everybody else was, was crazy.
It's still crazy.
Right.
But, but back in the, in the, in the day, you know, Tesla was averaging around eight or nine, uh, then moved up to 10.
Now they're at about 13, uh, ports, ports per station.
and everybody else was less than two, right?
And, know, again, we won't necessarily name names, but there's some well-known names in the industry, you know, who are selling, you know, one low-power fast charger to, you
know, a restaurant owner, you know, and putting in the back, or even convenience store chain, you know, one out front, right?
And, you know, and then maybe some twos, right?
And, and you know, this bill said the problem with that is yes, like if you have one charger and it's broken, right, you have no chargers, right?
If you have two chargers and one, you know, it's like there was this story that this woman who went on a road trip several years ago in a, a, in a, uh, uh, in a Chevy Bolt and she
planned like all these stops and she would get to a location that had two chargers and one would be full and the other would be broken.
And she had like, you know,
30 miles left and the next nearest charging station was 40 miles away.
Yeah, it it creates such a bad experience.
And then one person hears that story and they tell like 20 more people about how bad that was.
And so just to put an exclamation point on it and, but so then when you get to like Bill said, when you get to four to six to eight, you know, then it's like, okay, if it's, if
the station is full, you're probably only going to wait five minutes for it to churn and, and, know, and for you to get there.
And if one or two charges are broken, right, you just, there's still six others or whatever um that, that are working.
And so that, that.
number of stalls per station growing is one of the most significant and important trends in the industry because it just improves everything that we just talked about.
When I'm kind of curious I mean obviously software must be one of if not the largest kind of player into this right reliability thing because I had taken I guess it was about a
year ago I did a road trip from Bend Oregon down to Phoenix Arizona didn't a day don't recommend it and I was in Battle Mountain Nevada which is very middle of nowhere and there
was four chargers two of them
One of them for sure was down and then a second one looked like it should work.
But no matter what I did, no matter like there was something, even though the screen was telling me it was working, clearly it was just broken.
And you go into the app and it says there's only one down.
And in the end, obviously I love to tell the tale I'm here.
But for those people like in that Chevy Bolt, in those kind of experiences who are new to it, I completely agree.
Having more stalls there is great.
And I just think even when you're at four, okay, you're on the second one that's failed.
starts getting a little dicey and a little nervous even for someone who has like is experienced that.
now it feels to me like the thing that is helping with this is just reliable, accurate software on the back end.
That's really giving a lot of these CPOs and charging providers that clear data to say, Hey, this
stall is malfunctioning it needs to be replaced.
I is that in I'd be kind of curious if to you if both of you guys think that's probably the biggest thing just because it just seemed like we'd see such a long I mean only go
back a couple of years you would see such a long time between a station being down and being replaced or even properly fixed and now we're starting to see that fine I mean
obviously as you were mentioning like Tesla still kind of like the gold standard for that where they can do like 48 hours.
but it seems like a lot more are really catching up in that space.
So there's a lot to unpack in that statement, but let's start at the end there, which we started to call the mean time to repair, right?
And which is a normal uh hardware type metric, but from a customer perspective, how long does it take?
We've seen charging stations that have been down for weeks, months, many months.
ah We've got stations that we've seen in.
oh
in the Pacific Northwest where cable cutting is a big challenge, where I'm pretty confident that the CPO or the site host has said, I'm done.
I'm not replacing the cable again if it's just going to get cut the next day.
I get it.
That makes perfect business sense.
we see, I told this example, I think at EBCS.
where there is a Tesla charging station that is right behind where I used to work.
And it was set on fire.
This is in Massachusetts.
So it set on fire, I don't back in early March, I think.
And it set on fire probably around midnight on a Monday night.
Power was cut.
Five of the eight stalls were damaged.
By Thursday afternoon, people were charging again.
I don't know if all eight were replaced, but at least the five that were damaged, looked like someone poured gasoline or something and set them on fire, but they didn't damage the
backend infrastructure, they just damaged the stalls.
So that to me, that's the gold standard, right?
That is you're out there shutting it down, digging, replacing and testing and validating, and they even put up uh one of those mobile cameras that's solar powered.
So that's a great example of really matching what the customers are expecting from this location.
Yeah, and chase the, you know, the.
That's like the top tier experience from like a hardware standpoint.
I think what's still in my experience using some of the other providers what's so cool was obviously Tesla does have like just the total number of stalls.
So if one goes down in that area it's not a huge mess.
But from the driver perspective in the OS it just kind of disappears.
It's offline.
