Ep. 19: Felix Hamer, AKA “Electric Felix” on Incentives, Smart Charging Pilots and EV Adoption Across The World
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由机器转录整理而成。译文为机器翻译,可能存在错误。
欢迎来到Smart Charge by RiDERgy播客。我是Claudio Geyken,RiDERgy的创始人兼首席执行官。这是您了解电动汽车和车队能源管理及智能充电创新的节目。
大家好,欢迎来到Smart Charge播客。我是主持人Claudio,今天我们将与Felix Hamer连线,他更为人熟知的名字是Electric Felix。Felix是欧洲最具辨识度的电动汽车故事讲述者之一,他是一位常驻荷兰的内容创作者,在欧洲大陆乃至中国记录了无数真实的行驶公里数,对从Ionity到小型AC充电桩的充电网络进行压力测试,并将这些公路旅行转化为极其诚实的分析、深度新闻通讯和数据驱动的社交媒体帖子。Felix的与众不同之处不仅在于续航测试或
充电器评测,而在于他将千瓦数、电价和路线规划器转化为人性化决策的方式。这个充电器凌晨2点能用吗?我能信任那张RFID卡吗?当电量降到7%而下一个直流充电器还有40公里远时,一家人的公路旅行会是什么感受?在本期节目中,我们将深入探讨这些方面以及更多内容:地理差异以及是什么让某些国家的电动汽车普及率优于其他国家,特别是他在中国、德国、荷兰和丹麦的经历。还有智能充电,他的体验
试点项目,他对理想状态的完美愿景,以及更多内容。让我们开始吧。你好Felix,感谢你今天加入我。你的柏林之行怎么样?实际上非常顺利,谢谢你邀请我。是的,我们昨天从阿姆斯特丹开着一辆很普通的小电池特斯拉来到这里,是的,这只是,我专注于价格实惠的充电器,不幸的是这并没有留下太多选择,但是,开电动车去
柏林多年来一直相当容易,但定价是另一个问题。好的,是的,但至少你成功到达了。这是一件事,我们肯定会谈论所有与电动汽车充电以及你个人设置相关的挑战和困难。在我们深入讨论之前,为了帮助听众更好地了解是谁在说话,你能介绍一下自己吗?你的背景是什么?你是如何走到今天这一步的?好的,谢谢。我是Felix Hamer,
有些人可能知道我是Electric Felix,因为大约8年前我第一次尝试了电动摩托车。虽然我是阿姆斯特丹的一名IT从业者,但我喜欢尝试新事物,而这辆摩托车真的让我惊讶。它向我展示了快速充电作为一种终极机会可以电动化任何东西。我突然意识到:如果这辆摩托车可以是电动的,我当时有一辆汽油摩托车,那么我想任何东西
都可以。这些快速充电器创造了各种可能性。你可以有一个慢速充电器,这也不错,但快速充电器创造了这种机会,让你可以一直前进。这就是,我想,因为我本质上是一个公路旅行者,我在欧洲旅行多年,过去常常开柴油车。我从未拥有过汽车,因为我住在阿姆斯特丹,而租柴油车
总是去远离家乡的最佳选择。这就是我在摩托车上尝试快速充电时注意到的:如果你寻找合适的优惠,特别是7年前,在许多地方充电都非常便宜,尽管速度不如今天快。这为我创造了以非常实惠的价格大量旅行的机会,骑着电动摩托车。就是这样。摩托车也让我开始寻找
汽车租赁服务。例如,我租了一辆宝马i3去巴黎,实际上那是一场彻底的灾难,但我最好的朋友在车上,他在那次经历之后仍然选择了电动汽车,因为在回程路上,一旦我们再次进入荷兰,我们就进入了这个快速充电天堂,那里有一个全国性的网络,让一切变得简单。他立即意识到他需要换掉他的汽油车,因为他在
荷兰行驶了很多公里,通过改用电动汽车,他可以以一半的价格做到这一点。所以是的,过去十年发生了很多事情。我创建了一个博客来简单分享我的旅行经历,一切都有点升级了,所以到现在,特别是在LinkedIn上,我有数千名粉丝,我只是试图让人们了解充电领域正在发生的事情。我也主要对差异感到惊讶,第一次去法国的旅行真的表明,即使
离家只有500公里,巴黎离阿姆斯特丹并不远,但电动汽车的景观在那次小旅行中发生了好几次变化。即使在今天,你仍然可以看到去意大利旅行与去西班牙完全不同。虽然我认为这很有趣,因为我可以写相关内容,但我也认为,对于大规模普及来说,事情需要简单且负担得起,而不是像这样需要找到正确的方案才能左转或右转的
拼图。好的。谢谢,这已经给了我们相当多可以讨论的点。首先,是什么让你对电动摩托车如此兴奋,基于你使用柴油车的经验?如果你还记得的话,核心要素是什么?是的,摩托车让我如此惊讶,因为我刚拿到驾照,我想大约一年,我拥有我的汽油摩托车也就那么长时间。而这辆电动摩托车的体验,你立即获得
那种持续推动的动力感,你骑在这台没有换挡、可以一直前进的机器上,它有一种流畅感,这是你在化石燃料时代所不知道的,因为它不存在。这是完全新的东西。是的,我认为正是这种结合真正将技术带入了出行领域。我一直,我甚至喜欢骑自行车。我仍然喜欢骑自行车,因为
它给了我如此多的自由,而电动自行车只是为这种自由锦上添花,因为你可以在相同的时间里骑得更远。电动自行车真正向你展示了,在像荷兰这样的国家,大量的人骑电动自行车上班。而且我认为他们中有一半人永远不会骑普通自行车上班,因为那样会浑身是汗,你也永远不会每天骑很远。就是说,如果你负担得起,你就会升级。
而且我认为这里真的有一种秘诀,就是有机会去做我们以前没做过的事情,因为电动车创造了以前不存在的机会。还有,比如,电动摩托车并不是那么安静,所以人们认为电动车有点无聊,因为没有发动机的轰鸣声。但我试骑的这辆摩托车来自意大利,实际上这家公司遇到了很多麻烦,但当时他们真的在
突破界限。事实是,当你全速行驶时,它实际上会发出很大的声音。显然它是那种高音调的电动声音,非常不同,但确实会让你想要疯狂驾驶。而且还有一点就是,我在阿姆斯特丹载过朋友,他们至今还在谈论那些骑行,因为那种扭矩凭空而来的感觉实在太不可思议了。而且
如果你想想你能用那辆摩托车做什么,以及找到实惠的充电设施是多么容易,这样你实际上可以每天重复这种体验,而成本轻松只有用汽油做同样事情的一半,同时它还向你展示了,如果你有一个大的室内空间,你也可以在那里骑它,因为没有尾气。就是所有这些事情都发生了,
但对我来说,让那辆摩托车如此特别的是它的快速充电能力。它可以直流充电,它需要一个50千瓦的充电桩,但事实是它可以以20千瓦左右的功率直流充电,所以不是绝对最大功率。但问题是电池只有11千瓦时,非常小。到现在他们已经把它翻倍到20千瓦时,就这样。比如,续航里程有多少,它有
实际续航里程稍微超过100公里,如果你正常使用的话。然后你可以通过节能驾驶多跑一点,而且我是在夏天骑的,所以可以再多挤出一点。但同样令人兴奋的是它与基础设施的结合。我骑着摩托车去了瑞士,我发现我在法国北部需要的充电桩只在超市里有,而那些超市
充电桩只在商店营业时开放,因为这是为顾客提供的服务,而且你无法付费,它是免费的,这很棒。但同时这意味着我不能在周日进行实际的旅程,因为商店会关门,充电桩会关闭,而在法国的那个地区根本没有替代方案。所以是的,这真的向我展示了,对我来说,充电插头解锁一切这个因素是
我最大的秘密。是的,这也是我认为在欧洲我们在扩展基础设施方面做得相当不错的地方,但问题是如果充电插头不在它们需要在的地方,也就是在人们的面前和房子前,是的,事情就会发展得太慢。那么摩托车可以使用与汽车相同的充电插头吗?是的,有趣的是可以。在欧洲一切都围绕着CCS插头。幸运的是,欧盟很早就做出了这个决定,
所以你实际上可以使用相同的基础设施。我认为这也是为什么欧盟比美国做得更好的关键因素之一,因为在美国即使到今天也只是一团乱麻的插头。而且一旦你使用快速充电而不是慢速充电,你需要不同的电缆、不同的转换器。这真的取决于你的车辆和你的房子,以及很多事情,你需要什么。而在欧洲这相当简单,
我们有一个对每个人都相同的AC标准,而DC标准,除了老旧的日产故事之外,就是CCS,所以这是完全统一的。所以现在我了解了你是如何进入电动出行这个话题以及是什么促使你开始在博客上分享它的。是的,我发现关于这辆摩托车最奇怪的是,我无法相信它能做到什么,
但我也不明白为什么我不知道它。因为事实是,我赢得了一次摩托车骑行,然后我租了好几次来试用,最让我惊讶的是我根本不知道它的存在。我认为在某种程度上,这甚至在今天也是真实的,如果你在欧洲各地走访,在
某个随机的欧洲城市街头采访人们,问他们是否曾经试过电动车,我预计大多数人会说没有。而且我预计大多数人对电动车不了解很多事情。即使在今天,当我在阿姆斯特丹看到一辆电动摩托车时,我几乎会晕倒,因为我很少看到它们。而这是在我试用摩托车8年之后,在试用了一个下午之后,我意识到任何在
荷兰工作的荷兰人,骑车上班,可能骑摩托车,可能开车,或者其他什么。他们可以骑那辆摩托车去上班,没问题,因为我们已经有了基础设施。而今天,甚至更疯狂,但大多数人甚至不知道它的存在。所以这促使我首先开始我的博客,甚至只是一个Instagram页面,分享我的充电体验、我的公路旅行,只是为了向人们展示:如果你在谷歌上搜索电动的东西,那么也许你会找到
这个故事。这也是我为什么用英语写作的原因,因为我遇到了很多人。想象一下把那辆摩托车骑到法国,法国人热爱摩托车。当我在充电的时候,有那么多人走过来围着车转,每个人都会问我关于它的事情。每个和我聊摩托车的法国人都认为它是混合动力的,因为他们不敢相信它不是。我觉得即使到今天,大多数人
当你向他们展示这些东西真实存在时,他们也不会相信你。这也是我坚持下去的原因之一,就像写它是正常的一样,因为我认为它应该是正常的,但我想我们还没到那一步。对,你提到了不同国家之间的差异,特别是有一件事最让我好奇的是西班牙和意大利之间的差异,我对此不太熟悉。你能详细说说
那些地理方面的差异和挑战的不同吗?是的,对我来说,欧洲最奇怪的就是这种差异,我猜这和道路网络有关。我认为意大利的收费公路比西班牙多。他们在道路所有权和你可以去加油的地方等方面做法非常不同。但是,我认为欧洲的能源市场
完全是,每个国家都在做自己的事情,尽管欧洲在某种程度上连接得很好,但这并不意味着整个欧洲有统一的千瓦时价格。当你住在罗马并且经常出城,而且想用电动车出行时,你就能真切地感受到这一点。在罗马充电的价格大约是马德里充电价格的两倍。当我
大声说出这一点时,我就在想,怎么会这样?一方面,我完全理解它们彼此距离不近,但它们都是阳光充足的大城市,位于到处安装太阳能板都很容易的地方。它们都有足够的空间建造大型充电站。显然,是的,西班牙可能有更多人口较少的地区,所以可能安装太阳能更容易。但
现在的情况是,在西班牙充电的价格可以相当容易地做到意大利价格的一半。我们具体在说什么?是的,我们真的是在说意大利的充电,在那里找到每千瓦时80欧分的任何类型的充电桩都是完全正常的,而在西班牙相当容易找到40欧分的充电桩。在我看来,显然,一旦你可以在家充电,情况就会改变,但在那里你已经可以
再次看到很大的差异,那就是意大利很多人无法在家充电,因为家里的电力连接实际上不允许。这又是那些事情,即使我们看看荷兰,荷兰在电力市场上有某些法律减慢了我们的交流充电桩速度。我们将交流充电桩限制在低于19千瓦,因为这样可以创建一个便宜得多的电网连接。但这意味着一旦
你在阿姆斯特丹插上一个看起来像11千瓦充电桩的充电器,虽然已经很慢了,但对大多数车辆来说这就是它们拥有的车载充电器,所以没关系,一旦两辆车插上,你甚至得不到11千瓦,而这已经很少了。在我看来,这与荷兰的一项法律有关,这项法律从未,你知道,它是在充电还不存在的时候制定的,我就是不明白为什么我们
不升级这些东西,为什么我们不认真对待这个问题,因为荷兰昨天就需要一百万个能在人们需要时以11千瓦运行的公共充电桩,而我们就是没有这样做。尽管我们拥有欧洲最出色的交流充电网络,也许是世界上最好的,但我们只说欧洲,在我看来,我们仍然在做很多错误的事情,我们本可以做得更好。为了理解:如果两个充电
点被占用,典型情况下你会得到什么?是的,那么两个都会得到8.5千瓦,当然你可以说这已经足够接近11了,但其实不是。今天人们驾驶配备100千瓦时电池的德国电动车。你可以买到电池更大的中国电动车。这也取决于你的车载充电器。荷兰过去有很多笑话,因为我们在电动车普及方面非常早,因为我们在电动车
方面有非常好的税收法规。所以我们有一些电动车,比如捷豹,我试过很多次,因为当时它是一款价格实惠的租车。这款捷豹有一个单相车载充电器,这意味着如果你在阿姆斯特丹把它插到一个三相公共充电桩上,实际上只能得到不到4千瓦。所以这意味着你可以在那里待一整天也充不满,这就是为什么当我开着
捷豹去德国进行公路旅行时会有很多乐趣。然后我终于可以以11千瓦充电了,我当时想,是的,交流充电太棒了。但是,这只是那些老故事之一,如果你今天买二手车,它们是相当受欢迎的二手车,那么在荷兰的公共充电网络上,给这样的车充电绝对糟透了。这与车载充电器有关,但也是这样:是的,我们甚至通过不提供,在德国,
因为你可以在交流充电桩上以22千瓦充电,这为捷豹创造了达到11千瓦的机会,而在荷兰它永远无法达到。所以这里有很多点要讨论,在荷兰可能还是。我们可以从那里开始。你认为荷兰有哪些特别好的地方,即使我们都知道你是荷兰人,你也可以夸耀一下,然后说说所有那些
在荷兰可以改进。因为我认为在所有国家中,你去过很多国家,也许你可以详细说说你体验过电动汽车充电的所有国家,然后,即使我们知道你有偏见,你也可以说哪个国家在你的排名中是第一,就电动汽车天堂而言。是的,所以其中一件
荷兰的事情是我们很长时间以来就有交流充电。所以即使回到5年前,阿姆斯特丹已经有了数千个公共充电桩,到现在我想我们已经超过了8000个,但5年前我们就已经有4000个了,如果我没记错的话。我们已经过半了。而那个,比如,阿姆斯特丹5年前的交流充电网络可能就比柏林今天的交流充电网络更大。然后
是的,这还不包括价格。这相当疯狂,因为阿姆斯特丹比柏林小得多,而且我们的汽车少得多,所以它绝对不是一个以汽车为中心的城市。而在这里,当我走在街上时,我看到的汽车数量让我感到震惊,我也理解这一点,因为这里大得多,当然人们在城外工作等等。但是,问题是,在
荷兰,如果我们看交流充电,你可以看到我们来自这样一种情况:我们很早就开始推出这些充电桩,我们让人们很容易在他们房子附近,或者至少在他们需要充电桩的地方附近获得一个公共充电桩。所以这是人们要求的,或者政府会主动……不,你可以,只要你有一辆电动汽车,这是唯一的
条件,在我看来有点不对的地方是,当你在等待你的电动汽车时,你不能得到充电桩。所以会有一个阶段你没有它。但无论如何,只要你有了电动汽车,你就可以使用政府网站表示你感兴趣,他们实际上会,在像阿姆斯特丹这样的城市,他们实际上会
从你房子的一定距离测量那里的充电桩,当你想使用它们时,在你想使用的平均日子里是否可用。然后如果证明那个充电桩在你最需要它时不可用,他们会在附近安装一个新的。现在这已经改变了,像阿姆斯特丹这样的地方以及许多其他地方已经开始根据预测
增长会在哪里来推出充电桩,因为他们可以看到车队不断扩大,充电桩使用得越来越多。距离,最小或最大,也是一个标准吗,你不能走得太远?确切地说。所以是的,我想在阿姆斯特丹,如果我没记错的话,大约是300米,类似这样。上周我实际上就在你现在的位置采访了德国,国家电动出行协调中心,是的,Johannes Palka的负责人。然后
