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272 - The Charger Maintenance Episode
272 - The Charger Maintenance Episode
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About this episode
Dive into the complexities of EV charger maintenance and reliability with industry expert Brad Sandis. The discussion covers challenges like charger uptime regulations, hardware and software failures, payment terminal issues, and the impact of weather and vandalism. Brad explains how automation and better processes can improve charger availability, contrasting the fragmented EV charging ecosystem with Tesla’s integrated system. The episode also highlights the importance of transparent metrics for charger availability versus uptime, the costly problem of cable theft, and the need for industry-wide standards to enhance user experience and trust in public charging infrastructure.
Topics:
charger maintenance
charger reliability
public charge point regulations
payment terminal issues
charger uptime vs availability
automation in maintenance
cable theft and vandalism
impact of weather on chargers
EV charging user experience
industry standards and transparency
In this conversation, Gary Comerford and Brad Sandys discuss the critical aspects of EV charging reliability, focusing on maintenance, user experience, and the challenges faced by chargepoint operators.
They explore the differences between maintenance and repairs, the impact of payment terminals, and the role of weather in charger performance.
Brad emphasizes the need for automation and better processes to enhance reliability and user satisfaction in the EV charging landscape.
Guest Details:
The EV Musings Podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the go-to app for EV drivers, helping you find and pay for public charging with confidence.
Links in the show notes:
- The UK, Netherlands, & California Have More EV Charging Ports Than Gas Pump Nozzles? - CleanTechnica - Cool thing
Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk
(C) 2019-2026 Gary Comerford
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"very well known European CPOs got charges in the in the main key car park and I went there to charge because my my my charge of my Audi e-tron is only about 120 miles on in the winter and I went down there didn't have enough charge to get back had to go charge cables were cut I said to"
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Hi, I'm Gary, and this is EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that
are interesting to electric vehicle owners. And on the show today, we'll be looking at charger maintenance.
Our main topic of discussion today is charger maintenance. It's something of a hot topic
with some EV drivers, as it often contributes to charger anxiety for someone new to the field who's
doing their first public charge, and wants to be sure that the chargers will work, for example.
The last thing they want to do is to turn up at a site with a handful of available chargers
to find that in reality most of them are down due to technical issues. The public
charge point regulations 2023 have a specific section in them concerned with charge availability.
The legislation calls for 99% uptime across a charge point operator's rapid charges.
In theory, that's an admirable thing to be aiming for, but in reality the devil's in the details
with things like that. For example, it doesn't differentiate between 99% uptime for individual
charges and 99% uptake for the complete offering across the whole charge point operators
network. As I said before on the show, if you have a thousand units and the two that are closest to
you are permanently out of order, then they're still complying with the regulations, but that
doesn't mean that you have 99% availability on your specific local charger. Furthermore,
the definition of uptime is a little flexible in the public charge point regulations 2023,
especially as it applies to the rapid charges, but not the slow or fast charges which
gives leeway to operators who are AC only. Now I do want to put things into context here. Again,
I said this before on the show. Petrol pumps are not as reliable as you might think. I worked
for 18 months during lockdown delivering groceries for a retailer with on-site fuel stations.
At the end of every shift I had to refill the diesel vans I was driving and in those 18
months the number of times every single petrol or diesel pump was working could be counted
on the fingers of a mitten. But we need to hold EV charges to a slightly higher standard,
because a. their new technology that should be less prone to faults due to wear and tear,
and b. because in a nascent industry like EV charging, we can't afford for public confidence
to be depleted by constant hardware and software faults. Having said that, the charges themselves
are complex pieces of equipment. You need some hardware to physically dispatch electricity,
you need software to manage the current flow, software to communicate with the car, software to
communicate with the back office, hardware to manage payment processing, car readers etc,
software to manage that process etc etc etc. So here to talk to us today is someone who looks
at charger servicing for a living. I'm Brad. I lead the business development for a software
company serving the mobility space and have worked in suppliers for the forecore and
EV world for the last 10 years. So today we're going to focus on charging reliability and maintenance
that aspect of it. So just give me the 30,000 foot elevator pitch for what your organization does,
please. Sure, so Technishi V and we're a global software company and we've supplied mobility
operators for the last 30 years and we help we help CPOs to automate as many of the manual
steps as possible to ensure that charges can remain online and operational so that
drivers get the best charging experience as possible. Right, so building on that I want to
differentiate between sort of the maintenance aspect and the repairs aspect when it comes
to charging because obviously one of those is scheduled or scheduled depending on which
side of the Atlantic you come from and it tries to prevent issues in the first place
and the other one is sort of ad hoc and it solves existing issues. So where do you see
your organization fitting? We'll cover both of those aspects and I think CPOs that are the best