So you're not still being routed to this one that's either down or offline.
It just you.
It figures out and you keep going on your road trip as if it was never there or never an issue.
But I'm sorry, what were you going to say there, Loren?
point was actually one of the original things that got me going to start this business about two years ago, which is that, there a way to tell that a station is down when it
says it's not?
When it says it's up, And so we actually worked with the original reliability, sort the original reliability.
uh
study that came out, which I still quote recently.
It's now getting a little old in the tooth.
This is about three years old, right?
And this was from the Cool the Earth team in UC Berkeley, uh a team headed by a woman named Carleen Cullen that went out and physically tested 600 ports in uh the Oakland area,
DC fast charging ports.
And they found that some of them worked, some of them said they worked and they didn't.
Some of them didn't work.
They said they didn't work and they obviously didn't work.
And then some worked.
And so we got a hold of their data and matched it up against some of our data.
And we were able to sort of train an algorithm to understand what it looks like when a station says it's up and it's really not capable of holding an EV charge.
uh we're seeing, we don't see that as much anymore.
We talked about reliability going up and that's one of the key reasons is that the...
uh
that there's a whole bunch of different pieces of software involved.
There's the software in your vehicle.
There's the software in the OS running the charger itself, charging unit, and then there's the software um for the payment terminal.
They all have to be in sync.
uh And when they're not, bad things happen.
And so we're seeing a lot of improvements in that area, just in general, over the last two years.
Yeah, Chase, software and Bill knows the of the numbers uh by heart, I think.
But maybe it was the charger help study and stuff.
think isn't software the number one cause of charger failures or is it cellular connectivity?
I can't remember which one.
Do you remember?
um I think it's the cell.
I think at the time of where that study was done, I think it was the cellular connectivity.
And maybe that's evolved a bit.
I know, um you know, Camille of Charger help, she always recommends to customers to use a wired backup and stuff like that.
And I know there's some innovative solutions now where they sort of, uh if one cellular uh service goes down, it reconnects to a backup one and stuff.
I think.
You know, again, you go back to what we were talking about earlier is in the early days, it just, you know, they were learning while they were flying, right?
And, um and the, the, you know, the, wasn't a business yet.
So it didn't make sense.
Now it's starting to make sense to, to spend the extra money to have these backups, to have teams that monitor the software.
I monitored a moderated a session, not this year at EVCS, but
a year ago on using like AI and machine learning and using like anomaly detection and stuff like that.
It's still kind of early, but a lot of the companies and software providers are starting to build in intelligence to actually look for patterns before, you know, charging hardware
or things go down, right?
And so they can maybe be proactive and stuff.
The reality is what Bill and I
and Floran experienced a couple of months ago is that that dream is not quite real yet.
So again, I won't mention the names, but uh we stopped off at a very well-known uh charging station in Marin County on the way back from a uh executive retreat.
uh And uh we pulled up to a...
three fast charger plus a level two charger stationed at a uh supermarket.
And uh there were two stalls full and we go up to the third one and it says it's down or I forgot what the message was on it, right?
So we literally sat there in the parking lot aisle for a little bit.
Florenta and I went in and got sandwiches and stuff and then I came back and I walked up and I looked and there was a phone number and stuff so I pressed the button and called got
hung up on after waiting five minutes called back then somebody answered within four minutes and the guy said what's the problem I said, you know the chargers down and He says
what's the number on it.
I told him the number he
few seconds go by, oh yeah, we've already fixed that station.
Here, let me reboot it.
And he literally rebooted the charger.
I watched it go dark, come back on it took, think maybe less than 60 seconds.
And it was working and there was a car sitting there waiting.
We'd already plugged in another one.
That's why I waved the car over.
But it was like, that was like this total head scratcher for us.
Wait a minute.
They knew it had been down.
They somehow fixed it, but didn't bring it back online.
And so it was down.
think Bill went back and looked at the data when we got back to the office.
It was down for, I think, an hour or two or something like that.
But if I hadn't called, how long?
It might have been down for days.
ah But that's stuff that's just unacceptable.
How does that happen?
And I think I'm yeah, I know we've been kind of uh talking about the negative side of it.
So I kind of to pivot to see talk about the things that we're optimistic about because you're totally right between I guess I've shared this before, but I'll share it real
briefly.
I recently went to a third party charger along the Oregon Coast.
Beautiful area, but there really aren't many chargers around there.
And fortunately, I didn't need to charge.
It just would have been nice to charge.
uh Given where we were staying and like on our trip we were doing something else like hey if this works that's kind of nice we don't have to stop later.