我们在讨论对于德国的任何公民来说应该现实的距离,我想要多得多。所以300米听起来相当慷慨,相当酷。是的,从这里你可以看到荷兰,如果我们从柏林开一辆电动汽车到荷兰的某个地方,那么如果你最终到达任何看起来像一个村庄或更大的地方,很有可能
你停留的地方或你需要去工作的地方附近有公共基础设施。比如,即使你去荷兰的海滩,你停车的地方附近可能就有一个交流充电桩。然后,显然,在夏天的某一天它们可能正在使用,因为高峰需求仍然有点问题。但问题是,在荷兰,我敢说当你停车时插入充电相当容易,因为如果你
经常使用停车场,在荷兰,我认为现在几乎不可能找到一个你不能同时充电的停车场。我发现自己,如果我在荷兰开车,我不经常这样做但我确实这样做,不在许多停车场插电,因为我不喜欢他们安装的充电桩的价格,因为停车场的许多充电桩有一些交易,在我看来对于交流充电桩来说根本没有
任何意义。但这就是它对我来说变得有趣的地方。首先,因为我在阿姆斯特丹长大,我在10多年前就看到了很多共享汽车,我也经常使用它们,它们可以电气化因为充电网络在那里。所以阿姆斯特丹试图让这些公司从一开始就投资电动汽车。当时一个叫Car2Go的网络的Smart汽车
都是电动汽车,如果我那时去汉堡,同样的汽车会有汽油发动机,因为他们没有足够的充电桩来充电。而在阿姆斯特丹,从2013年开始整个车队都是电动汽车,因为他们可以在公共网络充电。这是我个人生活中第一次使用电动汽车的时刻之一,因为实际上如果你在它们电量低的时候插上电,你会得到奖励分钟,这创造了这个
机会让我在阿姆斯特丹尝试电动汽车多年,付很少的钱,甚至在某种程度上帮助网络。现在这不再必要了,因为人们无论如何都会插上电,而且周围有这么多充电桩。在过去,你仍然需要寻找充电桩,现在在阿姆斯特丹,如果你走在普通的街道上,你就会看到一个充电桩。但这里是其中一件事,我仍然
觉得我们有一个有点旧的网络。在荷兰,因为我们开始得很早,它基于RFID徽章,人们如果开电动汽车或尝试过可能知道的充电卡。确实每张荷兰充电卡都能在每个荷兰充电桩使用。很长一段时间这就是世界的样子。现在你可以看到我们已经到了一个
这事儿其实没那么简单。首先,充电可能是能充上,但价格可能不对。而且现在,因为这些网络已经运营了很多年,在鹿特丹或阿姆斯特丹这样的地方,可能已经有三次招标投放了公共充电桩,它们可能都有各自的费率协议。所以如果我们今天去鹿特丹和阿姆斯特丹这样的地方,完全可能走在街上,左右两边都能看到
街上看起来一模一样的公共充电桩,但它们的价格却不一样。有时候很容易看出来,因为价格会标在机器上,或者你用的App能显示清楚,但一般的App显示得并不好。如果价格跟你预期的不一样,可能不会有提醒。如果你住在那里,每周都用同一个充电桩,你可能都不会注意到价格其实变了。所以还有
太多事情在我看来我们必须改进,这就是今天来柏林这么酷的原因。比如说,以前我七年前开车来这里,深夜找到充电桩的可能性几乎为零。而现在如果我开车到柏林的一个随机街区,那里会有充电桩,但价格差异会非常大。我
感觉现在这个城市至少有五家运营商运营着相当数量的交流充电桩,有趣的是这些充电桩看起来也非常不同,行为方式也不同。有些自带充电线,我觉得这超级酷,这些固定线缆的交流充电桩在我看来太棒了。但它们完全不是常态,所以我爸肯定会下车,拿着他的充电线,然后撞上街上这根他没想到的线缆。所以
这也挺有意思的。但不管怎样,这个信息问题,就是不太容易理解该去哪儿,在哪儿能找到最好的价格,或者在哪儿容易停留更长时间,我们可以一直说下去。让我觉得不可思议的是,我当初开博客就是因为在欧洲发现的充电丛林,我一直期待它会变少,但我
感觉它反而变多了,比如今天我们的丛林比五年前更多了,这不完全是我希望的。更多的丛林,这个说法很好。有一件事我会很好奇:也许我们可以用快问快答的方式,因为我很确定你在这方面在世界上是独一无二的。想了解一下你到目前为止在电动车充电方面经历过哪些国家,
我们过一遍欧盟国家。你去过所有国家吗,还是分批次,西欧、东欧?是的,更多是西欧,因为我去过意大利、西班牙、瑞典、挪威和英国这样的地方。但远东地区我还得去,所以波兰以东、罗马尼亚以东,是的,开车去伊斯坦布尔仍然是我的目标之一,因为那样你就真的,是的,一旦你某种程度上
离开匈牙利,大多数西欧充电App就完全迷失了,找到那些你不认识的充电桩仍然有点刺激。你可能会发现更多中国品牌的充电桩之类的。然后英国,我已经好几年没去了,但我一开始去过好几次。现在他们做得好多了,真的有大约十个网络在那里真正推进,但
同时你会注意到定价在英国是个大问题,有家庭充电的人可以很容易地在夜间以几乎零成本充电,而公共充电可以轻松达到每千瓦时1欧元左右。这些事情让我觉得太疯狂了,这些事情怎么能升级得这么离谱?我认为每千瓦时1欧元不太合理。然后我知道你去过中国,
我们会深入聊中国,但亚洲其他国家你去过吗?我去过亚洲其他国家,但不是在我的电动车时代,所以,肯定的,因为印度尼西亚和泰国这样的地方发展得非常快,我去过泰国但那是在电动车之前很久。美洲我在电动车时代从来没去过,所以上一次是2018年,我还和一个朋友做了一次汽油车公路旅行。我猜
非洲也没去过。没错,完全没有。顺便说一句,我们最近有一期节目是关于埃塞俄比亚的,你可能知道它是第一个禁止在国内销售汽油车的国家。所以我们和一个真正了解情况的人做了深入探讨,很有意思。所以我鼓励你,如果你想分享你在那里的经历,我会非常好奇看到你的体验,
那么让我们稍微,我觉得我们已经对荷兰做了一些深入探讨,但有一件事我特别感兴趣,实际上是荷兰的两个方面,我很想听听你对此的看法。大家都知道电网非常拥堵,这是我认为对可用功率水平有如此严格限制的原因之一,你怎么
看待这一切?电网拥堵是一个迷人的现象。我认为这与荷兰人对效率的自豪感有关,这在今天产生了极端影响:我们对我们所做的事情有一个高效的电力网络,而且因为我们在格罗宁根的天然气资源,每个人都认为用天然气供暖很棒很便宜,而现在不是了,所以人们终于开始安装热泵了。幸运的是
我们家里有很多智能电表,但问题是荷兰很多东西原本不是用电的。现在当然很多公司和个人出于各种原因想要全面电气化,然后突然我们假装昨天才发现电网无法在一夜之间按我们需要的任何幅度增长。这实际上给我们带来了严重的麻烦,因为比如说你经营一家物流公司,
如果你有50辆卡车,只想尽快实现电动化,你需要一个大型充电广场才能在一夜之间给50辆卡车充电,或者根据你的业务运营方式采用其他方式。但如果你今天发现这个需求并去找能源公司申请几兆瓦的容量来做这件事,他们只会嘲笑你,
然后直截了当地告诉你他们能在2032年交付,如果你幸运的话。所以我们现在处于这样一个境地,我想知道我们多快能摆脱它,因为显然很多扩建计划正在进行中,容量也会增加,等等。但现在这确实让我们陷入了某种僵局,在乌得勒支这样的城市,已经产生了这样的影响:他们
限制乌得勒支的充电。我想如果你在晚上7点插上充电器,你会得到很少的电或根本没有,因为整个社区在人们下班回家时的用电需求就那么大。这也是公共充电网络目前有点愚蠢的地方,因为所有这些人开车去上班,他们大约在同一时间回家,他们同时插上公共充电桩,然后
在家里他们也插上所有电器,开始做饭,等等。而这完全没有必要,90%在下午6点插上充电器的车在他们插入的那一刻完全没有电力需求。这当然也是我认为荷兰可以在很多年里通过更智能地做事来解决其问题的地方,因为在很多情况下,一旦一家公司,比如说
这家公司建造了一个有几兆瓦的充电广场,如果你申请5兆瓦,配电系统运营商(DSO)会随时为你保留这个容量。这完全是无稽之谈,因为这些卡车中有一半在一天中的大部分时间都在外面,所以当卡车不在时,你的接入容量实际上接近零。当然所有邻居应该能够在那时那刻使用那个容量。所以我认为在
很多情况下,我们只需要更智能地安排事情,然后我们可能可以持续多年甚至扩展。我认为从某种意义上说,这也显示了公共充电的重要性,因为想象一下5家物流公司彼此相邻,如果中间有一个大型充电枢纽,那么不是每个人都需要在自己的门后建造充电设施并申请自己的接入容量,而那个容量在一天中的大部分时间
都没有人会使用。所以我认为这也只是做好事情和更智能地沟通的问题。这个播客叫做Smart Charge by RiDERgy,你有什么经验?我也在领英上看到了:你在荷兰已经有不少与智能充电相关的举措。你能否分享一下你的经验以及它如何与你刚才说的内容相契合?是的,我很幸运,因为在
阿姆斯特丹实际上是第一个真正的公共试点,你现在可以使用城市里已经存在的交流充电桩。其中一些已经启用了他们所说的智能充电功能。不幸的是,你需要一个充电应用程序来使用它,然后,我认为这确实是他们在尝试一些很酷的东西的情况,但对我来说,我以为,比如说我第一次尝试时,我以为
在白天插上充电器会很智能,因为我那时经常在房子附近,如果我想的话,插上我爸爸的车很方便。然后我们有很多阳光明媚的日子,特别是在周末,能源价格接近零甚至是负的。所以我认为我第一次尝试时在11点左右插上充电器是有意义的,因为阿姆斯特丹有这么多公共充电桩反正都没在使用,所以这是
一种最优组合。但问题是他们做这个测试,他们正在运行它,只有当他们能够实际延迟充电会话时才会奖励你。所以这与能源价格或实际负载无关。只是如果你在他们不希望你插入的时刻插入,并且他们可以为你延迟它,因为你在应用程序中说明你什么时候再次需要你的车,那么他们会计算,因为
他们知道你的车辆,你必须通过API登录,所以他们知道需要多少小时才能充满,然后就会产生这样的情况:我现在已经尝试了几次,并与背后的人聊了一点。是的,至少我弄清楚了他们希望你怎么做。所以你必须在次优时刻插入,然后它会为你延迟充电会话,
这就是你获得奖励的方式。奖励基于此,应用程序会显示你的充电会话被延迟到的价格区间,但不是很清楚。然后这个应用程序的使用费用也比我通常使用的应用程序更贵。所以最终,有一半时间它对我帮助不大。我获得的最佳奖励我想刚刚超过1欧元,但在阿姆斯特丹这意味着你获得
赠送的千瓦时,这比什么都没有要好。但如果你看看我为了得到那个所经历的麻烦,我确实,因为我想要另一个概念验证,在我来这里之前的那天晚上插上了充电器。这次奖励不到20欧分,甚至不值1千瓦时。后来我意识到,如果我早上早一小时离开家,
在早上8点在阿姆斯特丹外的第一个超级充电站插上充电器,我会节省更多,因为特斯拉在荷兰和许多其他国家都有可变定价。我认为这主要基于现货市场,但我认为这也与他们的本地合同有关,因为每个地点的价格完全不同。对于不太熟悉的听众,也许你也知道,那会很有趣,有不同的价值流
如果你想的话。一个是电网的拥堵,这意味着我们所讨论的本地配电网严重拥堵,所以你通过在电网拥堵的特定时段不充电来帮助电网。我认为你得到的奖励是通过我们刚才讨论的应用程序,而不是通过现货市场,这是你暗示的和你期望得到奖励的方式,比如,出现负电价,现货市场每小时都在变化
,这是一个不同的市场,对吧?没错,是的。所以这绝对是需要改进和考虑的,在一个好的智能充电解决方案中都应该考虑到。但有一件事,我不知道你是否有相关经验或了解,但我在荷兰还发现一件有趣的事,就是乌得勒支的V2G案例,据说是世界上最先进的之一。你有看到过相关信息吗,或者
你在那里充电的经验能否说明什么?嗯,我被邀请参加了开幕式,所以我看到了这个概念是如何运作的,他们说它确实在运行。但是,这又是一个让我疑惑的案例:好的,这很棒,这肯定会帮助乌得勒支市,肯定会帮助运营共享车辆的公司,甚至可能帮助销售这些车的公司。但我确实想知道,是的,对我来说问题是
这对我有什么好处?因为如果你住在乌得勒支并且喜欢使用这些共享汽车,我认为做这些事情的最终方式是确保人们在正确的时间使用它们,在正确的时间插上充电。我想知道实际终端用户的激励在哪里?因为这些是雷诺汽车,我认为乌得勒支拥有它们非常酷。我
有点嫉妒阿姆斯特丹没有它们。也许我们在某个时候会得到它们。但是,我只是,如果这个V2G的东西意味着有人得到了奖励,我觉得不是那些真正应得的人,也就是街上那些放弃自己的车去使用支持V2G的共享汽车的人。如果他们的生活只是,哦,灯能保持亮着,我真高兴。不,应该是
如果那辆车在做V2G,给他们打折,因为V2G正在为你这个公司赚钱。所以让我有点难过的是,我看到许多我喜欢使用并且经常使用的共享汽车,它们主要变得更贵了。如果我看柏林,我在那里第一次尝试了生命中许多电动汽车,现在许多那些车都没了,我过去常用的公司现在所有
到现在我几乎只看到汽油共享汽车,而且是在2025年,我看到这些情况就想知道这里发生了什么。恐怕这与,让我这么说:我认为这些共享汽车中的一些,我几年前就喜欢在柏林使用那些电动汽车,但我想不是所有当地人都那么喜欢它们,因为没有很多充电桩,所以可能你
会发现很多这些车只有一半的电量,然后附近找不到充电桩。所以我担心这肯定与现实世界有关,柏林多年来没有帮助这些公司运营共享车队,因为共享车队需要公共基础设施才能成功。现在我走过这些柏林街道,突然有很多充电桩可用,这有点令人难过,所以突然间我脑海中三年前的
那个车队现在可以到处充电了。而实际的车队已经没了,可能亏本出售或运到丹麦,因为在那里电动汽车非常成功。在几年前我已经在那个国家之一以半价使用过DC公共充电桩,因为现货市场价格下降,我可以在午餐时间以半价插上DC充电桩,在一个已经有吸引力价格的国家,但价格在下午
当你需要快速充电桩时甚至更低。所以,对我来说奇怪的是,在一些地方事情发展如此之快,然后我来到这里,我确实看到了基础设施的进展,但车队似乎在挣扎。回到荷兰,最后一点,也回到你刚才的观点。是什么让荷兰这样,处于前沿,或者丹麦,或者你可能想到的
欧洲其他国家,比如挪威,是什么动机或原因使它们在领导地位上远超其他国家?是的,我认为如果你看欧洲,很容易看到大多数这些电动汽车成功的国家要么有大量基础设施,要么有价格实惠的基础设施。但不仅如此,在很多情况下,如果你看挪威,电动汽车根本没有税。所以突然间,
我前几天发现,在挪威购买Model Y比在这里(它的生产地)便宜数千欧元,因为他们不征税。所以你把它从生产地运到很远的地方,然后它变得更便宜,因为根本不对它征税。所以想象一下,如果德国简单地说电动汽车不征税,你可以直接卖它们,我们不收税。如果你这样做,电动汽车昨天就会在德国蓬勃发展,因为每个人都想要最好的
交易。我盲目地相信这一点。所以关键是电动汽车必须是最好的交易。在中国它们就是,这是它们成功的唯一原因。如果你想在中国买人生中最便宜的车,你总会选择电动汽车,因为它购买更便宜,使用更便宜,而且可能在你居住的城市,有一半时间甚至不允许你开汽油车,或者他们会限制天数或小时。而且
我认为这些事情,让我们以巴黎为例,因为我喜欢巴黎对两轮车如此友好。在欧洲,我甚至会说在巴黎你看到的电动摩托车比在中国还多。这是为什么呢?因为当地的规定。巴黎对摩托车引入了收费停车,而在他们推出这项政策的当天,他们说电动摩托车免费停车。所以巴黎的每个人,好吧,我夸张了一点,但巴黎很多人,在那一天就换成了
电动摩托车。你也可以通过以旧换新你的汽油车获得折扣,等等。但在巴黎,我可以走在一条街上,就能看到几辆电动摩托车停在一起在红绿灯处充电,这是欧洲唯一发生这种情况的城市,而这是因为一条停车规定。这向你展示了如果你正确地设定这些规则,就像在荷兰那样,有一种税收政策,荷兰的每个人
都开公司车,新车都是旧的公司车,如果你选择电动车就完全不用交税,所以每个人都买了特斯拉。2019年来到欧洲的所有特斯拉中,有一半来到了荷兰。现在比利时也是这样。在比利时,你现在会看到比德国更多的德国制造的电动车,因为比利时人仍然喜欢他们的德国车,而他们只是不用为这些车交税。丹麦也是这样,因为如果你走进丹麦的