operators will focus much more on preventative because if they can make sure the filters
are changed and those charges are actually getting the right maintenance schedules planned in and
they're happening within their SLAs that's going to lead to less breakdowns and ensure those
drivers can actually charge more often. I think that's fine and good operators can do that but I
think the real problem comes from when breakdowns happen with these charges and how CPOs address
it with the processes they follow. Now I know the whole subject of maintenance and charge
availability slash reliability could be quite an emotive subject because you know needing to
ensure that when someone needs a charge they can get it but if we take the emotion out of
this why is it important to ensure the charges are reliable? Well I think that there's several
factors here first of all the operator and the reputation of that operator they're all out
there trying to make make money if they're having a reputation that these charges aren't available
and operational drivers are going to choose to go elsewhere so that means they're not going to
get that halo revenue they'd expect from getting people to come shop in there in their
convenience stores or use their food service so that's a key thing and it's really difficult
to get EV drivers to come charge you at your locations because most people choose to have an
EV because they want to be charging at home where it's cheaper so it's becoming really difficult
for operators to get people to their sites if their assets aren't working they're losing money
not just on charging but on much wider amenities as well and then I'd say on the on the flip
side of it it's important for that perception for charges to be working so that there isn't
these headline stories out there that charging infrastructure isn't out there and supporting
drivers and that's preventing the the transition for people to make the switch so there's several
factors it's um it's impacting. Now I was in a discussion with somebody the other day and he
brought up the old the iPhone analogy which is you know well how can I be sure that when I'm
driving my EV the battery won't die in the middle because you know my iPhone could be 100%
in the morning and I look at it half an hour later and it's already dropped down to 40% etc
because I've had it for three plus years and I think there's a lot of this mentality of equating
electric vehicles and how they work with the iPhone and if we'd sort of extend that analogy
we've got charging of a phone now I can't recall a single instance where I've actually
had a charger for an iPhone plugged it in and it hasn't worked so when you look at an EV
charger especially a rapid charger there appear to be multiple points of failure along the potential
points of failure along the way so what are the key failure points when we're looking at EV chargers
that we don't have when we're looking at something simple like an iPhone charger? Sure there's
quite a lot of contributing factors here so if you think about these chargers the hardware
there's lots going on there so there's plenty of things that could cause an issue you've
got power you've got connectivity to the internet both of those things need to be working and uninterrupted
for for that charger to operate you've then got the driver and user error and all of these chargers
follow different processes to get them operational and actually providing a charge and then lastly
that you've got the car involved so the car causes a number of issues as well so there's
what's that five five problems that contribute to it's much different to a very simple charger
coming out the wall for your iPhone so there's a lot more to it okay and I understand exactly
what you're saying there and I agree with it but let me put my devil's habit on and reply with one
word Tesla they don't have these problems kind of nailed it yeah why is that I think there's
two there's two buckets here right and the first one's going to be about the process
the cpo follows to address issues when they happen that's one thing I think we should dig
into that in a moment and the second one is is the root causes of these charges and there's
multiple manufacturers that are being used by operators that require all sorts of different
technology and different processes to keep them operational so if you're a cpo with with different
manufacturers in your estate you've got different things you need to be aware of Tesla
closed loop system they've developed it all in-house they're not going to outside
manufacturers to come up with the technology for them and then try to work it around
Tesla have kind of created that and they've done a fantastic job but again playing devil's advocate
there are companies out there that use Tesla hardware yeah there are and they presumably
have got to the point where they don't have all the communication issues that you've talked about
they don't have the issues with the cars they don't have any of the things that you've just
talked about two minutes ago about what caused the issues with a lot of the other charges
so what what i'm getting to is it is possible to have hardware out there that is not a closed loop
that works extremely reliably so what is it about the alpatronics and the abbs and the
camp powers that is not happening i would put it down to the process the the cpo follows
and these are companies out there meant to be technology companies but they're actually
operating in very manual ways and i feel for them for a moment because shock most cpo's aren't
profitable they might have some profitable sites out there but they're burning cash and they're just
trying to keep their heads above water whilst trying to scale and we were at an event last week
the irons the icnc in berlin fantastic event probably the most amount of cpo's you'll
ever see in one place and we got to speak to probably almost 30 of them and they've
all suffering from the same problems of why can power alpatronic charges are going down
but it's all about how they actually resolve them when they happen and some of them are more
developed than others great but others are operating in a very manual way so just to paint
you a bit of a picture of what they're doing if they're not a 24-hour operation there might be