We're already getting lunch and I go to use the card swiper and one it's a 50 kilowatt charger which yeah whatever but I go to use the card swipe and I have never had a car and
I knew this was gonna happen I've never had a card swipe work with this.
uh
provider.
don't want to say chain, but CPO.
just literally they have they physically have them.
I know that they were trying to add the software to make them work.
And if they have ever actually done it, they're all broken.
And I don't know that just unfortunately is just the sad state of affairs with them.
Anyways, I go to the backup, which is to download the app, which should hopefully make it work.
Well, where this is on the Oregon coast, I have no cell reception.
And I had
I downloaded the app and because I got some setting on my phone, it deletes apps I don't use for a while.
And here I am.
I mean, in some ways I'm getting like a sick satisfaction out of this.
Like this is so unbelievably bad.
you did have the RFID card, right?
The little fob.
right.
mean, I mean, that was that was about about as pathetic and to the point that it was that I tried just about everything.
And at that point, I was just like, you know what?
This is pointless.
I'm just going to drive away.
But I can only imagine I'm far from I just kind of think like, OK, the the poor little grandma or just someone who's like trying this or doing this for the first time.
What the hell are they going to do and how is this system going to work?
So now that we've.
gone through all the terrible experiences we've had and how sad we are with the industry.
Let's talk about some of the things that make us optimistic.
And because I do think that was actually a really funny thing talking to a lot of people uh coming from the charging somebody just it seemed like a lot of people were going into
it were a little kind of downtrodden.
Obviously, I think some of the news and stuff had happened like the week before.
But then coming out of it, there does seem to be a pretty positive feeling from a lot of people.
And maybe I'm just naturally optimistic.
I was going and kind of.
Excited to be there and everything else going on.
I came out even happier out of it But what are like looking at utilization and some of those some of these other things we're starting to see what what are some of kind like the
really positive?
trend lines and things are showing like okay, this is growing and Reinforcing and rewarding those CPOs who are doing this well
Yeah.
And just to be clear, I think we started off really positive and they were saying, you know, different players, you know, they're bringing provenly brand experience reliability.
We are seeing reliability go up and stuff.
So I just want to be clear.
We started off very positive.
got to sandwich the bad news between like two good things, right?
we ended with our negative experiences.
yeah, mean, utilization is one of the things that Bill obviously tracks and we look at a lot.
And I think there are a couple of things that really stood out.
One is just that in many key markets, utilization is averaging 25%, 30 % on a
either a 24 hour basis or however long that particular station is open.
But one of the things that we did is we sliced the data um by what we either call sort of peak time or prime time charging.
In this case, we sort of looked at a bell curve and stuff and picked the hours of 12 noon to 6 PM.
In this particular data set, we were looking at across the largest MSAs that
sort of was when we saw the sort of the bulk of the usage.
And, you know, there are markets that are like averaging north of 40 % utilization during those six hours, right?
And what that means is, is there are actually a number of charging stations in markets like San Francisco, LA, New York, Vegas, Miami, et cetera, where they're 80 to 100 %
Utilized during during the middle of the day, right?
Like they are literally tapped out as Bill and I talked about uh And we don't get no sort of what the magic number is.
We're actually starting to work on that but It's it's sort of good news bad news for these CPOs in these markets one is, know utilization is off the chart, but You you can't you you
know, if they're completely occupied
in the middle of the day, you can't sell more, right?
How do you grow?
And again, this is maybe, I don't know what, build 20 or 30 markets or something like that where this is a problem.
The rest of the country, it's not a problem yet, right?
But in those markets, you really have roughly three options.
One is,
You know, you use time of use rates and different things like that to try to attract more people to charge at, you know, five o'clock in the morning, 11 o'clock at night, because
rates are significantly cheaper.
So you get them to change their behavior.
ah Because, you know, if everybody just goes and waits or whatever it is, they're going to leave, right?
You just you it extends those little bit of hours.
So you want to move them to the to the lower utilized hours.
B, maybe you.
uh
you do partnerships with fleets and rideshare companies and apartment complexes and stuff like that where you get people to come charge in the middle of the night and things like
that and at a lower price.
And thirdly is, and this is sort of Bill's favorite of the three is you add more ports and open new stations, right?
But yeah, and so this is, know,
Like two years ago, this was not a problem or an opportunity.
Like we weren't talking about, you know, 100 % utilization, 80 % utilization.
Well, I guess in those markets is it are you seeing the old adage if you build it they will come in that case when they are actually that maxed out.