展厅,比如说你喜欢宝马,丹麦的展厅会直接向你展示4系,比方说,8万丹麦克朗,然后i4只要6万克朗。我甚至还没有提到丹麦,例如,如果你使用太阳能并且给你的电动车充电,你家里的电费也不用交税,等等。所以这完全是显而易见的选择:你有这个超级昂贵的化石燃料车购买选项,或者你以不到一半的价格
选择电动车。然后还必须提到公共基础设施,因为在丹麦这简直太疯狂了,它是一个小国,高速公路拥有全欧洲最令人难以置信的快充基础设施,也许除了挪威。但挪威不是欧盟成员,所以有点独立,他们太遥远了。如果你从德国来,丹麦非常容易到达,你会不相信自己的眼睛,因为那里会很容易
用信用卡支付,支付你习惯价格的一半,找到更多可用的充电桩。实际上,在德国我去过很多地方,比如说有40个超级充电桩,或者有一个大型宝马充电站,比如说有30个充电桩。但我见过它们忙碌吗?好吧,也许在冬季运动日。但在丹麦,你现在就可以开车去丹麦,几个小时就能到,所有这些大型充电站都会
非常繁忙,因为今天每个人都在开电动车。那里的车队增长如此荒谬,以至于今年有些月份他们进口的电动车比新车销量还多,因为使用它们非常有吸引力。这真的很酷。让我们谈谈中国。你去过那里,是什么时候?,两次,在一月和四月。
我访问了广州、深圳、香港、上海和杭州等地。这有点疯狂,因为现在在柏林,试图把它与上海的某一天进行比较,这完全疯狂。因为所有的一切,如果你打车,你会坐在这辆旧出租车里,是的,它看起来像一辆旧车,但它是电动车。我坐过一些
已经行驶了30万公里的出租车,来自这里没人知道的品牌。那个出租车司机,我遇到过一些年轻得甚至不知道化石燃料车是什么意思的出租车司机,当然,他们永远不会再开那种车了。所以所有这一切都很疯狂。我认为疯狂的部分还在于,在像荷兰这样的国家,我们有几家中国公司活跃了一段时间,他们都
说他们会来德国,但这里的进展似乎更慢。但在荷兰,我们有几家公司活跃了一段时间,你可以看到事情发展得如此之快,因为这些电动车去年已经在使用800伏充电了,但现在他们装上了新电池,充电功率可以再次翻倍。我最近试驾了极氪汽车,而
实际上在荷兰有点难找到能够提供它所能处理功率的充电桩。它可以做到超过400千瓦,你实际上需要一个能够提供远超500安培的充电桩,这并不常见。我认为这只是这种组合,是的,他们确实拥有我见过的最快的充电桩。我见过的最便宜的充电也在那里。你能说说什么数字?是的,所以当我
在杭州试驾极氪汽车时,我在城外,只是在屏幕上点击浏览。我不在市区,我在湖边附近,感觉相当安静,但在屏幕上我可以看到,无论我看向哪个方向,在几公里范围内,都会有多种速度和多家运营商的快充桩。例如,我找到了10欧分的120千瓦充电,但我
找到了15欧分的500或600千瓦充电,而这是没有仔细找的情况下,所以我确信我没有找到最便宜的。意识到你在一个国家里是如此疯狂,在中国,一升汽油,如果你没有得到合适的优惠,会花费你1欧元,而120千瓦的充电很容易在10欧分找到。所以这甚至不是有一个
选择,这就是:你选择电动车,便宜6倍。这太疯狂了。我认为这些变化的速度,我试驾过去年就让我印象深刻的这些车型,尽管到目前为止ADAS从来没有我试过的德国车那么好。即使在极氪汽车中,它的充电速度比宝马快得多,但宝马仍然可以更好地应对高速公路。而
你永远无法在最高速度下使用定速巡航,诸如此类,所以德国人仍然有办法说,你知道,我们提供的是他们没有的东西,目前这完全是事实。但可能就在明年这就不再是事实了,因为事情发展的速度太快了。这就是我想知道的,我们是否足够意识到这些事情正在以如此快的速度发展。因为大众,好吧,
今天早上有人在Bluesky上告诉我,他们今年将达到一百万辆电动车,这听起来很惊人,如果是真的,那就更惊人了。但然后你会意识到大众销售一千万辆汽车,所以实际上只有十分之一是电动车。然后如果生产五百万辆车的竞争对手已经全是电动车了,那么明年会怎样?问题是,我真的认为人们没有意识到
当这些电池价格像现在这样下降时,甚至在美国安装充电枢纽都会变得如此容易。特斯拉现在建成了他们有史以来最大的站点,他们说没有电网连接,尽管实际上不是真的,它有一个很小的电网连接,但这真的向你展示了突然出现了一个充电站点,如果我没记错的话有1.5兆瓦的连接,他们有10个这样的Megapack,所以他们实际上可以在
几个小时内处理1000辆特斯拉进来,给它们全部充电。而这可以做到,多亏了这些电池,在一个偏僻地方。我认为在欧洲那种偏僻的地方甚至不存在,但这就是重点,我们甚至没有那种偏僻的地方,我们在这方面的进展仍然太慢。这真的让我沮丧,因为我觉得在我访问过的
中国的超大城市,是的。可以说,你面临的挑战在某种程度上我认为比我们这里的更艰巨,但他们应对这些挑战的速度作为一个欧洲人几乎无法相信,对吧?所以你在应用程序中看到了大量的充电点,这也是一个奇怪的事情,我确实看到,比如,走在周围有很多交流充电桩。但奇怪的是你真的注意到
我在荷兰已经有点感觉到的:生活在一个交流充电可能不理想的地方是非常容易的。在我看来,如果一个交流充电桩每千瓦时收费50欧分,我认为就其本质而言这是不可原谅的昂贵。问题是在我看来那种充电桩成为了那些不在乎的人、那些自己不付费的人,或者那些只是
需要充电的人的奢侈品,他们显然会插上充电。但如果你运营正确的直流充电基础设施,你绝对可以低于这些价格,但它必须是智能基础设施,而我们在欧洲没有那么多。而在中国,你会看到我注意到很多交流充电桩有时比我到处看到的直流充电桩更贵。你也可以看到直流充电桩无处不在。有所有这些
汽车使用的不是为它们的车建造的基础设施。我还看到很多我以前从未见过的老款电动车,它们甚至不能快充,但它们可以充电而且很便宜,所以人们会使用它们,它们在二手市场上会非常有吸引力等等。我认为这也是这一点,在欧洲存在这样一种风险,我们正在制造大量的电动车。像大众这样的公司正在生产相当可观
数量的电动车。而在意大利,我希望人们以比荷兰更快的速度转向电动车,因为他们值得拥有,但对大多数人来说这样做没有任何意义。如果我们不解决这个问题,那我不知道我们到底在做什么。因为是的,这个想法,在欧洲我们仍然处于这样一个阶段,认为电动车是那些负担得起的人的东西甚至不奇怪,而这
鉴于实际电动车的逻辑根本说不通。但在很多地方这是事实。在中国还有什么让你感到非常惊讶的,与你在欧洲的经历相比?我知道我们谈到了通过微信支付,或者说,你也许可以详细说说。绝对令人惊讶的是,比如说,在我的情况下,让我讲讲
我的故事。我下载了微信和支付宝这两个应用,用这两个应用我在中国生活了3周。我在街上从一位女士那里买食物,她晚上有这个自行车推车,炸着超级美味的东西,价格简直便宜得离谱,摊位上就挂着这个二维码。当我扫描它时,比我在欧洲做过的任何支付都快,她的手机或其他什么
设备就发出这个响亮的消息说我已经付款了。所以也有这样一种认识,就是没有任何摩擦。这是一个疯狂的消费主义社会。当我在中国四处走动时,我感觉自己置身于我以为我知道的美国的超速版,那里到处都是汽车,大城市里到处都是摩天大楼。在
很多方面对我来说看起来像美国,但东西是负担得起的,一切都是数字化的,公共交通令人震惊。在这个看起来像美国但一切都感觉在正常运作的地方,有点奇怪。
这就是,是的,然后电动车的情况当然让它更疯狂了。但我认为这也是一个情况,我猜他们有一个更年轻的人口金字塔,那里有很多数字原住民。如果我在柏林地铁,我今天早上在柏林地铁,我肯定会看到几个人在看手机,我们这里有很多手机,这不是重点。但如果你在
中国地铁里,首先,它是你在欧洲见过的任何地铁的三倍大。我可能只在一个安静的地铁里待过,但其他50个地铁都很繁忙。所以就是人群规模以及他们如何处理,你也意识到如果你在有那种人群的情况下不走数字化道路,什么都行不通。所以对他们来说从
刚开始的时候。然后我今天早上读到一篇文章,讲的是荷兰南部的一个海滨小镇东堡(Domburg),他们不想把停车计费器升级成不再接受现金的版本,因为那里有很多德国游客,他们习惯用现金支付停车费。这让我会心一笑,因为如果你读到的是关于一个中国渔村接待很多来自另一个省份的游客的报道,没人会相信,
因为我在那里待的三周里没见过现金。所以你比如说充电,都是用微信或支付宝支付的。我能想象那是怎样的吗,每个充电桩的用户体验都一样吗?这就是问题所在:他们有这种疯狂的模式,就是在微信里有各种小程序。所以微信应用基本上是通往中国数字世界的一个门户,只要你去到一个新城市,它就会
你知道,当你第一次在那里乘地铁时,你得先登录地铁系统。但是,是的,这是无缝衔接的,你只需要同意他们的条款或者什么条件就行了。充电也是一样,通常你只需要用微信扫一下,就会进入那个供应商的小程序,然后就可以付款了。这样你就不会
有风险,你知道,二维码诈骗在欧洲这里是个大话题。所以我想,当然我不是中国人,这是我们需要研究的。微信作为门户可能造成了这样一种情况:你不是用相机扫描二维码,而我在欧洲习惯的是用相机扫码。如果我扫二维码,我会用相机。而且
它可能跳转到任何网站,可能是任何东西。我觉得关键在于,微信应用扫描二维码后,可能只会把你送到它认识的那些平台。如果有人找到绕过这个机制的方法,我也不会感到意外,但问题是
我没见过多少中国网站,这就是问题所在。所有东西都隐藏在这些超级门户背后。我觉得几乎,我甚至不能向你证明中国网站做了很多事情。显然会有很多我不知道的网站,但我没看到,你知道,在欧洲这里我们可能也比较少宣传网站,但对我来说,想要获取信息时去
网站仍然是完全正常的。当我在那里见到人们时,他们从不去网站给我看任何东西。他们会打开微信,打开租车公司或其他什么的小程序,然后在那里给我看东西。是的,我是说,我不确定你是否知道,但我对中国也有一些了解,所以那里的超级应用概念与我们在欧洲所知道的很不一样。那里有各种各样的小
程序,这让你在那里时相当方便。所以你不会有很多像我们所知道的那种MSP(移动服务提供商),需要你下载单独的应用,你只会使用小程序。是的,这有点像我们真的把应用商店当作做这些事情的中心,而我真的觉得他们不是这样。现在说到电动车,就车辆本身而言,如果
你要把它们从你迄今为止获得的最好体验到最差体验排个序,也许你可以
分享一些例子和故事。
当你谈到这个,我马上想到的是,比如五年前我开着一辆爱驰(Aiways)去法国旅行,那是我第一次能试驾中国电动车的经历之一。他们很早就来到荷兰了。这个品牌叫爱驰。他们现在在中国甚至都不活跃了,所以只在欧洲销售,我不确定现在销量如何,很难弄清楚实际情况是怎样的。但不管怎样,我开着
那辆车去了法国,它充电的方式,甚至他们把CCS插头横着放在车前面的方式,导致我在使用CCS充电线时遇到了很多麻烦,要真正把它插进去我得坐在地上才行。这就让你明白,是的,在他们推出之前有人试过这个吗?而且它还有一个
大眼睛盯着我看,所以我马上在上面盖了点东西,幸好它没抗议。它假装能支持CarPlay,但其实不行。我觉得这也是,我去年甚至试过其他承诺有CarPlay但实际没有的中国车。但这就是你看到的,是的,他们发展得非常快,所以现在CarPlay已经是标配了。他们实际上可以通过OTA升级很多
东西,所以你能看到他们正在改进我可能就在一年前抱怨过的那些问题。是的,确实存在这样的差异,有些公司可能就是太小了,比如这家爱驰公司,据我所知他们背后没有很大的母公司。但在中国,在欧洲你可能会看到像极氪(Zeekr)甚至Polestar这样的品牌,很多人
只是看到它,根本不知道,我上个月在哥德堡,到处都是Polestar。我觉得很多瑞典人,当然Polestar在那里有个大办公室,但当我看到Polestar时我会想到吉利,因为我对这个行业感兴趣。我觉得像那样的公司,当你在中国的普通城市走走,看到路上跑的车,比如我一月份去
广州时,极氪001的普及程度,我在阿姆斯特丹只知道两辆这样的车。在广州,你在一个红绿灯路口就能看到三辆,而且这一天剩下的时间还会继续看到。你一天走在城里就能看到成千上万辆。你就会意识到这辆在这里看起来还很新、以这个价格做到这样已经相当令人印象深刻的车,在那边,完全是司空见惯的。他们已经升级了三次。它充电
速度是这里的两倍。他们甚至不在这里销售充电更快的版本,因为没人在意。反正基础设施也不具备。它已经能与许多德国车竞争了,所以。是的,这有点疯狂,而且豪华程度也很惊人,因为你真的可以看到在屏幕方面完全不同的理念。在中国,甚至一些城市本身就感觉像一块屏幕,因为他们在那些建筑物上投影各种东西,我也在想:你们在干什么,
为什么要这样。但那不重要,它是否打动我并不重要。问题是,如果你坐进一辆价格不菲的现代中国电动车里,那么是的,我坐过一辆有两块6K屏幕的车:一块在前面供驾驶员和乘客使用,另一块6K屏幕在后面。当我坐在那里看某部中国电影时,我意识到,我没有任何朋友家里有6K屏幕。而在
中国,我不想说在汽车里配备多块这样的屏幕目前还算正常,但很快就会是了。显然这对我们来说并不重要,它不会突然让欧洲人产生屏幕痴迷,需要在车里配6K屏幕。但对于任何中国人来说,这将是正常的,他们不会接受更差的配置。如果我们不造这样的车,他们就再也不会买任何德国车了,一点机会都没有。而这些事情很重要,因为德国
出口的一半去往中国,而三年后,如果你问我,我会说预计是零。我的问题也更多地与你对任何类型电动车的体验有关,不一定只是中国车。所以如果你要分享你最喜欢的电动车型,我不知道你开过多少款电动车型,永远都不够,但我总会提到的是Taycan,因为它仍然是我
自己开过的最好的一款,就它给人的那种在电动车中与路面连接的感觉而言,这是完全不寻常的,因为即使到今天,许多电动车都不是那样造的。这恰好说明,是的,我认为他们很早就转向电动车是对的。现在很多人认为,有文章写道,他们有点太早了,我认为那完全是错的。他们绝对应该早转,不幸的是
我不确定他们是否配了合适的电池等等,但它仍然,尽管我现在给一辆中国车充电的速度和Taycan一样快,那是五年后的事了,所以你可以看到他们在2020年真的树立了一个标杆。它的峰值充电功率可达270千瓦,并能维持一段时间,所以创造了在15分钟内充接近60千瓦时电的机会。所以即使
到今天,这仍然非常令人印象深刻。而新款Taycan,我从未开过,充电更快。所以那真的是一款非常好的产品。但话说回来,你真的能注意到,我几周前坐过一辆,因为我的一个朋友现在实际上有一辆。它们,我不会说便宜,但你可以在二手市场以与新车非常不同的价格买到。你会注意到,是的,如果你
从一辆近期的电动车换过来,它确实感觉不同,感觉更像一辆汽车。有很多按钮。你坐得非常舒服,坐得非常低,这在大多数电动车中仍然非常不寻常。但话说回来,就其本质而言,它永远都是一款小众产品,我认为这就是我想知道的,他们后来转向Macan的做法是否正确,
延期了,而且我觉得Cayenne也再次延期了。我会说那些产品已经需要在那里了。我非常享受的那次Taycan驾驶是如此久远,以至于一方面,我仍然对它印象深刻,并将永远保留那段经历。但在此期间发生了什么?我和一些德国朋友一起期待着试驾Boxster,我们实际上一起进行了一次去格拉斯哥的公路旅行,去
看杯赛。那是2021年,当时我们都觉得Boxster电动版要来了,我们谈论我们可能的公路旅行,作为新结识的朋友,作为我们的目标。而现在我和你坐在这里,是在与一些德国人讨论那件事的四年之后,我们多年前就为那款产品做好了准备。现在它被推迟到,我想,2027年。而你谈到了保时捷,有一家公司试图