a small cpo for instance they will come in the morning their network operations team will go and
review their back end solution to see what issues have happened overnight that i need to address
they'll be trying to manually sort and prioritize which ones they need to do and they'll be going by
which are the heaviest use sites are there any of their clients but really strict SLAs that they
need to adhere to so they'll be trying to pick those out first of all and then they'll be trying
to diagnose actually what the problems are so they would have presented some error codes
and each manufacturer has different error codes and different remedial steps to resolve them
so they'll be sense checking those in all of that they'll be going on lunch talking to
colleagues it might require a reset for that charger depending on what the OEM states they
need to do so they'll go and perform that or the real headache is when they have to organize
on-site maintenance call outs and that error code is it going to be covered under the warranty
contract who is my maintenance provider what's the SLA for them i'll document that on an excel
spreadsheet and then email them even talking about that that's the long process so put that
into reality all of that contributes to downtime and if you're not efficient at it
you're you're you're just going to frustrate drivers and these cpo's who are profitable are
just trying to keep bleeding operations so they don't want to increase headcounts but they're
trying to scale the network at the same time as utilizations increases wear and tears increases
so they've got a real cluster of problems that they're trying to deal with and that can be
solved with with automation and i fully understand that but again i'm kind of going to come back
with the contrary view on this which is this isn't actually new technology personally i've been
driving electric vehicles for seven years the underlying technology is still fundamentally the
same so surely they should at this point have been able to iron out all the problems i think you gave
four different reasons why that things go wrong a short while back now one of those is is the
user interface and that's a complete different thing you know we can sort out why it is that
certain users can't or we can discuss at a later point why it is that certain users
can't actually intuitively use certain chargers you've got whole episodes about that but but the whole
issue of the comms why are we putting charges in in places where the communication isn't working
what is it about the internal hardware that is faulting out why is it we're continually
having these kind of issues on technology which is not cutting edge at the moment is it
it's not and there's a real cloud everything you describe there i can think of scenarios
for each of those things so there's very prominent charging manufacturers out there
that are having significant problems with their ac dc power modules they're having to go out and
replace them and cpo's are obviously that's an expensive cost that and it costs time to to resolve
all of those things it should have been solved when that manufacturer was designed and put into
practice unfortunately something was missed and they're having to backtrack and solve it so that's
a problem also think when corn is probably being cut for communication issues and i think one of the
biggest underlying problems that the industry faces that no one's talking about is the connectivity
with the payment unit and that's not the charger that that's the payment unit and i could this is
anecdotally i can't prove this but i would say one out of three times when i go to a fast charging
site i will either have a problem myself or i'll see people having a problem where they've
gone through the alpatronic menu of selecting the connector they want to use how they're going to pay
for it typically being lazy i'll use a payment card and then you'll go to authorize it and nothing
happens so you've got to tap it on your apple pay that nothing try debit card nothing happens
and then you have to resort to downloading the app and and joining the service or choosing a
different charger that is an unreported issue that is contributing to charger availability
that the industry isn't talking about i know you do but the industry isn't and the cpo's that are
saying oh we've got 99 uptime it's not transparent because people aren't able to make charges and
it's causing frustration and people tell their friends it's interesting because the very next
question i have on my list is taught to me about credit card terminals and the interface there
what are the failure points because to me again there are two issues related to this one is that
in a large proportion of the charges that you see the terminal the payment terminal has been
bolted on as an afterthought and it's not part it's not integrated in so of course you've then got
compatibility issues there you've got water ingress issues where the cable enters and that
sort of thing and then the other aspect of that is the underlying comms and the the
software slash security issue so even if you do have an integrated payment terminal
you're still going to get the issue where you slap your card on there and for some reason
it's not making the correct connection out to the network or it's not speaking with the bank
correctly or the return codes are incorrect or whatever so what can we do to solve that because
again i can go i did it the other day i was out at a festival there was somebody there who had a
one of these little square credit card terminals they were selling vegetarian hotdogs i slapped
the card on there and it validated within five or six seconds why is it ev charges have such
a different experience when it comes to validating with a credit card or a payment card
if you have hats of that that's super frustrating because you know you can always pay someone
when you're at a festival with with an iZ at all right but you think about the scenario on a plane
so if you're paying for kick out a coffee on a BA airplane they're actually not connected live so
you're making the the payment and it's kind of taking your details and it doesn't actually
process until that flight's landed and got back into comms again so i do not know why
that technology can not just be used to pre-authorize payment terminals at ev charges it feels like a
