Gadgetory

hi this is Roy Choi for TechnoBuffalo and I am here at the charge point booth at CES 2013 and I have with me here the president and CEO of charge point Pat and we're going to talk about the charge point network so Pat how big is the network for charge point and and what do we expect to see in the the growing future so Roy right now we're coming up on 11,000 charging ports that are provisioned on the network in North America alone we do have an international presence to give you an idea there are about 72,000 cars on the road right now in the US as of the close of the year that have a plug we should see over a hundred thousand new cars come on to the market next year and if the charging stations continue to grow proportional with the penetration of those cars we should over double in size just to have enough capacity to have all those cars charged wow that's great so I know that we saw the level three Chargers and we know that network is changing and evolving with newer cars and newer technologies what what kind of things should we expect and and what happens if let's say the standard were to change or the network were to change well there's some good news for drivers the standardization process that all of the auto manufacturers have been working on for a lot of years is sort of kind of come down to two standards there's the chidomo standard that many Japanese automobile companies have on their cars and then there's the SAE combo connector that you're seeing come out on most American manufacturer or European manufacturer cars so it's very likely that in any given market for the foreseeable future there'll be no more than two connector types that'll deal with the DC charging you do see some Chargers already like one from one of our partners DBT that supports both the SAE combo and the dynamo connector in one charging station it's kind of an either/or thing you can pick either one in charge your car we know that there's many players in the market blink is another one GE what differentiates charge points network from say any of those competitors so I mean there's a couple there's a couple major things the most important is that we focus primarily on our network not on our hardware even though we make very good hardware we are completely open network and we have invited every hardware manufacturer out there that makes charging stations to bring their hardware onto our network and be part of the charge point offering if you look around our booth here for example you'll see a lot of hardware with logos on it that are not ours not from charge point so it's first it's the most open network out there it's the only one that accepts hardware from just about every vendor out there now if you if you look at our business model our business model is we we like to tout ourselves as the largest network of independently owned and operated charging stations and that independently owned and operated is really crucial the perf the in the business that decides to put these stations in front of their business decides the pricing model who can access it etc so we're kind of the glue that binds this community of charging stations together but we allow the freedom for the business owner that's actually paid the money for the station that is providing that service to their drivers to set it up the way they want but it's still for a driver one card so your charge point card works anywhere right one mobile app you know just one account on line one payment method all that sort of stuff so we we keep it simple for drivers to be very flexible for stationed arms potentially I could go and purchase my own charge point and be a part of the network yes oh wow yeah so let's say you owned a retail store you could decide that you wanted to put eb charging out in front you would either buy our hardware or someone else's that was on charge point we actually don't care whatever works for you you would pay for our services as a subscription on an annual subscription you get a web portal it basically lets you control the entire charging experience for your customers and decide who can use the station at what time and how much they're charged you hear that John we can get our own charging station at the offices so if I'm driving around my car my electric car people stop me all the time and they ask you know three questions it's always the same three questions how do you like it how long does it take to charge and how much does it cost in terms of newer technologies or expanding the range on on vehicles how do you expect to change your business model how do you expect to help people move their cars faster along so the next person can get in and in the future yes so there's actually two really good points there first of all is as in in the near future batteries might get a little bit bigger but I think the auto manufacturers want to make the price point a little more accessible so as battery technology gets better they'll more likely put the energy into making the car cheaper at the same range versus expanding the range although at the high end of the product line I'm sure people will give expanded range as well there strokes for different folks the interesting part about how people drive EVs is very different than gasoline cars you do not wait to you're on e and then go charge it up and then wait say you're on a again so whether you have a battery that goes 300 miles or 50 miles you're gonna top it up everywhere you see a plug and so the amount of time it's going to take to get you back to full isn't going to change much depending on the capacity of your battery because most of the time if you were full at home and you showed up at work and you had a 20-mile commute to work and you plugged in at work you're going to put 20 miles worth of charge back in whether your battery was a 300 mile battery or a 50 mile battery so that should change a ton what will change I think from a business model perspective is you're just gonna see how much broader number of V's out there at a much much broader set of price points and you know there'll be elements for long haul charging in in highway applications where they'll be more DC right now there's very little DC charging deployed there'll be some but I think the workhorse will continue to be the level 2 chargers and most locations where you're parked for an hour or more so what's up next for a charge point what do we expect to see in the next few years well I think what you're going to see is your game is first of all you're going to see a lot more you've already got a good percentage of the hardware manufacturers on the network we're going to continue to add more hardware manufacturers to the charge point network to give them more flexibility to our station owners you're going to see a lot more services for our drivers you're going to see some new mobile applications that I think are going to have some great features you're going to see just lots of features that are going to help that driver find that station get connected with the business owners that have put those stations out in front we've already released a feature called charge point connections to allow those business owners to connect to those drivers and you know offer them potentially charging perks and things like that from patronizing those businesses lots of stuff along those lines we're going to continue obviously to support the deployments so we're gonna we're going to expand internationally to a larger degree than we've already expanded so I think you should see some pretty exciting things so thank you again for taking time to meet with us once again we're here at the charge point booth at CES 2013 meeting with Pat Romano from charge point the president and CEO like to thank him for his time check us out on TechnoBuffalo comm for the latest CES 2013 news and we'll see you soon you you