在同一水平上衡量自己,我觉得这也特别有意思,那就是小米,它在某种程度上做了苹果没做的事,创造了,对于那些不知道的人,小米是这家大型智能手机和其他电子产品制造商,非常成功,实际上创立得相当晚,我想是在2012年左右,不是很久以前,但现在被疯狂炒作,也许理所应当。我很想听听你的意见。所以
说到我非常关注的塑造电动出行的几个品牌:当然有比亚迪,来自中国的小米,你已经提到了吉利,也许是中国的三大领先者。然后在欧洲我们有德国汽车制造商,他们目前非常谨慎;他们在尝试,但尝试得不够。我很想看看这种比较,以及在你看来未来
几年它将如何发展。是的,所以今年去中国是一件非常酷的事情,因为我太惊讶了,甚至因为我在1月和4月都去过,我能看到这种差异。早在1月我就已经看到很多小米汽车了。但随后4月再去时,他们刚刚发布了Ultra,我想是在我实际去之前几周,在深圳这样的城市里走动时,我可以简单地在城市里转转,
就能看到好几辆Ultra在开。是的,你真的能注意到有一群认真的人群热衷于获得新东西。是的,我没开过它,所以我只是参观了展厅,但只是看到那边购物中心里疯狂数量的商店在卖手机之类的东西。但问题是,现在如果你走进这些华为门店,你没有提到,或小米门店,
是的,商店大约有一半陈列着,可能是笔记本电脑,可能是平板电脑,在小米的案例中可能是吸尘器。而商店的另一半突然间就摆满了汽车。所以我去访问的时候,Ultra在四月份占据着中心位置,然后周围是较慢的版本。但假设你和我明天飞往深圳,我们
录制这期节目时还是七月,所以距离我刚访问过已经过去好几个月了,小米的商店对我来说又会像一个全新的店面,因为他们的新车型现在会放在中间。这无疑会与Model Y形成激烈竞争。当然忘了说,特斯拉,也想听听你对特斯拉的看法。是的,非常值得关注的一个。你看到的就是这种方式,像小米这样的公司应该
与苹果这样的公司相比,因为他们提供一个生态系统,是的,如果你是一个在中国有份体面工作的30岁左右的人,那么你家里可能满是小米的产品,控制着你的灯光,做着吸尘的工作,处理家里的各种事情,并且可以自动化它们。现在你的汽车也整合进来了。是的,如果他们将来也做家用电池之类的,我也不会感到惊讶
。但是,像比亚迪这样的公司可能是更好的例子,因为他们已经建立了那样的价值链。但是,你真的可以看到就是有这样一整套的产品,汽车只是他们更大拼图中的新部分。这向你表明人们可以四处走动,他们基本上永远不会离开这样一个地方,所以他们总是会接着看小米系统
。我想在那里买一个对讲机,但买不到,因为他们需要它们,他们有很多对讲机,但他们需要它们作为这个汽车商店的展示品。这也让我明白了,我以为我在购物中心,因为人们在那里购物,但实际上人们在手机上购物。所以即使小米汽车就在你面前,大多数人也会在手机上购买它们。我认为,这真的是特斯拉进入的地方
,他们仍然是极少数可以让你简单地现在就去网站上用手机给自己买一辆特斯拉的公司之一。你可以在我们结束这期播客之前完成购买。这家公司已经这样做了十多年,这真的让我想不通,实际上很少有公司简单地复制那个模式做同样的事,不是别的,不是更好的,就是同样的,
成为特斯拉的竞争对手。我认为这真的是德国人在完全错失重点方面表现突出的地方,因为他们不提供这个,甚至只是一个德国的汽车配置器。显然我明白有些人想要非常个性化的体验,所以总会有那样的空间。但购买特斯拉的简单性本身就是一个卖点,我认为小米在很大程度上复制了这一点,因为我就在那里的商店上了他们的网站。
非常容易点击并订购一辆SU 7。现在我们可以用YU 7做同样的事。在你购买之前,你可以看到产品的等待时间,所以你可以决定升级以获得更快的车型,因为它会在30周内到货而不是50周。这就是特斯拉一直在玩的同样把戏,他们可以直接发布一个新产品,他们会给你快的那个,后来
会有一个更快的车型,然后嘭,就会有一个新的炒作周期。是的,我认为这真的,是的,这向你表明美国人也是,因为我们不要只关注德国人,美国人,除了特斯拉,也完全错失了这一点。他们太深地活在他们的经销商模式泡沫中,以至于他们认为那是唯一的方式,而对于电动汽车来说永远不会是这样。所以你
需要摆脱它,如果你找不到方法,那你就会被困住。这是一个很大的风险,我感觉,欧洲整体上就处在这样一个位置,是的,我认为我们在某些方面比美国人做得更好,但我们也真的错失了,是的,看到我们同时可以做什么。是的,对于特斯拉来说,真是令人着迷的是,这是一个产品
我想,是的,他们一直代表着简单性。他们的软件打磨得非常好。在那个层面上,我认为即使在今天也几乎没有什么竞争。但是,你可以看到,曾经他们提供比大多数更快的充电,如果你今天去中国,几乎任何品牌,甚至一些几乎被视为预算品牌的品牌,他们都会与特斯拉的体验非常有竞争力。所以对特斯拉来说幸运的是,他们仍然非常高效,几乎没有人能在这方面击败他们,也许
德国人可以。但在中国,当你看充电成本是多少时,例如,有多少人会对效率非常感兴趣。所以我认为这也是欧洲真正可以专注的元素,因为我们擅长这个,我们可以选择继续擅长它。所以我非常高兴看到像奔驰这样的品牌真正专注于这样的事情。但与此同时,我们怎么到了
2025年夏天,我还没在任何地方看到CLA?我知道你可以买它。我不知道如果你买了什么时候能拿到,但我没看到它。我只是想在街上看到它们,当我们去某个地方旅行时,我们会看到这辆车。让我们也谈谈这一点,让我抓狂的是在美国,如果你从全球视角看美国,我
认为没有人在电动汽车方面失败得像美国那么惨。然而他们有Lucid,他们有Rivian。还有另一家公司要推出另一款纯电动卡车,他们想使用已经被取消的补贴等等。但欧洲的Rivian在哪里?欧洲的Lucid在哪里?嗯,欧洲的Lucid,有些人可能会说Rimac,但我说没有规模。你根本没法比较。我希望这些能成真,是的,
是的,太阳能汽车,是的。我觉得这甚至更让人痛心。有些人尝试了这些事情,他们真的应该得到很多支持。但他们没有得到。是的,这只是向你展示了小米真的在成功,并且正处于某个可能会如此庞大的事情的起点,没有哪个欧洲人会相信。这向你展示了即将到来的事情,而我们没有办法阻止它们。我们必须做得更好。谁
会去做呢?是的,就是比亚迪,因为它是第一名。你认为它会保持第一名吗,或者你开过吗?比亚迪是一个有趣的案例,因为他们做的事情太多了。你可以去加州,在那里和一些孩子一起坐校车,那可能就是洛杉矶的比亚迪校车。这真的让我很惊讶。你可以在任何地方遇到它们。我去过一些最奇怪的城市,在那里我突然看到一辆
比亚迪巴士,我简直不敢相信自己的眼睛。然后与此同时,当我坐在他们的一些汽车里时,如果你有时使用特斯拉,然后你接触到Atto 3的界面,嗯,它们没有可比性。然而Atto 3在荷兰售价38,000欧元,Model 3在荷兰售价40,000欧元,所以它们之间相差2,000欧元。但是是的,当谈到比亚迪时,他们是如此庞大,以至于我真的觉得
我敢做的唯一一种比较是与大众集团,在那里你已经可以看到有些东西真的不匹配,因为显然大众集团没有他们拥有的电池潜力。而且我不清楚大众在巴士方面的情况。但无论如何,他们有这种经典的方法,他们会经营一个正常的经销商网络,这也给了他们这种优势,我认为他们将经营数量相当可观的
经销商,可以和大多数欧洲品牌竞争,可能到明年年底在欧洲。而这些经销商将销售汽车,这意味着那些人不会购买欧洲汽车。我认为许多人会喜欢他们所购买的,因为现在在荷兰,以及类似地在丹麦,例如,但甚至在法国,在高速公路上我到处都看到这些Seal U汽车。而在荷兰,今年超过一半的
汽油车带有电池插电式混合动力。这真的向你展示了欧盟委员会,至少他们是这么说的,认为这些来自中国的电动汽车对欧洲汽车制造商或其他什么构成某种风险,我们需要更多时间。所以他们对电动汽车征收关税。在我看来,欧盟委员会所做的是,他们让插电式混合动力对中国人来说更有吸引力,他们可以赚更多的钱
这样做。而欧洲有非常庞大的人群完全没有准备好转向电动汽车,因为在你当地社区的充电可能对你来说要么是未知的,要么是昂贵的,或者你只是不感兴趣,我可以继续说下去,清单永远列不完。所以这有点滑稽,因为即使是我过去在中国非常喜欢的一些公司也都在转向增程式电动车,因为事实是,即使在中国,首先,许多人仍然有能力
购买汽油车。也有能力不去在乎,不想在乎充电,因为你需要用一个应用程序来弄清楚事情。你需要弄清楚充电器在哪里,即使它就在你家附近的街区。如果你习惯了去加油站,也许你就是不介意。所以事实是,你看到很多过去只在中国销售纯电动汽车的公司也要
销售增程式电动车。小米就是其中之一,因为会有巨大的人群需求,这只是向你展示了,是的,我觉得这对我们来说甚至是更大的危险,因为它只是向你展示这些汽车是如此有竞争力,以至于我们作为欧洲要保持竞争力,将会非常具有挑战性。我认为这里有一半的人只是不想知道,但这真的不那么有趣。换个话题,但也是一个很好的过渡。
比亚迪与英国的Octopus Energy宣布了一个大型V2G项目,他们刚刚启动,这让我对此非常兴奋。对于听众来说,我想这是一个300英镑的套餐,包括租赁一辆汽车,然后如果你遵守Octopus Energy的V2G条件,你就可以免费驾驶。你对这个特定公告有什么看法,总的来说,作为一名电动汽车驾驶者,你对V2G的看法是什么,在你的日常生活中,你理想的
smart charging V2G套餐是什么样的?是的,那个英国套餐非常有趣,它真的向你展示了,在这里我们有一个敏捷的能源参与者在英国占据了一半的市场,成为一个真正的英国巨头。你可以看到像比亚迪这样的公司进来了,那本来可能是特斯拉的交易,你知道,他们有Powerwall。在过去几周里,他们开始在
欧洲比以往更多的国家销售它。我认为他们感受到了威胁,这向你展示了比亚迪就这样进来了。他们有更多的车型可以提供,他们有足够的电池,他们就会把这些东西卖给你,如果他们想的话,他们可以补贴,等等。而且在英国,我认为这些东西非常有意义,因为,我们已经谈过这个,公共充电有点好坏参半,特别是在价格方面。据我所知,
英国的数据显示,50%的人可以在自己的车道上停车。是的,这个数字在大多数欧洲国家我们都达不到,所以那里家庭充电和家用电池的市场潜力非常大。有如此大的潜在客户群,是的,这些激励措施可以获得良好的月度价格,然后甚至是良好的能源费率,无论如何你回家时就会把它插上,而
应用会处理好这一切。它们了解你的车辆,了解你的能源节奏,所以,这些事情就是理所当然的。数学上算下来,收益能翻三倍。这简直太荒谬了。我认为这也是,很多汽车公司不会走到那一步,真正地,就像,它们可能会成为兼职能源公司,或者说至少它们本可以成为。我认为这种潜力,对于
像比亚迪这样的公司来说是很自然的,因为他们本身就来自电池领域,但这在行业里当然是完全不同寻常的。而且,我预期这样的服务会出现在任何有类似Octopus这样参与者的欧洲国家,这事本可以早就发生。我认为潜力巨大。这家公司,我太习惯荷兰这样的国家了,所以我总是关注公共充电这一侧。在荷兰,
这很不寻常,对一大群人来说,把车停在自家房子前面、停在自己的地产上是非常不寻常的。这不是常态。当然有很多地产的人拥有汽车,情况很不一样,但是,一旦你靠近阿姆斯特丹,这就会变得完全不寻常。那里有一百万人,已经接近全国10%的人口了,所以我们必须依靠公共设施来做这些事。
这就是为什么我非常渴望看到公共充电测试进入到一个阶段,在那里每个充电桩都能协作,更多的应用支持这一点,而且主要是,真的,让我有动力在正确的时间插上充电,或者知道我应该什么时候充,因为我认为现在我们真的错失了太多机会。人们毫无意识。比如,欧洲有多少人甚至知道自己家里的千瓦时电价?我感觉这根本不是
,当然,由于东边发生的事情,这有所改变,所以有些人确实意识到了。但是,这仍然只是,我认为,这也是我想知道的,欧盟是否足够警觉,能够理解,千瓦时教育,我们应该把它纳入学校教育。这是基本的。如果你必须,也许你已经想过了,但如果你必须
想象理想的未来V2G案例会是什么样。我显然思考过这个问题,我们认为用户应该有无缝的体验,就是不需要太多手动输入。某种程度上,应用应该从过去的行为中学习,或者从日历或其他类型的有用数据点的集成中学习,以理解用户的偏好,这样你只需插上充电,它就会
,应用可能会学习你想什么时候插上充电,什么时候想再次离开并使用车辆,这样出行需求会随着时间的推移越来越多地被学习到。然后它会自动安排充电,这样你就能够行驶你需要的下一段公里数。如果有例外情况,你可能可以指定,但这应该是例外而不是
常规,然后你尽可能地降低成本,甚至可能降到零,就像英国Octopus的案例那样,对于公共充电桩。但对于私人充电桩,或者对于公共充电桩,这样的话...你怎么看,你有没有思考过,或者你认为什么会是理想的情况,在希望很快到来的未来?嗯,我认为自动化这部分
确实非常重要,因为显然不会有这种接受度,人们不想整天按按钮,在正确的时间插上充电,这些事情都没有意义。但如果你可以远程启动这些,如果它们就这样发生,因为系统知道这是正确的做法,或者你只是设定你想要获得的奖励,系统会对此更积极,你可以接受
它,因为你足够灵活。显然人们过着不同的生活,所以应该有不同的设置。但我非常想知道我们如何能让这些事情在公共场合奏效,因为真的,当我看着我住的阿姆斯特丹这样的城市时,我积极地,我有一颗好奇的心,我就想知道:好吧,我们已经大力发展充电网络了,但是,车队,即使阿姆斯特丹的车队非常电动化了,
周围仍然有很多旧车。而且,如果每个人都有一辆电动车,那会是什么样子?我们在公共场所就需要更多的充电桩来让V2G案例运作,而且很容易看出它如何运作,因为我认为这完全说得通。如果更多人能插上充电,你就创造了更多的灵活性,你有更多的灵活性。所以理想情况下你想要那样,但你
真的想看到这个城市到处都是充电桩吗?这是一个很可疑的问题。所以我总是想知道这实际上会是什么样子,我认为你在较新建的社区看到的情况,在阿姆斯特丹这样的地方发生的,我猜这里也一样,是更多的车实际上被放在建筑物下面等等。我认为一旦你有一个大车库之类的,在那里有
电池,到处都是充电桩,真正的车库。如果你今天建一个车库,却不为这些模式安装线路,那么我认为你就是,要么你不想加入我们前进的方向,要么你的市场中的激励措施可能就是错的。但我认为这确实是欧盟必须发出信号并真正推动这些成员国的地方,因为如果这些事情发生在
丹麦,他们永远不会建一个没有充电桩的新车库。在瑞典,我去过一些停车场,整层都有充电桩。我在荷兰几乎看不到这种情况,但在瑞典这很常见。你看到他们也很聪明,因为这些充电桩并不快,但这不重要,这些车就停在那里,它们就插上充电,慢慢充电,价格实惠。在这些场景中,这正是
但这个想法,我希望在整个欧盟看到这些东西,理想情况下在全球范围内。但你可以看到欧洲各地的进展速度非常不同,我认为这是我们不应该承担的风险。因为事情是这样的,人们说中国发展如此之快是因为他们没有石油。好吧,我们也没有石油,那么为什么我们的发展速度不如他们快,或者更快呢?我们可以走得更快,没有什么能阻止我们。好的,是的,说了这句话,也许你想给听众留下最后的寄语。
嗯,主要就是试着开开电动车。也许你没有电动车,但听我的建议:租一辆周末开,或者租一天,试试共享汽车,因为你不喜欢它的可能性实在太低了,所以是的,你应该试试。Felix,谢谢你,继续保持。我认为你做得很棒。
哇,与Felix,电动Felix,的这一集节目真是精彩,他显然对这个行业充满热情,并以多种方式向我们展示了他的专业知识和经验。