simple fix but this is probably a conversation that cpo's need to have with the likes of nyax and
peter to to improve this because you're right you can pay a festival we can play in a plane
why can't we solve this at a um at a charging station because again it's not new technology
we've had payment terminals for decades now and it's the underlying technology is slick and it works
so you know like you i constantly hit issues with paying with credit card i i rarely now pay with
a credit card or a payment card at a charger i will use an RFID card zap map sponsors of this
podcast now have the card that they can use there are others out there on the market and
that's the only thing i can slap an RFID card on the reader and the response is almost instantaneous
help me understand why that's different to the way credit cards work well i'm probably going to be
uneducated on on the actual technology difference there but i think we need to be able to provide
different options for the consumer to be able to make these charges um have fail saves in place
that's probably the best i can do and what i would say is better reporting on these failure
types is is probably needed for the cpo's so that's where if a if an authorization hasn't
happened with a credit card that needs to be picked up either through the ocpp logs or through the
the um an interface with the paytor or night unit so we can see where these failures are
and identify these behaviors where there are issues so that the cpo can actually have a picture
of of where the problems are in the estate and start to put fixes in place for them
i also think clear instruction um for for the driver as well because some of this is
is also going to happen with user error right um i've faced that as well before where i've
picked up a charge i think i know what i'm doing i'll plug it into my car and then go to use
the payment reader i've done that in the wrong order i should have actually read the the
signage first wouldn't be great if we could just standardize that with plug and charge
yeah or i mean you know if you've listed my podcast you know i'm a big advocate of plug
and charge i think everybody should do it and it will it will solve a huge number of the
problems that we're talking about here not all of them but it will definitely cut down on
the errors that we've got but again that that is another thing why is it that we cannot say
i don't care whether you plug in and validate or validate plug in why does that cause an issue
on on charges i mean standardize if you want you know plug in first all the time or validate
first all the time fair enough but i can't see why it is that sequence in which you do that
has an effect on whether your payment is validated or not it's you know it does seem
mad but the factors that are going to contribute to that is the hardware the payment terminal
and the process the cpo wants to follow and unless we standardize those things as an industry
everyone's going to think this is the right way to do it and and they'll give their logic to why
someone else will come up with with something different and and if you're trading between
these charging operators you're getting a mix of experiences and it causes confusion so i'm
a fan of introducing some standards through the likes of the regulatory bodies that can
help enforce this before we move on from payment process i just want to look back to
something you said a few seconds ago am i right in thinking that if i try and pay by credit card
and there's an issue it isn't a default that it logs that on the charger somewhere or is
it a fact that it is a default that it logs it but nobody actually is checking on the back
end to see how many times there's been an issue what's the which one of those is accurate
have i uh have i understood or misunderstood that again it will vary between manufacturer and
vary between cpo i think for the most part that information can be captured in in the payment
reader once it's gone into authorization mode if if something hasn't authorized that there's
been a fail there but then it's getting that information to the cpo to have a diagnostic
so obviously how many of those failures have happened that i think that's where it sits
i think i'll come back and and talk a little bit about some of the other potential issues that
maybe aren't being appropriately logged um a little bit later on but i want to move on and talk about
how much does weather impact reliability because we did an episode on canopies recently and i'm
i'm wondering if having a canopy over a charger will result in potentially fewer callouts due
to a lower weather impact or not it's funny to say that i think look the unmanned locations
where they're not under covers definitely have more issues right and for a varied number of factors
we've got some some customers that are in the middle east who have really high temperatures
and that affects components that affects the the performance of the charges and they are
standardized in putting canopies over those chargers so they can actually protect the charger
from direct sunlight which which causes problems so i absolutely believe that there is an issue
there we're actually doing a study and we released one last year on all the issues that
caused downtime for for for fast dc charging we had a sample of about 5000 dc charges
it's going to be expanded for this year um and i'm actually looking into weather specifically and
if we can actually identify if it's whether it's been a cause of that because we've looked at the
hardware failures and they typically go from power communications payment terminal hardware
failure i think are the main ones that are causing problems weather it's probably something
that just needs a bit more on the root cause and remedy scenarios to actually identify what's
caused that breakdown in the hardware it has it been a weather related thing and in some ocpp
logs we're actually um we can look at the weather when that error code was presented to see if
there was any adverse events at the same time we're pulling in from different sources there
but we could do some correlation of that data with the right ai and machine learning tools
would that capture long-term cumulative effect so if you've got a charger just sat out there with no