So not necessarily in those markets, but generally.
But we also did a study with a bunch of NEVI data that we got.
So Ohio leads the country in the number of NEVI stations.
So it's a really good uh data source to look at.
And so we looked at the holidays of the new NEVI stations.
And it was really interesting around Thanksgiving and Christmas New Year's of 24, where those stations were like months old, some in cases weeks old.
uh and they saw 20 % utilization during the peak travel times.
to me, that said, and Ohio is very interesting because it has two or three east-west uh major highways that run through it and then two north and south, right?
So it is, if you're going anywhere on the East Coast, generally, unless you're hugging the coast, you're gonna pass through Ohio, as I did during the holidays.
And those stations, for being brand new, uh
just saw a tremendous amount of activity.
And I think that is one case where I think if you build it, they did build it and they came oh and they continue to come.
that's in not necessarily specific urban populations.
mean, the places, because Ohio is generally, well, at least the highways are generally all in major metro areas uh or at least in that region.
That doesn't surprise me.
But when we look at, in the broader sense, when we look at the big metro regions, uh to me, growth is the only way out.
uh There's only so much you can do from a time of use pricing perspective.
uh And you can incentivize a few folks, but it's really hard to move the needle.
really just need to increase the capability, both of
of the charger, put more high powered charging.
As newer cars come out, they can accept that high power at better rates, leading to shorter charging times, leading to more folks being able to move through the cycle,
through the system.
to me, it's an opportunity for existing CPOs to expand their space.
Again, easier said than done, much easier said than done.
And an opportunity for other folks, whether they're the...
you know, the sheets and the loves and the buckies that don't already have charging, to put uh more charging stations in places where they don't have to go find the land, like
Walmart.
Walmart just saved probably a third of the problem of landing EV charging, which is the land grab, right?
They've already got it for the most part.
Yeah, Chase, think one of the, and I think we talked about this on one of my previous uh appearances on the show was the thing that really has driven utilization in these major
urban markets is rideshare drivers.
And this,
I'm sorry not to to catch up.
I want to hear what you have to say.
But one of the things I did want to ask you specifically about that is your time about time of use.
And in my own anecdotal experience, I have seen time of use literally, albeit a charger that I am the only person at.
And then it becomes 10 p.m.
And it is then flooded with what appears to be mostly ride share drivers.
So I wanted to ask you kind of like time of use does seem to have some impact specifically with
that group that's so price sensitive for that return that they're trying to get on their rides.
Yeah, you know, ride share drivers, for many of them, especially those that drive EVs and stuff, it might be their primary business, right?
As opposed to the people that are like school teachers that are driving on weekends and nights and stuff like that, right?
But yeah, mean, you know, we all, all three of us use uh Uber and Lyft when we travel and stuff like that.
And I'm just, it's amazed at how many are
know, Model Ys and Model 3s and other electric vehicles.
I mean, it has just exploded.
Uber and Lyft have incentivized.
There's these leasing rental services that have emerged and partnered.
I think the drivers get a few more pennies per mile or something if they drive an EV with a green rate and all these kinds of things.
that's
That has really taken off because these drivers who it's their like business have realized, especially when gas prices are high in markets like California and certain
places on the coast that they can actually be more profitable driving an EV versus a gas car.
But where this really first came onto my radar was about nine months ago when EVgo and one of their quarterly earnings uh investor presentations.
said that 25 % of their throughput, meaning the amount of energy dispensed in the quarter was to one customer segment, rideshare drivers.
25%, one quarter of their business is from this tiny percentage of drivers.
They have something like now 1.3 million members.
But so, know, like.
uh a small percentage of that is driving one quarter of their business.
And the analogy I like to use is somebody that was like a diamond uh status on Delta for many years.
The industry is sort of, at least for a while, moving to a model like that, right?
the upper tier, the top tier business, uh loyalty members of airlines,
account for like 1 % of the customers, but like 80 % of the revenue and profits and that type of thing.
And we're starting to see that now with RightShare that, you talk to some of these RightShare drivers, Chase, and some of them will charge two or three times a day, six days
a week, right?
So.
you know, they might be charging 15 or 20 times a week versus an average EVgo customer apparently might charge a couple times a week or something like that, right?
So that, you know, that just emerged like in the last two years or so.
And that's what, that's, know, if you go back and we plotted the chart, you would see that that's really what seems to be driving.
That and the fact that
You know, we're almost about doubling the number of EVs on the road now, you know, because we're at, 1.3 million, right?