对我来说最引人入胜的是荷兰,不同国家之间的地理差异,激励措施显然是有效过渡到电动车的关键,通过税收减免等方式激励人们,到处都有足够的充电桩,中国有非常便宜的电动车,而且还有每千瓦时10美分这样的定价。还有
小米和其他类型的软件优势,以及来自特斯拉的体验,如何购买汽车以及如何支付电动充电费用,这绝对是激励人们进行转型的必要条件。他的个人故事也相当有趣,了解他对电动摩托车的兴趣,以及他在大多数欧盟国家的经验,并将它们与德国进行比较,不幸的是德国还没有取得更好的成果,但我相信我们会做得更好。以及他对
smart charging的看法,他在测试阿姆斯特丹试点项目时的经验,在那里也必须结合基于现货市场的充电以及配电系统运营商(DSO)的电网拥堵管理,这将使其变得非常智能,或者V2G案例,它不应该仅限于乌得勒支的雷诺5。还有很长的路要走,但这已经是一个开始了。是的,我认为这是一集很棒的节目。希望你喜欢。欢迎分享并在下次收听。
Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.
Hello and welcome to the Smart Charge podcast. I'm your host Claudio, and we're plugging in with Felix Hamer, better known as Electric Felix. Felix is one of Europe's most recognizable EV storytellers, a Dutch-based creator who's logged countless real-world kilometers across the continent and even in China, stress-testing charging networks from Ionity to mom-and-pop AC posts, and turning those road trips into brutally honest breakdowns, deep-dive newsletters, and data-driven social media threads. What sets Felix apart isn't just the range tests or
charger reviews - it's the way he translates kilowatts, tariffs, and route planners into human decisions. Will this charger work at 2 a.m.? Do I trust that RFID card? How does a family road trip feel when the SOC hits 7% and the next DC charger is 40 kilometers away? In this episode we'll unpack some of these aspects and much more: geographical differences and what makes some countries' EV adoption better than others, and especially his experience in China, Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. And also smart charging, his experiences
with that, pilots, his perfect vision of how it should be, and many more things. Let's dive in. Hello Felix, thanks for joining me today. How was your trip to Berlin? Very smooth, actually, thank you for inviting me. Yeah, we traveled yesterday from Amsterdam to here in a very casual, tiny-battery Tesla, and yeah, it's just a matter of - I focus on affordable chargers, which unfortunately doesn't leave that many options, but yeah, driving electric to
Berlin for years has been fairly easy, but the pricing is a different point. Alright, yeah, but at least you made it. That's one thing, and we'll definitely talk about all the challenges and difficulties related to EV charging and to your personal setup. Before we dive into that, to help listeners understand a little bit who is talking, can you introduce yourself? What's your background? How did you get to what you're doing today? Yeah, thank you. I'm Felix Hamer, and
some people might know me as Electric Felix, because it was about 8 years ago that I tried an electric motorbike for the first time. Even though I'm an IT guy in Amsterdam, I like to try new things, and this motorbike really surprised me. It showed me fast charging as a sort of ultimate opportunity to electrify anything. I suddenly realized: if this motorbike can be electric - I had a petrol motorbike at the time - then I guess anything
could be. These fast chargers sort of create any possibility. You can have a slow charger and it's fine, but the fast charger creates this opportunity that you can just keep going. And that is - I think, because I'm a road tripper by heart - I've been traveling around Europe for many years and I just used to do that with diesel cars. I never owned a car because I live in Amsterdam, and the diesel rental was simply
always the best deal to go far from home. And this is what I noticed with the fast charging I tried with the motorbike: if you looked for the right deal, especially 7 years ago, it was super easy to charge cheaply in many places, even though it was less fast than today. That created the opportunity for me to travel a lot at a very affordable level, on an electric motorbike. That's the one. The motorbike also unlocked me to look for
car rentals as well. I took a BMW i3 to Paris, for example, and it was actually a full disaster, but my best friend was in the car and he still went EV after that experience, because on the way back, as soon as we entered the Netherlands again, we were in this fast-charging heaven where they had a nationwide network that made everything easy. He immediately realized that he needed to get rid of his petrol car, because he was making a lot of kilometers in
the Netherlands and by going EV he could do that at half the price. So yeah, many things happened in the past decade. I created a blog to simply share my travel experiences and it all escalated a bit, so by now, especially on LinkedIn, I have thousands of followers, and I just try to keep people updated on what is going on in the charging scene. I was mainly also surprised by the differences - this first trip to France really showed that even
going 500 kilometers from home, Paris isn't far from Amsterdam, but the electric landscape changed several times over in that tiny trip. Even today you can still see that traveling to Italy is completely different from traveling to Spain. While I see that as fun because I can write about it, I also think that for mass adoption, things need to be easy and affordable, and not like this puzzle where you need to find the right deal to go left or right like
this. Right. Thanks for that - that already gives us quite some points to touch upon. First, what got you so excited about electric motorbikes, coming from your experience with the diesel? What were the core elements, if you remember? Yeah, the motorbike surprised me so much because I had just had my license for, I think, about a year, and I had just had my petrol motorbike for that time. And the experience of this electric motorbike - you immediately get
This feeling of the power that just keeps pushing, and that you're on this machine that has no gear shift, that can just go - there's a certain fluidity to it that is just, you don't know it from the fossil age because it isn't. It is something completely new. And yeah, I think just the combination of that really puts tech into the mobility space. I always, I even like biking around. I still love to bike around because
it gives me so much freedom, and an e-bike just sort of adds to this freedom because you can simply go further in the same time. And the e-bike really shows you, in a country like the Netherlands, that massive amounts of people take e-bikes to work. And yeah, I think that half of them would never take the bike to work because then you get all sweaty and you would never go very far every day. Like, if you can afford it, you would just upgrade.