canopy and it's constantly exposed to rain for example over time there's going to be some you
know there may be rusting on the outside there may be water ingress the point at which it
fails may not directly correlate to you know poor weather it may just be continual degradation
over time due to most and things like that i don't suppose you'd be able to track that
lot of data would you you know what you've given me an idea because we absolutely would be able to
track that but have we put the um the metrics in place to capture that no it's probably the first
thing so when cpo's fork operators are using our software they can tag their locations with
with any sorts of information that's going to be useful for them actually having a field in
there to say is the charge of protected by a canopy sounds like a very sensible
suggestion gary so i'm actually going to steal that and see if if we can start to create some
metrics around it because it clearly has is having an impact but we're not tracking it
the industry is not tracking it because of course there is a knock on effect of that when it comes
to screens because one of the problems that a lot of people have is the screens are very
difficult to read in certain weathers there are um the sun tends to bleach out a lot of the
things if you get the covering there degrading in the sunlight and the same thing happens on
the credit cards as well so the credit card readers you know you i've seen people sort of
down on the hands and knees looking at the shadow or the light yeah exactly so i'm wondering whether
there's a potential to sort of expand it to include screens and and the impact that the
weather's the elements having on those sure i can't see why not an example i often use when i
when i when i speak to cpo's for the first time is when we're comparing uptime versus availability
in the difference of those things uptime not to teach anyone to suck eggs for a moment but uptime
is is essentially when the charger is reporting data saying i'm alive to to the back end and
it's up and that's usually the metric that cpo's are reporting on again with some the one that
really grates me as if one charger a charging location is up then the whole site is classed
us up that that annoys me and isn't transparent whereas available is actually is that charger
able to make a charge for the driver when the always issues always talk about is a crack screen
or missed on a screen something that's preventing the driver from being able to make a charge in
my mind that is charger unavailable you have not been able to make that it's not going to be able
to be picked up by an error code it's going to have to be reported or looking at diagnostic to
say this charge you would usually be making a charge on a monday morning it isn't today
we should send someone to look at it so i think that is a is a major issue and we should
really be reporting more on charge availability than then uptime talk to me about i mean i i said
it a couple of times on the podcast i was at a well-known large cpo's hub and there was an event
going on and at the time i was driving a vehicle that had a chatter bow connector and i tried to
charge and for some reason the chatter bow connector would not connect but this was also
a location that had a dual charger so you could charge chatter bone ccs not the same time you could
do one or the other so i moved out of the charger somebody else moved in who had ccs
they plugged in and it worked correctly so is that flagged as a unit that's available or not
it won't be no it won't be that that'll be flagged as as up but really we should be
looking here is there should be a simple mechanism to see that that ccs connector has been connected
it's failed and we should be classing that as unavailable it's really going to bring the metric
down so when they talk about 99% availability it's really going to bring that metric down
that our software can look at it from a rudimentary level to see if we get access to the ocpp
logs and to determine have there been particularly short sessions low power delivered low peaks
and all of those things are if they happen once it's probably okay but if it's happening multiple
times going to present the idea that that charger is actually having some difficulty and it won't
be presenting an error code but if you can actually look at those things and identify those
bad behaviors you can get your operations team to spend more time looking at those complex
issues rather than doing resets and organize and maintenance manually which all their time
is consumed with at the moment the corollary corollary the additional thing that happened
at the same site was there was another charger there where the credit card reader wasn't working
but the RFID reader was and the app so people were able to charge as far as the system is
concerned the charger was available but if you were trying to pay with the credit card
it wouldn't initiate the charge so again there's so many variations and subtleties
about availability versus reliability and all that sort of stuff it's to me is a minefield
and you can start to get really granular on this and say it's unavailable for credit card users but
available for RFIDs and for the consumer to look at those metrics and go well do I want to charge
with this CPO because their credit card availability is not as good as their RFID they just the
consumer just wants to know is it working and that's kind of it and they don't want to
they're putting trust in the CPOs that they're providing the service that they need right so
they just want simple messaging and I appreciate that's hard when there's so many contributing
factors to this as well so it's it's not an easy process to solve for.
Can I go back and just confirm something you said shorter recently which is
if I'm at a site that has four chargers and three of them are out of order and one of them
is working that whole site is deemed to be working I've heard that that is a way and something that
Tesla have reported on as well that if they've got one charger operational at a site then that's
a that site is operational it's good to go and I don't think that's transparent for the driver
because that charger could be in use and there could be a queue for it and that that is not a
good way to operate and I think we need to push for more transparency.