And so if you're at 4 million, you add, uh you know, 1.3 million each year, even though, you know, the headlines say we're slowing from an actual numbers growth perspective, uh
that's like 25 % VIO growth, you know, number of vehicles on the road in one year.
That has also contributed, but the rideshare drivers are
Really like the big mover.
Yeah, go ahead, Bill.
I think it's kind of interesting because I think I may have spoken with you about this in the past as well.
Like if you look at the traditional rideshare taxi driving business, they have their own commercial charging and it does seem like there is kind of a bit of a business opportunity
for one of these C.P.O.s to kind of either lean into that.
I know you've got like Revel, which has their own cars and they kind of do that, but it seems like that would also alleviate a lot of this.
pressure you see at these fast chargers.
mean, and that seems to be where most of these negative headlines come from, because I think it was last winter when Chicago had that kind of big winter rollout and then all
these, uh you saw the headlines of people waiting at chargers and the vast majority of them were rideshare drivers that were just trying to use that with this.
And to me, it just seems like there does, there's a business opportunity and there's also an experience improvement that kind of needs to be made.
with this optimization for who rides share drive, where and when rideshare drivers are charging on some of these charging networks so that the grandma who's taking that road
trip across the country isn't kind of getting this horrible experience when they roll up to each charging or waiting like 20 minutes, just even plug in.
So real quick on that, I Revel is doing more than just just fueling their own vehicles, right?
They've opened up, I forget exactly where, was it LA or San Francisco, that they've opened up a hub uh specifically for rideshare.
BP Pulse opened up probably the largest charging station in New England, including Tesla.
uh I think they 48 or something stalls uh in the Boston area, and that's gonna primarily uh serve uh
ride show drivers, because we've seen in certainly around Logan Airport, um where I've spent far too much time, is it's a charging desert.
There's a couple of stations that more often than not are plowed in and not usable.
So I think that's a great opportunity.
The other quick thing to add is I read somewhere recently where Uber Green
is no longer at some point going to allow hybrids.
And I'll tell you, as an Uber customer, there's nothing more disappointing than going on Uber Green and getting a RAV4 hybrid.
Nothing against the RAV4.
I have one in my garage.
But it's not what the expectation is.
So that may actually drive more EVs into that green space, especially if uh you're getting a few cents more per mile out of it.
Chase, think, yeah, we've all talked about this and stuff.
And there's this expectation that Uber and Lyft fund or partner or whatever at some point, right, this charging infrastructure.
But that may not happen.
What they may do is just work with, like Bill mentioned, BP and Revel and companies like that and provide the data.
It's sort of like.
Look, if you'll build these things, we'll tell you where to build it, right?
Because we know, when airports are in most obvious location, right?
They go and they queue a while.
It's a perfect thing.
Go plug in.
Use the restroom.
Get a cup of coffee.
Check your phone.
Call your girlfriend, like whatever it is, for a little bit.
Top up and go.
get back in and get that, you know, that airport fair and head back into the downtown city or whatever it is, right?
And so, you know, maybe we're going to see the BP's and the revels and, you know, and the EV goes and others sort of take that on with these sort of, you know, maybe they're
exclusive, right?
Like maybe they're only for rideshare drivers or maybe there's certain stalls that are dedicated or something like that.
But, but I do think we need, we need to see Uber and Lyft kind of step up a little bit and
Yeah.
sure that that happens because you're right.
Like as this explodes, there's nothing worse than as a normal driver pulling into a charging station that's got 12 Uber and Lyft drivers there.
And you're like, what the hell, right?
No.
Well, and I think I think it is something that'll be self-encomic growing pain, but it just seems like it's a specific need that, like I said, traditional fueling, you have
commercial fueling for businesses so they are not interfering, for the most part, with travel of kind of regular citizens.
And I know we have been talking a lot kind of about more uh urban focus with a lot of this.
I would be kind of curious since we got Loren.
You're always kind of Mr.
Nevy with the current state of Nevy.
I would be curious to kind of hear your thoughts on kind of the rural market, the adoption and just overall adoption, how that's played or just any of these kind of trends you're
seeing from that uh point of view as since we're kind of starting to come up on time here.
Yeah, yeah.
one of the things when we looked at the data, and there's one of my favorite charts in the report that shows, uh it's got the utilization percentages and sort of colors.
And uh as you might expect, sort of the darker colors, meaning higher utilization tend to be on sort of the coasts things like that.
And that upper Midwest, the North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, et cetera.
are like white, right?
Like they're 1%, 2%, 3 % utilization, whereas California is like 25%.
