Greenlots Executive Slams Incompatibility of EV Networks
A high-ranking executive at an electric vehicle charging software provider has criticized the EV sector for making its charging networks incompatible with each other.
In an exclusive interview with TU-Automotive, Lin Zhuang-Khoo, senior vice-president of strategy at Greenlots, hit out at what he feels is the sector’s failure to make charging networks “inter-operable”. He said it is not “the toughest barrier” to EV adoption but is definitely “one of the more visible barriers”.
Lin said at best, a lack of compatibility “confuses people where they have to try and figure out what network they want to sign up for and what access method they want to use. At its worst, it can be just too much for someone to have five different accounts on a network”. While he did say the situation in North America was preferable to that in Europe in terms of having fewer major networks for consumers to choose from, Lin said the American market was actually worse in terms of there being “more ‘positioning'” and “less willingness to work together”.
Lin added that he was heartened by the work done by the ROEV Association, a group that purportedly enables users of any participating network to charge their EV using another network in the group, and Collaboratev, the joint venture formed by ChargePoint and ECOtality in 2013 to allow their respective subscribers to use the other company’s network. However, he said those initiatives have “fizzled out” and become “dormant”.
Lin then claimed: “It’s come to a point where the market is maturing and we are expecting pretty aggressive growth over the next three to five years. We have to get everyone to agree on a common way to move forward … there’s this real momentum to have a common roaming standard”. Despite all of this, he said he did not feel the biggest barrier to EV adoption in the US was a lack of network compatibility but the “costs and speed of infrastructure and installation”.