So what had I totally agree totally agree now the other thing that's been happening recently and
there's an instance at a local hub near me a cable cutting so if the cable gets cut does the
CPO realize that the cables have been cut or are they relying on people like me to go oh by the
way I've just been to your site the cables have been cut. I'm glad you brought that up because
this is a hot topic and it's really costing the industry a significant amount of money
and I was surprised we've got a customer in Denmark and I would have classed as probably one of the
lowest crime rate countries in the world right actually they're suffering really bad from cable
cuts and they're getting 20 euros around that for when they get a cable and they could process
it and get that money for it but it costs the CPO 1000 euros to replace that that cable so it's
a significant cost you can see why these CPOs are not profitable and again it depends on the
charger manufacturer and depends on the back end and depends on the maintenance process you've got
so with a well-known charger brand it doesn't just present one error to say charge has been
cut set the alarms off it presents a series of error codes and we've had to work out with the CPO
what this series is and that go right that means a cable's been cut we can get an alert out
to the operational team to get on the CCTV set the alarms off because if you've got a bank of
four or five charges with two cables on each if we're doing this within 30 seconds of that first
cable being cut we can hopefully present prevent the rest of those cables being cut which obviously
is a cost for the CPO but then it's frustration for the driver because that charge is not going
to be fixed probably for a month and I went down to visit my my mum down in Muddafubki
very well known European CPOs got charges in the in the main key car park and I went there
to charge because my my my charge of my Audi e-tron is only about 120 miles on in the winter and I
went down there didn't have enough charge to get back had to go charge cables were cut I said to
my mum I said how long has it been like that she's like oh weeks and they've done multiple locations
in Christchurch in Muddafubki so it's a real problem I don't know whether you'll know the
answer to this but why is it that if somebody's reported or if a charger is reported as having
the cables cut it can take months for them to to get those cables repaired I mean yeah Muddafub
it's it's you know it's not the middle of the country it's somewhere out on the edge there and
there's there's probably more call for repairs elsewhere central London things like that but
I don't think they should be ignoring it and having it sitting there unrepaired for months
well what's behind that do we know give you my perspective there's a cost element of this
so someone has to be sitting on those spare cables which obviously if you've got a thousand
of charges in the country and you're seeing X amount of cable cuts you're going to need to
hold stock of X amount that's that that's a cost that you have to sit on your P and L and E
secondly is the availability of engineers to get out and resolve those charger cable cuts so getting
them out in a quick amount of time to resolve them is is another problem I'd say they're the
two main main factors let's move on a little bit and talk about your specific offering to
charge point operators are you are you employed by specific is your company employed by
specific charge point operators or do you do they sort of buy a service from you how does
that operate they buy software service from us so we're a south solution hosted in
Microsoft as your so it's very well respected within industry and we've been supplying
four core operators for almost 30 years with asset maintenance management software
four core operators know how to address faults and breakdowns with their assets because they've
been in operation for a long long time and they've had hundreds if not thousands of sites that
they that they need to keep in check so that their processes are very robust CPOs are new
businesses and they're having to find out and and create processes as they go so we're trying
to show these CPOs that with integrated maintenance software you can automate many of those
manual steps that your operations team will be doing resets organizing engineer visits to site
making sure they're hitting it within SLA following the process you want them to follow
as a CPO signing in taking images on it on entry on exit all those types of things can be
controlled with them with a maintenance solution and most of them just don't have that process
at the moment interesting so are you able to share sort of some statistics around maintenance or the
costs that maintenance or lack of maintenance has incurred on certain charge point operators do you
have any any good financial data there that the listeners might go that's interesting to know
bracket my brain here probably anecdotally so typically the the stuff I would talk about is
the especially because our customers are mainly manned four court locations we do have some
CPOs that have some unmanned sites so the easiest thing to talk about is if your assets aren't working
for from an EV perspective the likelihood of that driver returning to your site if they haven't been able
to make a charge and get to their end destination is shockingly low like they will not return to
your site if back in the day when they're driving a petrol or a diesel car and they turn up on
one of your pumps weren't working there's 16 other pumps and they're all probably going to be
working so it wasn't an issue where if you have that with an EV driver they're not returning
you have lost that driver's loyalty who would have spent you know 10 pounds of the basket spend
in your site picking up all the everyday essentials or food for now there the metrics I try and
talk about is the return and loyalty of that driver the perception they have of your brand
and then the lost halo revenue by not having these these assets available hard facts I probably
wouldn't be able to call anything more detailed than that I think that's a very interesting thing