And so yeah, there you go.
so it's not surprising, right?
There aren't a lot of EVs being purchased in those markets.
It's very rural.
People drive 13,000 miles a year versus 8,000 miles a year in California.
They do long road trips just to go to that Walmart.
They drive pickups.
It's not necessarily where people are going to adopt uh EVs at a high level.
so the reality is infrastructure has probably exceeded the need and demand, if you will.
Right?
Like that's why utilization is so low.
Right?
If you got four chargers and nobody's using them, you're going to have a 1 % uh utilization rate.
the flip to this and the negative impact of the pause of Nevi is, you know, one of the drivers and hurdles uh of EV adoption is the fear that if I go on the road trip to
Yellowstone, Yosemite,
You know, Wyoming, you know, the, the, the, what is it?
The, uh, in, South Dakota, the, the, know, with the presidents in the Hill, I'm blanking on what's, what's, what that's Not Rushmore.
Thank you.
This is what happens when you get old.
Um, but yeah, I mean, there's people reading the headlines that, know, no chargers are being built.
I can't go on a road trip.
My, my brother in law has told me this.
He wants to drive across Iowa and he's heard that there's no chargers and he.
might run out of fuel so he's not going to get an EV, right?
And so even though utilization is low in these regions, they're still not there where we need them.
They're not the every 40, 50, 30, whatever miles uh on the way to Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore and things like that.
So the pause of Nevi is really problematic.
because it means not only are these chargers not going to be building, we're not bringing jobs, we're not giving the people that live there confidence that they can go to the
Walmart 70 miles away and back and charge.
It's that the hundreds of millions of people in America who want to go visit their grandma in Montana for Thanksgiving don't think they can, right?
And that's the primary...
hurdle that Nevi was designed to solve.
A lot of people don't understand that, but that's it was to fix the lack of those chargers that, every 50 miles and give people confidence they can go there.
So the Nevi pause is really not a good thing.
And the flip to it, Chase, is that what it means is, is those purple states are only going to get more purple, right?
Because
Now because people, and again, we won't mention names, but Bill and I have had conversations with several customers, they're like, this is a fundamental pivot for them.
They're like, yeah, when we can get incentives, we'll get them.
But we're really now completely driven by data and where we can make the most money, which means they're not going to put them out on those.
Bye.
those northern plate states, right?
Which means it's only making the matters worse.
So we're truly having headed towards what I'm sort of calling a charger divide or a charger utilization divide where the CPOs are just gonna double down on those urban right
share markets where they can make a ton of money uh and ignore those rural ones.
I mean, that is kind of interesting because that does seem to put like, uh obviously, kind of Tesla having the, in my experience, probably the most universal rural exposure to
charging locations as well.
So that is kind of an interesting one where that is leaving.
I get the argument like you're saying for it, but leaves a lot on the table kind of to them as a national provider.
That's right.
Yeah, but I was just going to say, because I got really negative there, but to go back to sort of be positive and connect it with some of the earlier players we talked about,
though this is where the Walmarts and the Quick Trips and those providers that are out uh in the rural areas could help solve some of that.
And so there is hope.
But fundamentally, the Nevi pause is problematic from a number of levels.
But you're right, Chase, it does put more pressure on Tesla to be that national provider.
And we saw this time last year when they canned the entire charging team.
And then we've seen them say that they're going to focus more on making existing stations larger to accommodate some of the need.
it...
That uncertainty of exactly what they're capable of doing, I think, is going to be uh something that we have to keep an eye on.
It's not an issue today, but it could be an issue in the future.
No, that's a good point.
I guess this may be a good pivot since we're talking about Tesla is kind of the adoption of the J 3400 North American charging standard and kind of roll out.
We're seeing with that uh nationally.
I'm curious on both of your guys thoughts.
Yeah, so we started counting ports, which is something that is not a lot to count right now.
But we're counting the number of NAX ports that are out there and seeing how is that going to change over time.
And we're looking at IANA, for example, when they put their stations out, generally they're putting them out in 6040, 60CCS 40.
We saw BP Pulse doing 50-50.
I think Walmart said they're going to do 50-50.
And the hardware that they're using allows them to quickly change their mind if they're measuring the data correctly and they see things moving in a different direction.
So that is something that we're watching.
We know EVgo has always had either...
has always had that third plug on some of their Delta City 100s.
That was the Tesla plug.
then, yes.
And then, um we're seeing some folks, we're some folks in California, EVCS is another CPO.
that has the plugs uh in, that has a mix.