And yeah, I think that here is really this sort of secret sauce where there's this opportunity to do things that we didn't do before, because EVs create an opportunity that wasn't there before. Also the combination of, like, an electric motorbike isn't that silent, so people think that EVs are sort of dull because there's no engine roar. But the bike I tried is this bike from Italy, and actually the company is in a lot of trouble, but back then they were really
pushing the boundaries. And the thing is that, yeah, when you go full speed, it actually makes a lot of sound. Clearly it's like this high-pitched electric sound - it's very different, but yeah, it really pushes you to go crazy. And the thing is also that I had friends on the back in Amsterdam, and they still talk about those rides, because it is just so unbelievable that this torque comes from nowhere. And
yeah, if you then think about what you can do with that bike, and how easy it is to find affordable charging so that you can actually rinse and repeat this every day at easily half the price that you could ever think of doing such things with petrol - and at the same time it also shows you that if you have a big indoor space you can also ride it there because the fumes aren't there. There's just all these things that happen,
but yeah, it was the fast charging that that motorbike could do that made it so special for me. It could DC charge - it needed a 50 kW charger, but the thing is that it could DC charge at 20 kW or something, so that's not absolute maximum. But the thing is that the battery was 11 kWh, so just very small. By now they doubled it to 20 kWh, and that is it. Like, how much range - it had a
realistic range of a bit over 100 kilometers if you used it normally. And then yeah, you could hypermile it to get a bit more, and I drove it in summer so you could eke a bit more out. But yeah, it was also this combination with the infrastructure that was just so exciting. I took the motorbike to Switzerland, and I found out that the chargers I would need in the north of France were only at the supermarkets that had the
chargers only open while the shop was open, because it was a service for customers and you couldn't pay for it - it was free, which was amazing. But at the same time it meant that I couldn't ride the actual trip on a Sunday because the shops would close and the chargers would shut down, and in that area of France there was simply no alternative. So yeah, that really shows you that, to me, this element of the plugs unlocking everything is
sort of the biggest secret for me. And yeah, that is also where I think that in Europe we're doing pretty well in expanding the infrastructure, but the thing is that if the plugs aren't where they need to be - which is in front of people's faces and houses - yeah, things will just go too slow. And could you use the same plugs with motorbikes as you can with cars? Yes, interestingly enough. Everything revolves around the CCS plug in Europe. Luckily, the EU decided on
that very early on, so you can actually use the same infrastructure. And this is, I think, also one of these key elements why, for example, the EU is doing better than the US, because in the US even today there's just this mess of plugs. And as soon as you go fast charging compared to slow charging, you need different cables, different converters. It really depends on your vehicle and your house, and a lot of things, what you need. And in Europe it's fairly simple,
where we have an AC standard that is just the same for everyone, and the DC standard that, apart from the old Nissan story, is simply CCS - so that's completely unified. And so I now have an understanding of how you got into e-mobility as a topic and what led you then to start sharing it in a blog. Yeah, so what I found was so strange about this motorbike is that I couldn't believe what it could do,
but I also didn't understand why I didn't know about it. Because the thing is, I won a ride on the motorbike and then I rented it to try it out several times, and what surprised me the most was simply that I didn't know that it existed. And I think this is, to a point, even sort of true today - that many people, if you were to go around Europe and ask people in the
streets of a random European city and just interview them and ask them if they ever tried an EV, I expect most people to say no. And I expect most people to not know many things about EVs. Even today I almost faint when I see an electric motorbike in Amsterdam, because of how little I see them. And this is 8 years after me trying the motorbike, and after trying it for one afternoon I realized any Dutchman that works
in the Netherlands and rides to work, maybe with a motorbike, maybe with a car, or whatever. They can take that motorbike to work, no problem, because of the infrastructure that we already had. And today, even crazier, but most people will not even know it's out there. So that triggered me to start my blog first, even just an Instagram page, and just share my charging experience, my road trips, to simply show people: if you were to Google for something electric, then maybe you'll find
the story. And it's also why I wrote in English, because I ran into a lot of people. Imagine taking that motorbike to France - French people love motorbikes. So many people came up to me when I was charging, walking around the thing, and everybody would ask me about it. Every French person talking with me about the motorbike always thought it was a hybrid, because they could not believe it would not be. And I think that is even true today, that most people
will not believe you when you show them that this stuff is out there. Which is just one of the reasons for me to keep going and just writing about it as if it's normal, because I think it should be, but we're not there yet, I guess. Right, and you hinted upon the differences in different countries, and especially one thing that captured my curiosity most was the difference between Spain and Italy, which I'm not so familiar with. Can you elaborate a bit on
those geographical aspects and the differences in challenges? Yeah, so what is just so odd to me in Europe is this difference - I guess it has to do with, you know, it even has to do with the road network. Italy has more toll roads than Spain, I think. And they do things very differently with who owns the roads and the places where you could go for fuel and stuff. But yeah, I think the energy markets of Europe are
just a complete - everybody does their own thing, and even though Europe is sort of well connected, that doesn't mean we have one kilowatt-hour price for Europe at all. And you really see this when, let's say, you live in Rome and you do go out of the city a lot and you want to do that with an EV. Charging in Rome is sort of easily double the price of charging in Madrid. And when I say
this out loud, I just feel like - how can this be? On the one hand, I totally understand that they aren't close to each other, but they're both sunny big cities in places where it would be so easy to put solar everywhere. They both have enough space to build big stations. Clearly, yes, Spain has more area maybe with fewer people, so maybe even easier to install solar. But the
thing is that charging right now in Spain can fairly easily be done at half the price compared to Italy. What are we talking about? Yeah, we're really talking about charging in Italy where it's completely normal to find any type of charger at 80 cents per kilowatt-hour, and in Spain it's fairly easy to find chargers at 40 cents. In my opinion, clearly, as soon as you can charge at home things change, but there you can already
see a big difference again in that a lot of people in Italy cannot charge at home because the home connection actually doesn't allow it. And this is again the stuff - even if we look at the Netherlands, the Netherlands has certain laws for the electricity market that slow down our AC chargers. We limit our AC chargers to less than 19 kilowatts because that creates a much cheaper connection to the grid. But that means that as soon as
you're in Amsterdam and you plug into a charger that looks like an 11 kilowatt charger - which is already slow, but for most vehicles this is simply the onboard charger that they have, so it doesn't matter - as soon as two cars plug in there, you don't even get 11 kilowatts, and that's already little. This has to do with, in my opinion, a Dutch law that was never - you know, it was written when charging didn't exist, and I just don't understand why we
don't upgrade these things, why we don't take this seriously, because we needed a million public chargers in the Netherlands yesterday that run at 11 kilowatts whenever people need it, and we're just not doing this. Even though we have the most amazing AC network in Europe - maybe in the world, but let's just keep it to Europe - we're still doing a lot of things wrong, in my opinion, that we could do better. And just to understand: what's the typical situation if two charge
points are occupied? What would you get? Yeah, so then both would get 8.5 kilowatts, and of course you could say it's close enough to 11 - but it isn't. People drive German EVs with 100 kilowatt-hour batteries today. You can get Chinese EVs with even bigger batteries than that. And it's also depending on your onboard charger. The Netherlands had a lot of jokes in the past because we were so early with EV uptake, because we had very good tax regulation when it comes
to EVs. So we had some EVs like the Jaguar, which I tried a lot because it was an affordable rental car at the time. This Jaguar had a single-phase onboard charger, which means if you plug it in in Amsterdam to a three-phase public charger, you actually get less than 4 kilowatts. So it means that you can be there all day and simply not fill the thing, and that's why it made for a lot of fun on my road trips when I took the
Jaguar to Germany. Then I could finally charge at 11 kW, and I was like, yeah, AC charging is amazing. But yeah, it's just one of these old stories that, if you buy them secondhand today - they're pretty popular secondhand cars - then in the Netherlands on the public network, it absolutely sucks to charge a car like that. And that has to do with the onboard charger as well, but it's also this: yeah, we even slow it down by not offering, in Germany,
because you can charge 22 kW at an AC charger, that creates this opportunity for the Jaguar to go to 11, which in the Netherlands it will just never get. So there are so many points here to discuss, in the Netherlands still maybe. We can take it from there. What are things that you think in the Netherlands are particularly good - and you can boast even though we all know you're a Dutchman - and then let's say all the things that
could be improved in the Netherlands. Because I think out of all the countries - and you have been in quite some countries, maybe you can elaborate and feel free to go into some level of detail on all the countries where you have experienced EV charging - and then, even if we know you're biased, you can say which is the number one in your ranking in terms of EV heaven. Yeah, so one of these
things in the Netherlands is that we had AC charging for a long time. So even if you go back 5 years, Amsterdam already had thousands of public plugs, and by now I think we've crossed the 8,000 mark, but 5 years ago we already had 4,000 if I'm not mistaken. We're already halfway. And that, for example - the AC charging network of Amsterdam was probably bigger 5 years ago than Berlin's AC charging network today. And then
yeah, that's not even regarding pricing. And that's pretty wild, because Amsterdam is much smaller than Berlin, and we have way fewer cars, so it is absolutely not a car-focused city at all. And here, when I walk the streets, just the amount of cars that I see is mind-blowing to me - which I also understand, because it's so much bigger and of course people work outside of the city, etc. But yeah, the thing is, in
the Netherlands, if we look at AC charging, you can see that we come from the situation where we started very early in rolling out these plugs and we made it very easy for people to get a public charger nearby their house, or at least nearby where they needed the charger. So that is something people were asking for - or the government would proactively... No, you could - as soon as you had an EV, so that was the only
sort of condition - and what in my opinion was sort of the wrong part about it was that while you were waiting for your EV you could not get the plug. So there would be a stage where you wouldn't have it. But anyway, as soon as you had an EV, you could just use the government website to say that you were interested, and they would actually - in a city like Amsterdam, they would actually
measure from a certain distance of your house whether the plugs that were there, when you wanted to use them, would be available on the average day that you wanted to. And then they would install a new one nearby if it was proven that that plug would not be available when you needed it most. Nowadays this has changed, and places like Amsterdam but also many other locations have just started rolling out plugs based on predicting where the
growth will be, because they can just see that the fleet keeps getting bigger and chargers keep getting used more. Is distance - a minimum or maximum - a criterion as well, that you cannot have to walk too far? Exactly. So yeah, I think in Amsterdam, if I'm not mistaken, it was like 300 m, something like that. Last week I actually had an interview right here in your spot with the head of the German - the Nationale Leitstelle für Elektromobilität, yes - Johannes Palka. And then
we were discussing the distance that should be realistic in terms of any citizen in Germany, and I think it was quite a bit more. So 300 m sounds quite generous and quite cool. Yeah, and this is just where you can see that the Netherlands - if we were to take an EV from Berlin to somewhere in the Netherlands, then probably if you end up in anything that looks like a village or bigger, the chances are very high that
there is public infrastructure nearby where you stay or where you need to go for work or whatever. Like, even if you go to a Dutch beach, there's probably just an AC charger nearby where you're parking. And then, clearly, on a summer day they might be in use because peak demand is still a bit of an issue. But the thing is, in the Netherlands, I would dare to say that it's just fairly easy to plug in when you park, because also if you
use parking garages a lot - and in the Netherlands it's becoming, I think, close to impossible to find a parking garage where you could not charge at the same time. I find myself, if I'm driving around the Netherlands, which I don't do that often but I do do it, not plugging in at many parking garages because I don't like the price of the chargers they install, because many chargers in parking garages have some deals that in my opinion just don't
make any sense for an AC charger. But this is where it becomes interesting to me. First, since I grew up in Amsterdam and I saw a lot of shared cars already over 10 years ago that I also used a lot, and they could electrify because the charging network was there. So Amsterdam was trying to get these companies to invest in going EV early, like from day one. The Smart cars from a network called Car2Go at the
time were all EVs, and if I would go to Hamburg at that time, the same car would have a petrol engine because they didn't have enough chargers to charge them. And in Amsterdam, the whole fleet was EV from 2013 because they could charge at the public network. This was one of the first times that I went EV in my personal life, because actually if you plugged them in when they had a low state of charge, you got bonus minutes, and it created this
opportunity for me to try EVs in Amsterdam for many years, paying very little money, and even sort of helping the network. Nowadays this is not necessary anymore, because people will plug them in anyway and there are so many plugs around. In the old days you still needed to look for a plug, and now in Amsterdam if you're walking down the average street you will just see a plug. But here is one of these things where I still
feel that we have a network that is sort of old. In the Netherlands, because we started so early, it's based on the RFID badge - the charging card that people are probably aware of if they drive EV or if they've tried it. It was true that every Dutch charging card worked at every Dutch charger. For a long time that was simply the world as it was. And nowadays you can see that we've come to a place where
it's just not that straightforward. First of all, it will probably work, but the price might be off. And nowadays, because these networks have grown older, in places like Rotterdam or Amsterdam there might have been three tenders by now that put in public chargers, and they might all have their own tariff deals. So it's completely normal if we were to visit places like Rotterdam and Amsterdam today that we could walk around a street where we could literally see left and right in the
street public chargers that look the same, but they would have a different price. And sometimes it would be easy to see because the price would be on the machine, or maybe you use an app that shows it well, but yeah, the average app will not show it well. You might not be warned if it's not what you expect. If you live there and you use the charger every week, you might not notice that the price actually changes. So there are
still so many things that in my opinion we just have to improve, and this is what is so cool about coming to Berlin today. For example, in the old days I was driving here seven years ago and the chances of me finding a charger late at night were practically zero. And now if I drive to a random Berlin neighborhood, there will be a charger there, but the pricing will vary wildly. There are, I
feel, at least five operators now in the city that run a decent amount of AC chargers, and it's funny because the chargers also look very different and they behave differently. Some come with their own cable, which I think is super cool - these tethered AC chargers are amazing to me. But yeah, they're completely not the norm, so my dad would definitely get out of the car, take his cable, and then run into this cable on the street that he wouldn't expect. So
it's also funny. But anyway, this information problem - where it's just not that easy to understand where to go, where to find the best price, or where it's easy to stay longer - yeah, we could just go on and on. It is wild to me that I really started my blog because of the charging jungle that I found in Europe, and I always expected it to sort of become less, but I
sort of feel like it's become more - like today we have more jungle than five years ago, which is not exactly what I hoped for. More jungle - that's a good statement. One thing I would be curious about: maybe we can do it rapid-fire style, because I'm pretty sure you're unique in that sense in the world. To understand which countries you have so far experienced in terms of EV charging -
let's go through EU countries. Have you been to all of them, or batch-wise - Western Europe, Eastern Europe? Yeah, more Western Europe, because I've traveled to places like Italy and Spain and Sweden and Norway and the UK. But far east I still have to go, so east of Poland, east of Romania - yeah, it's still one of my goals to drive to Istanbul, because then you really - yeah, as soon as you sort of
leave Hungary, most Western European charging apps just get completely lost, and it's still a bit exciting to find these chargers that you don't know. You might find way more Chinese chargers and stuff like this. And then the UK - I haven't been in years, but I did go in the beginning several times. By now they're doing much better in the sense that there are really around ten networks out there that are really pushing, but
At the same time you notice that pricing is a huge thing in the UK, where people with home charging can easily charge overnight for next to nothing, and public charging can be sort of €1 per kilowatt hour, easy to find. And these things are just wild to me - how can these things just escalate so madly? €1 per kilowatt hour, I don't think, is very sensible. Then I know you have been in China, and
we'll have a deep dive on China, but other countries in Asia you've been to? I have been to other countries in Asia but not in my EV time, so - definitely, because places like Indonesia and Thailand are developing very fast - I have been to Thailand but way before EVs. And the Americas I never visited in EV time, so the last time was 2018 and I still did a petrol road trip with a friend. And I assume nothing in
Africa either. No, exactly. So we had a recent episode, by the way, about Ethiopia, which you might be aware is the first country that has banned petrol cars from being sold in the country. That's why we had a deep dive with somebody who really understood it, and it was interesting. So I encourage you - if you want to share your experience there, I would be very curious to see your experience, and
so let's have a little bit of a - I think we had a bit of a deep dive on the Netherlands already, but one thing that I'm particularly interested in - two aspects actually of the Dutch - is that I would love to have your opinion on this. The grids are known to be very congested, and that's one of the reasons I think there are such strict limitations on the power levels that can be - how do you
see all this? Grid congestion is a fascinating phenomenon. I think it kind of has to do with Dutch pride in efficiency, and that has this extreme effect today: we had an efficient power network for what we did, and because of our gas bubble in Groningen everybody thinks that heating with gas is amazing and cheap - and nowadays it isn't - so finally people are installing heat pumps. Luckily