because again I've said this a couple of times on the podcast during lockdown I was a grocery
delivery for morrisons and at the end of every shift we used to have to go to the on-site
fuel station refill the the vans and in the 18 months I did that job I don't think there was
a single time when I went to the petrol pump for court and every single pump was working
there was always one that had the black and yellow tail lights thing on yeah and yet people don't go
oh I'm never going to go to morrisons and and use their pumps again because one of them just
happened to be not working the day I was there and it's interesting how when you're looking at
electric vehicle chargers versus petrol pumps people have a higher tolerance for failure
at the pump than they do at the EV charger and I find that interesting it's much more sensitive
and if you've if you found a pump that wasn't working at site never let that sit with you and
then tell your friends about it if you go to an EV charger the weather maybe one or two chargers
and they've impacted your ability to get to your next destination or mainstream late or whatever
it might be you will tell your friends and that will just spiral and they will tell people and
it just creates this hysteria around the idea that EVs are I'm going to be reliable and
it's a real problem so it's not an easy thing for operators to face into indeed what's the most
egregious maintenance problem that you've encountered with a charger egregious egregious one of those
where you've gone how the hell did this happen and why the hell did this happen trying to think
of a few scenarios in my mind that I think graffiti I think it is probably one like
mindless mindless destruction of chargers you don't tend to get it in the man locations
where so a fork operator or an EV hub they're all going to be fine because you've got people on
site but when you've got these unmanned locations or or you're placing it at a retail destination
or a car park somewhere they're the ones that have suffered from vandalism from graffiti
from just anyone causing harm to that charge and and that's probably the most frustrating
as a driver to pull up to because he's just disappointed that people have have damaged
this unnecessarily and then also for the operator I mean it's just costing them downs I'm costing
them reputation when it wasn't their fault that they can put better security measures in place
but they're the ones I think frustrate the most amount of people and have you had many
or are you aware of many instances where the charges themselves have been physically damaged
by vehicles I know I know a lot of them have bump stops and and bollards and things like that but
but yeah especially for things like the seven kilowatts and the 11-22 kilowatt charges have
you had many where they've actually as I've actually reversed in and knocked them over and
damaged them or is that something that doesn't happen it happens right but if you look at
our dashboards and see what are the main reasons for for charges being down that that's kind of one
of the lowest out there it's it's accident by driver but it does happen people will reverse into it
or a truck will come by and a clip it so that there's all sorts of those factors in there but
it's not much the main things are the ones I've spoken about already but it but it does happen
I know what points in sort of the maintenance schedule will either yourself or the CPO go
right we've repaired this unit X number of times it keeps going wrong we need to replace it we need
to whip the existing unit out and put either a brand new unit in or a different unit may
maybe buy a different a different manufacturer so in our reporting you can report on almost any
metric in in our system so there's good comparisons of charger availability so however
your CPO business is segmented regionally by brand by destination type by format you can split
and see that maintenance spend that downtime and that task that those areas of the business has
suffered from but then you can also do it by charger manufacturer so you can sit there and
you can compare your upper tronic you can pay your tritium to see who's cost me the most in
unbudgeted maintenance spend the most amount of call us aren't covered by warranty or the
most amount of downtime and with those metrics you can start to make some informed decisions about
which manufacturers are performing best for me and you can make some strategic purchasing the same for
contractors and then the same for assets so we've got a metric on one of the dashboards that shows
the age of the asset the amount of tasks it's had against it when it's broken down the amount
of downtime it's had and then the amount of maintenance spend and also that the replacement
cost of it and then you'll be able to weigh up at what point is it costing me to continue to
repair this asset or can just is it better for me to just purchase a new one and you can make
that decision very quickly by seeing that the top 10 outliers that are costing more than actually a
replacement and so there are two questions one of which I hope you answer the other one you
may not from the list of charge point manufacturers that you've mentioned is there one that you find
happens to be less reliable overall than the others I probably wouldn't want to paint a picture
badly for anyone out there I think there's nothing egregious that I would say that is is
is um could really point to one manufacturer so I won't call anybody out because I am conscious
to maintain relationships but everyone could be better right yeah so my next question was
going to be which one is it but that's fair enough if you're not if you're not going to call a name
out then no problem with that um well what's the one thing that you would like to see the one
thing that could happen or you would want to see happen that would make your job easier
it's a difficult subject to talk about and I've had to practice over the last couple of years
of getting the elevator pitch right as to what our product does and the problems it solves for