And so we're seeing that number grow.
We're also seeing the hardware, different hardware come out.
ChargePoint, I think, has sort of a magic dock-like solution for their customers.
And so those are all good signs that as the vehicles come, and they will come with better charging experiences.
just from a vehicle perspective, that there will be more than just Tesla options out there.
Yeah, and Chase, just from kind of a numbers perspective, and correct me if I'm wrong, Bill, but I think right now it's about 10 to 1, sort of Tesla, sort of like Magic Dock
capability versus all the other non-Tesla.
How many it's like?
It's just under about, I think, 1,000 for Tesla and about 100 for non-Tesla.
New.
Yeah, yeah, in the last quarter.
We're still really early.
so I think what we're going to see chase for a while is, and you know, I think the, lucid gravity, I think is the first.
Evie that's going to be on the market with, with the J 3,400 standard.
And then, you know, they're going to start to roll out after.
has started rolling out some of their vehicles already with it.
But you're right.
It is pretty limited what vehicles are out in the market.
And I know that that was one of the big things.
Lucid was going to mentioning with the launch of it.
think that the CPOs right now are sort of saying, okay, we're just going to depend on the adapters for the moment for our tens of thousands of ports that we have out there.
And then when we open new stations, that's where we're going to add the, as Bill said, 50-50, 60-40, whatever it is.
But until there are probably...
40 or 50 BEVs on the market that have, uh you know, a standard J3400 port on the car, they're going to probably not do a lot of retrofitting, right?
Or they'll do it when, you know, like in Seattle when the cable's cut, right?
They might replace it with the, you know.
of the wrong kind, yeah.
J3 400 or just, you know, like we saw with Electify American EV go in the last year or two, they did a lot of rip and replace.
They ripped out old hardware and replace it.
you know, and a lot of these chargers have been in the ground, you know, for five, seven, 10 years now and have reached their end of life.
And so that's, we might see a lot of that sort of where it makes sense, right?
If we're going to replace the hardware, let's...
let's replace the connector and stuff as well.
That makes a lot of sense.
I always thought that the rollout that a lot of people had shared around how quickly the turnover was going to be to J3400 seemed m optimistic at best, whether that be on the
charging or the automaker side.
I am curious.
m A little tangential to that, I was talking to some of the electric era team.
And they've been making a I mean,
Quince even on LinkedIn has been posting about it quite a bit lately that Tesla is also kind of opening up their native OS to recommend highly ranked third party chargers.
I'm just kind of curious if that's come up at all or much with any of the conversations of the CPOs you work with and any of the things that maybe are kind of going into the thought
process if they're trying to be involved with that to make sure they do well and kind of get ranked high on it.
We've had a couple of conversations.
And basically, it's more for us to understand a little bit about what those requirements are.
Is it this particular site has demonstrated over the last month that it is a reliable site?
Is it at a CPO level?
uh And how frequently is that data checked?
Because as we talked about early on in the show here, if the charger says it's available but it can't hold a charge, uh
The CPO says it's up, right?
We don't, drivers don't, we don't consider that up.
And that was actually a long conversation I had with the Charge X Consortium team when we were going with that a year and a half ago.
And so I'm curious as to what the actual requirements are there and how they're going to be met because I think that it should be probably more stringent than it is.
And...
Maybe we'll have a chat with Quincy and see if he can share what some of those details are.
But yeah, I'm curious as to how that's going to work, right?
We know that Rivian has done something somewhat similar in that they're using their fleet as a way to measure reliability from an EV charging perspective.
I like that idea.
I consider it a step above plug share.
Plug share is anecdotal, right?
It's hit or miss, right, as to whether or not you're going to get data on any specific charger.
uh But if you've got a bunch of a fleet of Rivians that are visiting the top 10 % of the chargers, then you're going to get some detail, but it's not going to be broad enough,
right?
uh So I'm curious as to how Tesla is going to handle that.
Yeah, I remember when they announced it for Europe a long time ago, they had said that if a driver shows up and the success rate is 70 % or greater, they would show it.
And to me, even 70 % seemed like a low bar for what should be.
Yeah.
And admittedly, this was a few years ago.
So I'm curious to see what they're, I'm hoping it's closer to 90%.
But I'll be interested to see how that is implemented.
Yeah.
But, but Chase, know, and this is this is ultimately the sort of the vision of, of, of Paren is, is to look not just at, um, you know, the ability to successfully charge, but,
but all the other factors that go into the decision to pick, you know, station location A versus D, right?