we have a lot of smart metering at home, but the thing is that just a lot of things in the Netherlands weren't electric. Now of course many companies and people will want to go electric for all kinds of reasons, and then suddenly we pretend to find out yesterday that the network isn't capable of growing overnight by whatever margin we need. And this actually gets us into serious trouble, because let's say you run a logistics company and
you have 50 trucks and you just want to electrify as soon as possible - you would need a serious charging plaza to do 50 trucks overnight, or whatever way you want to do it, depending on how you run your business. But if you would find this out today and go to the energy company and request a couple of megawatts to do this, well, they would just laugh in your face and
literally tell you they can deliver in 2032 - and that's if you're lucky. So we're in a place where I wonder how fast we'll get out of it, because clearly a lot of expansion is planned and it will come, etc. But right now it really puts us in a certain gridlock, and in a city like Utrecht it already has the effect that they
throttle charging in Utrecht. I think if you plug in at 7 at night you get very little or nothing, because the neighbourhood just has so much power demand from people getting home from work. And this is also where the public charging network is a bit stupid as it is today, because all of these people drive their cars to work, they all come home at roughly the same time, they all plug into the public charger at the same time, and then
at home they also plug everything in, start cooking, etc. And there's absolutely no need - 90% of the cars that get plugged in at 6 p.m. have absolutely zero power need at that moment when they plug in. This is of course where I think the Netherlands can, for many years, sort of solve its issue simply by doing things smarter, because in many cases it's also that, as soon as a company - let's say
this company builds a charging plaza with a couple of megawatts - the DSO will, if you request 5 megawatts, reserve that for you at all times. And this is completely nonsense, because half of these trucks will be away most of the day, so your connection will actually be close to zero when the trucks are not there. Of course all the neighbours should be able to use that capacity right then and there. So I think in
many cases we'll just have to arrange things way smarter, and then we can probably go on for years and even expand. And I think in a certain sense it also shows the importance of public charging, because imagine 5 logistics companies nearby each other - if there's a big charging hub in the middle, then not everybody needs to build their own behind the gate and request their own connection that most of the day
nobody will use. So I think it's also just a matter of doing things well and talking smarter. This podcast is called Smart Charge by RiDERgy - what experiences do you have? I've seen it on LinkedIn as well: you have quite a few initiatives related to smart charging in the Netherlands already. Can you maybe share your experience and how it fits within what you just said? Yeah, I'm lucky because in
In Amsterdam is actually the first sort of real public trial where you can now use the AC chargers that were already there in the city. Some of them have been enabled to do what they call smart charging. And unfortunately, you need one charging app to do it, and then yeah, I think it's really this case where they're trying something cool, but for me it was - I thought that, let's say the first time I tried, I thought it would
be smart to plug in during the daytime when I am nearby the house a lot, and it's easy to plug in my dad's car if I feel like it. And then we have a lot of sunny days, especially in the weekend, where the energy price is close to zero or even negative. So I thought it would make sense for my first try to plug it in, let's say at 11, when there are so many public chargers in Amsterdam not in use anyway, so it's
sort of this optimal combination. But the thing is that they did this test - they are running it - it only rewards you when they can actually delay the session. So it has nothing to do with energy prices or the actual load. It is just that if you plug in at a moment that they don't want you to, and they can delay it for you because you say in the app when you need your car again, then they will calculate, because
they know your vehicle - you have to log in through the API - so they know how many hours are needed for it to fill up, and then it creates this situation where I've now tried several times and I've talked a bit with the people behind it. Yeah, at least I've found out how they want you to do it. So you sort of have to plug in at the suboptimal moment, and then it will delay the session for
you, and that's how you get the reward. The reward is based on that - the app will show you the price bracket that your session is delayed to, but it's not very clear. And then also this app is more expensive to use than the app I normally use. So in the end, half the time it didn't help me much. The best reward I ever got was, I think, just over €1, but in Amsterdam that means that you sort of
get gifted kilowatt hours, which is more than nothing. But if you look at the hassle I had to go through just to get that - I literally, because I wanted to have another proof of concept, plugged in the other night before I came here. And this reward was less than 20 cents, not even worth 1 kWh. And later I realized that if I would have just left home an hour earlier in the
morning and plugged in at the first Supercharger outside of Amsterdam at 8 a.m., I would save way more by doing that, because Tesla has variable pricing in the Netherlands and in many other countries as well. I think it's mainly based on the spot market, but I think it's also their local contract, because it differs per location completely. Just for the listeners who are not so familiar - and maybe you know it as well, which would be interesting - there are different value streams
if you want. One is the congestion of the grids, which means that the local distribution grids that we're talking about are heavily congested, so you help the grid by not charging at particular times when the grids are congested. And I assume that's the reward you get through the app we were just discussing, and not through the spot market, which is what you hinted at and what you expected the reward to be - like, it's a negative price, it's a spot market that changes every
hour - which is a different market, right? True, yeah. So that's definitely something to improve upon and to consider, both in a good smart charging solution. But there's one thing - I don't know if you had experience with it or if you know anything about it - but one thing that I also found interesting in the Netherlands is the V2G case of Utrecht, which apparently is one of the most advanced in the world. Have you seen anything of it, or could
the experience factor into your charging there? Well, I was invited to the opening, so I've seen how the concept works, and they say it is working. But yeah, this is one of those cases again where I wonder: OK, it is great, this will help the city of Utrecht for sure, it will definitely help the company running the shared vehicles, it might even help the companies selling these cars. But I do wonder - yeah, for me the question is
what's in it for me? Because if you live in Utrecht and you like to use these shared cars, I think the ultimate way to do these things is to make sure that people use them at the right time, people plug them in at the right time. And I wonder where are the incentives for the actual end user? Because these are Renault cars - I think it's super cool that Utrecht has them. I'm
sort of jealous that Amsterdam doesn't have them. Maybe we will get them at some point. But yeah, I just - if this V2G stuff means that somebody gets rewarded, I feel like it's not the people who sort of deserve it, which are the people in the streets who give up their car to use the shared car that is V2G capable. If they live with - oh, the lights can stay on, I'm so happy. No, like,
give them a discount on that car if it's doing V2G, which is making you money as the company. So it makes me a bit sad that I've seen many shared cars that I love to use and that I use a lot - they have mainly become more expensive. If I look at Berlin, where I tried many of the electric cars that I tried for the first time over my life, many of those cars are gone now, and the companies I used to use all
By now I have hardly seen only petrol shared cars, and it's 2025, and I see these things and I just wonder what's going on here. I'm afraid it has to do with - let's say this: I think some of these shared cars, I loved to use those electric cars in Berlin already years ago, but I guess not all the locals actually loved them so much, because there weren't many chargers, so probably you
would find a lot of these cars at half a charge and then not find a charger nearby. So I'm afraid that it definitely has to do with this real world where Berlin for many years hasn't helped these companies run the share, because a shared fleet needs public infrastructure to be successful. And it's a bit sad to see that now I walk through these Berlin streets where there's suddenly a lot of chargers available - so suddenly that fleet that I have in my
head from three years ago could charge everywhere now. And the actual fleet is gone, and probably sold at a loss or shipped to Denmark, because over there EVs are crazy successful. In one of the countries where several years ago I used DC public chargers already at half the price, because the spot market went lower and I could plug in at a DC charger during lunch for half price - in a country that already has attractive prices, but the price goes even lower in the
afternoon when you need your fast charger. So yeah, it's weird to me that in some places things are moving so fast, and then I come over here and I actually see this movement in infrastructure, but the fleet seems to struggle. Coming back to the Netherlands - a last point, and to your last point as well. What makes the Netherlands such - on the forefront - or Denmark, or other countries that you might have
in mind here in Europe, like Norway - what was the motivation or the reason behind them being so much in the leadership compared to other countries? Yeah, I think that if you look at Europe, it's sort of easy to see that most of these countries where EVs are successful either have a lot of infrastructure or have affordable infrastructure. But not only that - in many cases, if you look at Norway, there's simply no tax on EVs. So suddenly,
I just the other day found out that getting a Model Y in Norway is thousands of euros cheaper than here where it's built, because they don't tax it. So you ship it far from where it's made and then it becomes cheaper because there's simply no tax on it. So imagine if Germany simply said EVs have no tax - you can just sell them and we take no tax. EVs would be booming yesterday in Germany if you did that, because everybody wants the best
deal. I trust that blindly. So the thing is that EVs have to be the best deal. In China they are - that's the only reason why they're successful. If you want the very cheapest car of your life in China, you will always go EV, because it's cheaper to buy, it's cheaper to use, and probably in the city where you live, half the time you're not even allowed to drive petrol anymore, or they will restrict the days or the hours. And
I think these things - let's take the Paris example, because I love Paris for being so two-wheel friendly. In Europe, I would even say in Paris you see more electric motorbikes than in China. And why is that? Because of the local rules. Paris introduced paid parking for motorbikes, and on the day that they introduced this, they said electric motorbikes pay nothing. So everybody in Paris - well, I'm exaggerating, but a lot of people in Paris - that day switched to an
electric motorbike. You also got a discount for trading in your petrol bike, etc. But in Paris I can walk down a single street and see several electric motorbikes parked together charging up at the traffic light, and this is the only city in Europe where this happens - and that is because of a parking rule. It just shows you that if you set these rules correctly, which in the Netherlands was sort of this tax thing where everybody in the Netherlands
drives a company car - the new cars are old company cars - and there was simply no taxation if you went EV, so everybody took a Tesla. Half of all the Teslas in 2019 that came to Europe came to the Netherlands. It's now true in Belgium. In Belgium you will now see more German-made EVs than in Germany, because everybody still loves their German cars in Belgium and they simply pay no tax on them. In Denmark it's also this way, because if you walk into a Danish
showroom - let's say that you like BMW - the Danish showroom will simply show you the 4 Series at, let's say, 80,000 Danish kroner, and then it will be 60,000 to go for the i4. And I haven't even mentioned that Denmark, for example, also doesn't tax your electricity at home if you use solar and if you charge your EV, etc. So it becomes a complete no-brainer: you have this super expensive fossil purchase, or you go less than half price
by going EV. And then public infrastructure also has to be mentioned, because in Denmark it is absolutely wild - it's a small country and the highways have the most incredible fast-charging infrastructure of all of Europe, maybe except for Norway. But Norway is not EU, so it's sort of set apart - they're so far away. Denmark is so easy to visit if you come from Germany, and you will not believe your eyes, because it will be easy to
Pay by credit card, pay half the price of what you're used to, find more plugs available. Actually, in Germany I've been to many locations where there are, let's say, 40 Superchargers, or there's a big BMW charging park with, let's say, 30 plugs. But do I ever see them busy? OK, maybe on a winter sport day. But in Denmark - you can just drive to Denmark right now, be there in a couple of hours - and it will be crazy
busy at all these big charging parks, because everybody's driving EV today. The fleet growth there is so absurd that in some months this year they have imported more EVs than new sales, because they're that attractive to use. It's pretty cool. Let's talk about China. You have been there - when was it? - twice, in January and in April.
I visited places like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. And it is a bit wild, because being in Berlin now and trying to compare it to one day in Shanghai or something - it is totally crazy. Because everything about it, if you take a cab ride, you will be in this old cab that, yeah, it looks like an old car, but it's an EV. And I've been in some
cabs that have 300,000 kilometres already driven, from brands that nobody here knows. And that cab driver - I've been with some cab drivers who were too young to know what a fossil car even means, and they will never drive one again, of course. So everything about it is just wild. And I think the crazy part is also that in a country like the Netherlands we've had a couple of Chinese companies active for a bit - they all
said they would come to Germany, but it's sort of going slower here. But in the Netherlands we had a couple of companies active for a while, and you can just see that things are moving so fast, in the sense that these EVs were already charging at 800 volts last year, but now they put in a new battery and it can go again like double the kilowatt rate. I recently tried the Zeeker car, and it is
actually sort of hard in the Netherlands to find a charger that can supply it with what it can handle. It can do over 400 kW - you actually need a charger capable of going way over 500 amps, which is not that common. And I think it's just this combination of - yeah, they simply had the fastest chargers I've ever seen. The cheapest charging I've ever seen was also there. What numbers can you talk about? Yeah, so when I
was trying a Zeeker car in Hangzhou, I was outside of the city, just clicking around on the screen. I wasn't in the city - I was nearby a lake, it felt kind of quiet - but on the screen I could see that in any direction I looked, within a couple of kilometres, there would be fast chargers of several speeds and several operators. And I found 120 kW charging at 10 cents, for example, but I
found 500 or 600 kW charging at 15 cents, and that was without looking, so I'm sure I didn't find the cheapest ones. And it's just so crazy to realise that you're in a country where, in China, a litre of petrol - if you don't get the right deal - will cost you €1, and 120 kW charging is easy to find at 10 cents. So that is not even having an
option - that is just: you go EV, it's 6 times cheaper. That is just so wild. And I think the speed of these changes - I've been in these models that already impressed me last year, even though the ADAS is never as good as a German one that I've tried so far. Even in the Zeeker car it can charge way faster than a BMW, but the BMW can still handle the Autobahn better. And
you can never use the cruise control at the highest speed, and whatever - so there are still ways in which the Germans can say, you know, we offer something that they don't, and for now that is totally true. But it might be just next year that that is no longer true, because of the speed at which things are moving. And this is where I just wonder if we are aware enough of these things moving at the speed that they are. Because Volkswagen - yeah, OK -
somebody told me this morning on Bluesky that they will get to a million EVs this year, which sounds amazing, and if it's true, that's even more amazing. But then you realise that Volkswagen sells 10 million vehicles, so actually only 1 out of 10 is an EV. And then if the competition that makes 5 million cars already is all-EV - yeah, what will that be next year? And the thing is, I really think that people don't realise that
when these battery prices come down the way that they are, it will be so easy to even install hubs in America. Tesla has now built their biggest site ever - they say without a grid connection, though not actually true, it has a tiny grid connection - but that really shows you there's suddenly a charging site that has a 1.5 MW connection if I'm not mistaken, and they have 10 of these Megapacks, so they can actually just handle 1,000 Teslas coming in in a
couple of hours, charge them all. And that can be done, thanks to these batteries, in a location in the middle of nowhere. And I think that in Europe that kind of middle of nowhere doesn't even exist, but that is sort of the point - we don't even have that kind of middle of nowhere, and still we're going too slow with this. That really frustrates me, because I feel like in the mega cities that I visited in
China, yeah. It's sort of, you have challenges that I think in a way are tougher than what we have here, but they're tackling them at a speed that as a European is almost impossible to believe, right? So you saw an immense amount of charge points in the apps that you - and that is also this weird thing where I did see, for example, a lot of AC chargers walking around. But the weird thing is that you really notice that
what I already felt a bit in the Netherlands: it's very easy to live in a place where AC charging might not be ideal. In my opinion, if an AC charger is running at 50 cents per kilowatt hour, I think for what it is that is sort of inexcusably expensive. The thing is that in my opinion those kind of chargers become a luxury for people who don't mind, people who don't pay for it themselves, or people who simply
need that charge - they will clearly plug in. But if you run the right DC charging infrastructure, you can definitely go below those prices, but it has to be smart infrastructure, of which we don't have that much in Europe. And in China, you see that I noticed a lot of the AC chargers were sometimes more expensive than the DC chargers I saw all over the place. And you could also see that DC chargers were everywhere. There were all of these
cars using infrastructure that wasn't built for their car. I also saw a lot of old EVs that I'd never seen before - they cannot even charge fast, but they can charge and it's cheap, so people will use them and they will be super interesting secondhand and whatever. And I think that is also this point that in Europe there is sort of this risk where we are making a lot of EVs. A company like Volkswagen is producing a very decent
amount of EVs. And in Italy, where I want people to go EV at a faster rate than the Netherlands because they deserve it, it doesn't make any sense for most people to do it. And if we don't fix that, then I don't know what we're actually doing. Because yeah, this idea - in Europe we're still at this point where it is not even weird to see that an EV is something for people who can afford it, and that
doesn't make any sense given the logistics of actual EVs. But it's true in many places. Was there anything else that was very surprising to you in China compared to your experience in Europe? I know we touched upon the payment via WeChat - or like, you can elaborate maybe on that. It is absolutely wild that - let's say, in my case, let's just
tell my story. I downloaded both WeChat and Alipay, and with those two apps I lived 3 weeks in China. I bought food in the street at night from a lady who had this bike cart frying super tasty stuff at the most absurd prices ever, and there's just this QR code hanging at the stand. When I scanned it - faster than I've ever done a payment in Europe - she gets this loud message from her phone or whatever
device that I had paid. And so there's also this realization that there's just no friction. And it is a crazy consumerist society. When I walk around China, I feel like I'm in a hyperdrive version of the America that I thought I knew, where there are cars everywhere, big cities with just skyscrapers all over the place. It really in
many ways looks like America to me, but things are affordable, everything is digital, public transport is mind-blowing. And it's a bit strange to be in this place that looks like America but where everything feels like it's working.