so I'd like some better awareness that there are technologies in place that can help solve
some of these issues the cpo of having each time you speak to them oh I didn't actually know you
could do this well we've been trying to cobble together a ticketing system an excel spreadsheet
an unintegrated asset management system so it's it's better awareness that there are
automated solutions that can solve these problems and improve the performance of these cpo's even
just automating resets that solves 60 to 70 of problems just just do that just just do that with
our software the customers that we've put in place almost overnight saw a four percentage point increase
in charger availability just by addressing resets when a charger required it just do that cpo's
knew that that was possible you should all implement it now when you first went out
to cpo's where they're very much of the case of well we don't really need this we've got our own
stuff did you have a problem trying to sell into the charge point operators or were they
sell sort of saying this is what we want give it to us give it to us I'm still having those
conversations now so that they feel like they're doing it because they've got a ticketing system
that they're they've got maintenance partners but all of those steps could still be improved
with with integrating your systems and and having maintenance workflows that would address those
problems so I'm still trying to convince people that improvements can be made the biggest thing I'm
seeing out there at the moment is it's about the use of AI being able to utilize the charging data
that is available to identify patterns and bad charger behaviors there are some businesses out
there that are really leaning into this and doing this I think that's kind of where the industry
is going to need to go and we're dipping our toe into that as well but I think for for me I
heard someone say this to me ICNC the other week it was a DC manufacturer that said AI will just tell
you that's going to go wrong it's just when so all your charges are going to break down at some
point right so just get the right processes in place to fix them when they do go wrong
rather than worrying about I don't know Brad do you have any final comments for the listeners
before we bring this chat to a close I think stick with it I mean I became an EV driver
myself back at the start of the year I'd always driven a nice car and being in the
industry I felt like a bit of a fraud by not having an EV myself so I dipped my toe in
and I was always concerned like is it a better product there's going to be issues with charging
and I've actually found it to be a really refreshing experience I love driving my EV car
now it feels like a smarter way of driving it's made life easier the experience of actually
driving the car is better I do want to see the range improvements on some cars I drive in each
one I listened to your podcast the other day where you were talking about the real world
range in each one you called out as well as the difficult ones right and it is in the winter
I only get a hundred miles out of it in the summer I'm getting 160 and depending on my driving
style so I haven't been put off by that and I think the experiences I've had with charges
pretty much are good and it's only going to get better and operators are only going to
innovate and improve so stick with it I do think driving an EV is a good thing and
yeah we can all benefit from that fantastic Brassandis appreciate your time today I think
it's been a fascinating conversation thank you very much it's time for a cool EV or renewable
thing to share with your listeners continuing with our charger theme in many places such as the
UK Netherlands and California EV charging stations now outnumber petrol stations the number of petrol
stations in Britain for example has been in steady decline since the 1960s there were 38,000 filling
stations in 1964 that number half between 92 and 2010 dropping from 18,000 to around 9,000 and it
has since stabilized at roughly 80 a bit thousand 8,300 8,400 with charger locations now numbering
over 85,000 and charger connectors now numbering over 120,000 it's a safe bet to say that there are now
more connectors than petrol pumps long way to continue
the EV Musings podcast is sponsored by Zatmap the go-to app for EV drivers helping you find
and pay for public charging with confidence see what charge points are available right now with
live availability and unrivaled UK charge point coverage at your fingertips pay at thousands
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download Zatmap and charge with confidence I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show
is put together this week with the help of Brad Sandis if you have any thoughts comments
criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info at evmusings.com
on the socials I'm on blue sky at evmusings.bsky.social I'm also on instagram at evmusings where I post
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now check out the links in the show notes for more information as well as a link to my regularly
using newsletter and associated articles now I've spoke to a few of you and I know that you're
probably driving walking jogging ironing all sat on the sofa watching this on your phone but
if you can remember and you enjoyed the episode drop a review in itunes please like subscribe
leave a comment on youtube because it really helps thank you very much if you've reached this part
of the podcast and are still listening thank you why not let me know you've got to this point by
messaging me at musingsv.bsky.social with the words maintenance or repair hashtag if you know
you know nothing else thanks as always to fuck out founder sam and you know I watch his youtube
videos him on his electric use unicycle hacking along paths and down trails by himself or with
his friends I often wonder what the main attraction is for him to do this I mean there must be a
couple right so I asked him don't think of a few scenarios in my mind that I think graffiti
thanks for listening bye
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