Because, as we've talked about, you know, one of the things that's really changed in this transition to charging 2.0,
is choice, right?
Like we've gone from, you you're driving down a highway and it's like, my God, there's a fast charger that I can charge at.
I'm just happy to, you know, now we have these like, these sort of hubs, like, and we talked about this on a previous show, right?
Where it's sort of like fast food and gas stations where there's one on every corner, right?
And so it's like, you know, do we want Taco Bell, Burger King, McDonald's or, you know, Arby's or whatever it is, right?
You know, it used to be there was just the McDonald's on that on one corner, right?
So now we have optionality and that's emerging now, which means that, you know, Ben and Bill uses this example all the time.
Like where he wants to stop is quite different from where his wife wants to stop, right?
She cares about, you know, safety and amenities and clean, link bathroom and stuff.
And Bill cares more about like state of charge and price and things like that.
Right.
um
And so, you know, what does a rating mean?
Right?
Like, you know, like I don't know about the, you know, the two of you, but when my family and I go on a road trip, you know, my first care is like good food and a clean bathroom.
Right.
Is this a place I want to stop and hang out at for 20 to 30 to 40, 40 minutes?
Right.
I, I don't care if it costs me 50 or 55 or 60 cents a kilowatt hour.
You know, I'm not everybody.
A lot of people do care about that.
But, you know, if I'm spending, you know, $40 on, you know, three burrito bowls and soft drinks and like, what do I care about, you know, a dollar 20 difference in price?
I mean, that's just me, right?
But, you know, one things we've talked a lot about is it's just not, it's not just amenities and clean bathrooms, but that charging station at two o'clock in the afternoon.
um could be quite safe, right?
But at 11 o'clock at night when the restaurant next door, the subway or Taco Bell or whatever it is, is closed and there's no bathroom, there's no lights, there's no humans
around, it goes from being really safe to I ain't stopping, right?
And so, you know, that's why, you know, not to pick on them, but you know, Plug Share or whatever these ratings.
kind of may not mean much at the moment that you stop, right, or want to stop.
And so we really need a more real time, comprehensive and personalized approach to helping figure out where to stop.
Yeah, I've always kind of considered so many of these are open 24 7 and I kind of think every now and then.
Well, should they be?
Maybe this one shouldn't be open 24 7.
It's good during the day.
But right now it's at best.
Yeah, but I mean, that's what I think there is a kind of there's a fun that comes out of it for some people such as myself when they are on a like they're trying to cover a
thousand miles in a day.
It's like, well, this is a fun twist.
uh But yeah, kind of speaking to it, that's not for everyone, especially if you're traveling with a family.
I don't think you want to have the experience like, well, I got held up at a uh charging station outside of Vegas and before I knew it.
Great story.
Terrible experience.
And I think with that, I do realize we've gone over time.
This has been great as always.
Thank you, Loren and Bill so much for coming on today.
Really great conversation, really great content.
For those listening, we already have quite a few of the links in the show notes, but are there any upcoming events or what's the best way to connect with the PREN team and learn
about more what your team's offering?
Yeah, I mean, you can go to the parent app uh website and we've got the report there.
Go to the reports uh section.
You can read and download the new Q1 report blog.
uh We actually um are, Bill and I are doing a webinar where we're going to walk through the highlights on Thursday, May 8th.
So.
That's maybe probably the key takeaway so you can actually hear us go through sort of in detail and actually see the charts as we talk to them.
I don't know, Bill, do you have anything to add or?
uh No, we're looking again at, we did an estimate around Thanksgiving and based on some AI tools that we're working with.
And so we're gonna do some similar estimates around Memorial Day and sort of.
oh
predicting the best times to charge.
It's a predictive algorithm that we're working on around major holidays as we look to kind of expand and build on what we call the routing companion, right?
Kind of what we just talked about is routing is getting more complex.
It's not just getting you from point A to point B, but that point B has to be working.
It's got to meet all of your other needs.
uh And that's really what our main focus is.
So we're continuing to kind of push that envelope.
uh
and move forward.
So follow us on LinkedIn.
uh Most of your crew are probably already following Loren.
Well, great.
Thank you, Bill and Loren.
We'll have to have you guys on again soon and great conversation.
Thanks, Chase.
All right, thanks, Jason.
That wraps up today's conversation with Lauren McDonald and Bill Farrow from Perrin from rideshare driven utilization to Walmart's nationwide charging strategy and the evolving
metrics that charging 2.0.
This episode captured where the EV charging industry is headed and why real time data and reliability are now non-negotiable.
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