And that is just - yeah - and then the EV case makes it even crazier of course. But I think it's also a case of - I guess they have a younger population pyramid where there are just so many digital natives. If I'm in a Berlin metro - I was in the Berlin metro this morning - I will clearly see a couple of people on their phones, and we have a lot of phones here, that's not the point. But if you're
in a Chinese metro, first of all, it's three times the size of any metro you've ever seen in Europe. I've maybe been in one quiet metro, but the other 50 metros were busy. So it's just the crowd size and how they handle it, and you also realize that if you don't go digital when you have those kind of crowds, nothing works. So it sort of makes sense for them to have done that from
the beginning. And then I read an article this morning about a Dutch coastal town in the south, Domburg, where they didn't want to upgrade the parking meters to ones that don't accept cash anymore because they get so many German visitors who expect to pay for parking with cash. And it just made me smile, because if you were to read that about a Chinese fishing village that gets a lot of tourists from another province, nobody would believe you -
because I haven't seen cash in the 3 weeks that I was there. So you paid, for example, the charging with WeChat or Alipay. How can I imagine that - was the UX the same for each charge point? Well, this is the thing: they have this crazy model where in WeChat there are these mini apps for everything. So the WeChat app is sort of a portal to the Chinese digital world, and as soon as you go to a new city, it takes
You know, when you take your first metro there, you sort of have to log in to the metro. But yeah, it is frictionless, you just have to say yes to their terms or whatever circumstances. And yeah, the same thing with the charging - usually you just scan it with WeChat and you get into this mini app of that provider, and that is the way that you pay. And then you don't
have the risk - you know, the QR code fraud was a big debate here in Europe. So I think, but of course I'm not Chinese, so that is one that we would need to research. The WeChat as a portal probably creates this situation where you're not scanning a QR code with your camera, which I'm used to in Europe. If I scan a QR code I use my camera. And
it could lead to any website, it could be anything. And the trick, I think, is that the WeChat app scans the QR code and will probably only send you to the parties that it knows. I would not be surprised to hear about somebody figuring out a way around that, but the thing is that
I haven't seen many Chinese websites - that's the thing. Everything is hidden behind these mega portals. I feel like there's hardly, I cannot even prove to you that Chinese websites do a lot. Clearly there will be many sites I don't know about, but I didn't see, you know - here in Europe we also maybe advertise websites less, but for me it's still completely normal to go
to a website when I want information. When I met people there, they never went to a website to show me anything. They went to WeChat, they went to the mini app of the car rental or whatever, and that is where they would show me stuff. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure if you know, but I also have some history with China, so the super app concept there is quite different to what we know in Europe. There's this mini
app for everything, which makes it quite convenient when you're there. So you don't have many MSPs like we know it, where you would download a separate app - you would only use the mini app. Yeah, it's sort of a world where we really know the app store as the center where we do those things, and I really feel like they don't. And talking EVs now, in terms of really the vehicles, if
you had to rank them from the best experiences you've had so far to the worst ones, maybe you can
share a few examples and stories.
When you talk about this, immediately I think of, for example, when I traveled to France five years ago with an Aiways, and that was one of the first times I could try a Chinese EV. They were very early to come to the Netherlands. The brand is called Aiways. They aren't even active anymore in China, so they just sell in Europe - I'm not sure how much right now, it's very difficult to find out what's actually going on. But anyway, I took
that car to France and, the way it charged - even the way that they put the CCS plug on the front of the car, sideways, so I had many struggles with CCS cables to actually get them in and I had to sit on the asphalt to even plug it in. It just shows you that, yeah, did anybody ever try this before they launched it? And it would have this
big eye looking at me, so I immediately put something on it and luckily it didn't complain. It pretended to be able to do CarPlay, but it couldn't. And I think that is also - I even tried other Chinese vehicles last year that were promising CarPlay but didn't have it. But this is where you see, yeah, they're moving very fast, so nowadays CarPlay is already normal. They actually can upgrade a lot of
things over the air, so you can see that they're improving the things that I complained about maybe just a year ago. And yeah, there's really this difference in that some of these companies are maybe just too small - like this Aiways company, I'm not aware that they have a very big parent company behind them. But in China, in Europe you might see a brand like Zeekr or even Polestar, and many people
will simply see that and have no idea - I was in Gothenburg the other month and there were Polestars everywhere. I think that many Swedes, and of course Polestar has a big office there, but when I see a Polestar I think of Geely because I'm interested in the industry. And I think that a company like that - when you walk around the average city in China, what you see driving around - like when I visited
Guangzhou in January, the normality of the Zeekr 001 - I know of two of those cars in Amsterdam. In Guangzhou, you can be at one traffic light and already see three, and the rest of the day this will continue. You can see thousands on a single day just walking the city. And you just realise that this car that here still looks new and is already pretty impressive for what it does at the price - over there, completely casual. They've already upgraded it three times. It charges
double the speed that it does here. They don't even sell the faster charging version here because nobody cares. The infrastructure isn't there anyway. It's already competitive with many German cars, so. Yeah, it's a bit crazy, and the luxury is also wild, because you can really see this complete difference in approach to screens. In China, even some cities in China feel like a screen because they're projecting stuff on these buildings, and I also wonder: what are you doing and
why. But that doesn't matter - it doesn't matter if it impresses me. The thing is that if you sit in a modern Chinese EV that costs a bit of money, then yeah, I've sat in one that had two 6K screens: one in the front for the driver and the passenger, and another 6K screen in the back. And I realized, sitting there watching some Chinese movie, that I don't have any friends who have a 6K screen at home. And in
China, I don't want to say that it's normal yet in cars to have several, but soon it will be. And obviously that doesn't matter to us - it won't suddenly create a screen obsession for Europeans who need 6K screens in their car. But for any Chinese person that will be normal, and they will not accept anything less. If we don't build that, they will never buy anything German anymore - not a chance. And these things matter because half of the German
exports were to China, and in 3 years, if you were to ask me, I would say zero is expected. My question was also related more to your experience with any type of EV, not necessarily only Chinese. So if you had to share what your top EV models are - I mean, I don't know how many EV models you have been driving, and never enough - but the one I will always mention is the Taycan, because it is still the nicest one I
have driven myself, just in the way that it gave this feeling of being connected to the road in an EV, which is completely unusual, because even today many EVs aren't built that way. And it just shows you that, yeah, I think they were right to go EV very early. Many people think nowadays - there's an article written - that they sort of went too early, and I think that's completely false. They were absolutely right to go early, and unfortunately
I'm not sure if they put in the right batteries and everything, but it was still - even though I now charge a Chinese vehicle as fast as a Taycan - that is 5 years later, so you can see that they really set a benchmark in 2020. It could charge at a peak rate of 270 kW and could hold it for a while, so it created this opportunity to charge close to 60 kWh in 15 minutes. So even
today that is still very impressive. And the new Taycan, which I have never driven, charges even faster. So that is just a very good product. But then again, you can really notice - I sat in one the other week because a friend of mine actually has one nowadays. They're - I'm not going to say affordable, but you can buy them secondhand at a very different price than they were new. And you notice that, yeah, if you
come from a recent EV, it does feel different - it feels more like a car. There are a lot of buttons. You sit really well, you sit really low, which is still very unusual in most EVs. But then again, it will always be a niche product for what it is, and I think that is where I wonder if they have the right approach with going Macan afterwards -
delayed - and I feel like the Cayenne is also delayed again. I would say those products already needed to be there. This Taycan drive that I enjoyed so much is so long ago that, on the one hand, I'm still so impressed by it and I forever will keep that experience. But what happened in the meantime? I was looking forward with some German friends to try the Boxster, and we did a road trip together to Glasgow actually, to
the Cup. It was 2021, and back then we all felt like the Boxster EV was coming, and we talked about our potential road trip together - as newly made friends - as our target. And here I'm sitting with you, 4 years after discussing that with some German guys, and we were all ready for that product years ago. Now it's been delayed to, I think, 2027. And you talked about Porsche, and one company that tries
to measure itself at the same level - which I find also particularly interesting - is Xiaomi, which is sort of doing what Apple didn't, and created the - for those that don't know, Xiaomi is this big smartphone and other electronics manufacturer, very successful, quite actually late in creating - I think in 2012 or so, not so long ago - but now being wildly hyped, maybe rightfully so. I would be curious to hear your opinion. So
just to put a few of the brands that are a lot on my mind in terms of shaping e-mobility: BYD of course, Xiaomi from China, you already touched upon Geely - maybe the three leading ones in China. And then in Europe we have the German automakers that are kind of very wary at the moment; they're trying, but not trying enough. I'd be curious to see this comparison and how it will develop in the upcoming
years in your view. Yeah, so that was one of the very cool things to be in China this year, because I was just so surprised - even because I visited both in January and in April - that I could see this difference. I already saw a lot of Xiaomis back in January. But then going again in April, they had just released the Ultra, I think a couple of weeks before I actually went, and walking around a city like Shenzhen, I could simply go around the city
and just see several Ultras driving around. Yeah, you can really notice that there's a serious crowd that is into getting the new thing. And yeah, I didn't drive it, so I just visited the showroom, but just seeing the crazy amount of shopping malls over there filled with stores selling phones and stuff. But the thing is that nowadays if you walk into these Huawei stores - that you didn't mention - or Xiaomi stores,
yeah, easily half of the store is lined up with - could be laptops, could be tablets, could be vacuum cleaners in the case of Xiaomi. And the other half of the store is suddenly packed with cars. So when I visited, the Ultra was taking center stage in April, and then around it would be the slower versions. But let's say that you and I would fly into Shenzhen tomorrow - it's still July when we
record this, so that's months after I just visited - and the Xiaomi store would already look like a new store to me again, because their new model would now be in the middle. And that's going to be crazy competitive to Model Y, no doubt. Forgot, of course - Tesla, to have your view on Tesla as well. Yeah, very interesting one to keep an eye on. And what you see is just that this approach - that a company like Xiaomi should
be compared to things like Apple because they offer an ecosystem - and that, yeah, if you're like a 30-year-old in China with some decent job, then probably you could have a house full of Xiaomi stuff doing your lights, doing your vacuuming, doing all kinds of things around the house, and automate them. And now your car gets integrated into this. And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if they would also do home batteries and
stuff at some point. But yeah, a company like BYD is probably a better example of that, because they already have that value chain built in. But yeah, you can really see that there's just this full set of offering, and the car is just a new part of their bigger puzzle. And it just shows you that people can go around and they will sort of never leave such a place, so they will always look at the Xiaomi system
next. And I wanted to buy a walkie-talkie there, but I couldn't, because they needed them - they had a lot of walkie-talkies around, but they needed them as demos for this car shop. And it also showed me that I thought I was in a shopping mall because people went shopping there, but actually people shop on their phones. So even though the Xiaomi car is in front of you, most people will buy them on their phone. And that is really, I think, where Tesla comes
in - in that they're still one of the very few where you can simply go to the website right now and get yourself a Tesla on your phone as we sit here. You could do the purchase before we end this podcast. And that company has been doing that for over a decade, and it really makes me wonder that there are very few companies who actually simply copy that model to do the same - nothing else, not better, simply the same -
to be a competitor to Tesla. And I think that is really where the Germans shine in absolutely missing the point, because they don't offer this - like even just a German configurator of a car. Clearly I get that some people want a very personalized experience, so there will always be a space for that. But the simplicity of buying a Tesla is a selling point, and I think Xiaomi copies that in a big way, because I just went on their website in the store there. And it was just
very easy to click around and get an SU 7. And now we could do the same with the YU 7. Before you buy, you see the waiting time for your product, so you can decide on upgrading to get a faster one, because it will be there in 30 weeks instead of in 50 weeks. And this is the same trick that Tesla has been playing - they can just release a new product, they will give you the fast one, and later
there will be an even faster model and boom, there will be a new hype cycle around that. And yeah, I think that is really - yeah, it just shows you that also the Americans - because let's not focus on the Germans only - the Americans, excluding Tesla, have also missed that point completely. They live in their dealer model bubble so deeply that they think that is the only way, and with EVs that will never be true. So you
need to get out of it, and if you don't find a way then you will get stuck. And that is such a risk that I feel - that Europe as a whole is just in this place where yeah, I think we are doing some things better than the Americans for example, but we're also really missing, yeah, seeing what we could do at the same time. And yeah, with Tesla it is just fascinating that - here is a product that
I guess, yeah, they always stood for simplicity. Their software is super well polished. On that level, I think there's very little competition even today. But yeah, you can see that where once they offered faster charging than most, if you go to China today, almost any brand - even some brands that would be almost regarded as budget - they would be very competitive to the Tesla experience. So luckily for Tesla, they are still very efficient and hardly anybody beats them at this, maybe the
Germans. But then in China, when you look at what charging costs, for example, how many people will be very interested in efficiency. So I think that is also the element where Europe can really focus on that, because we are good at it and we can choose to stay good at it. So I'm very happy to see a brand like Mercedes really focusing on such a thing. But at the same time, how did we make it
to the summer of 2025 and I'm not seeing the CLA anywhere? I know you can buy it. I don't know when you will get it if you did, but I'm not seeing that. I just want to see them in the streets - when we would travel somewhere, we would see this car. And let's also go into this point where it freaks me out that in America - if you look at America from the global perspective, I
think nobody is utterly failing at EVs as bad as America. Yet they have Lucid, they have Rivian. There's another company coming with another BEV truck, and they wanted to use the subsidies that are already canceled and whatever. But where is the European Rivian? Where is the European Lucid? Well, European Lucid, some people might say Rimac, but I say there's no scale. You're just not comparing it. I want these things to be true, yeah,
yeah, the solar car, yeah. And that's, I think, even more painful. Some people tried these things and they really deserved a lot of support. They didn't get it. And yeah, it just shows you that Xiaomi is really succeeding and is at the very beginning of something that can be so big, no European will ever believe it. That shows you things that are about to come to us, and there's no way for us to stop them. We have to be better. Who's
going to do it? Yeah, just BYD - because it's the number one. Do you see it as staying number one, or have you driven one? BYD is a funny one because they do so much. You can go to California and drive a school bus there with some kids and it could be a BYD school bus in Los Angeles. That really surprises me. You can run into them anywhere. I've been in the weirdest cities where I suddenly saw a
BYD bus and I could not believe my eyes. And then at the same time, when I sit in some of their cars - if you sometimes use a Tesla and then you get to the Atto 3 interface, well, they don't compete. Yet the Atto 3 in the Netherlands costs €38,000 and the Model 3 in the Netherlands costs €40,000, so there's €2,000 between those. But yeah, when talking BYD, they're so colossal that I really feel that
the only sort of comparison that I dare to make is to the VW Group, and there you can already see that some things are really mismatched, because clearly VW Group doesn't have the battery potential that they do. And I'm not aware how VW is into buses. But anyway, they have this classical approach where they would operate a normal dealership, and that gives them also this edge where they will operate, I think, a competitive amount
of dealerships to most European brands, probably by the end of next year in Europe. And those dealerships will sell cars, and that means that those people will not buy a European car. I think many people will like what they buy because, in the Netherlands now and similarly in Denmark, for example, but even in France, on the highway I see these Seal U cars everywhere. And in the Netherlands, more than half of them this year have been
petrol cars with a battery plug-in. And it really shows you that the European Commission - at least that's what they say - thought that these electric cars from China are sort of a risk to European automakers or whatever, and we needed more time. So they introduced tariffs on the electric cars. What the European Commission did, in my opinion, is they made the plug-ins even more attractive for the Chinese to sell, and they can make way more money
doing it. And there's a very large crowd in Europe totally not ready to go EV, because in your local neighbourhood charging will probably be either unknown to you, expensive, or you're just not interested - I could go on, the list goes on forever. So this is a bit hilarious, because even some of the companies that I was a big fan of in the past in China are all going into EREVs, because the thing is that even in China, first of all, many people can afford to
still buy petrol. And also can afford to just not care, not want to care about charging, because you will need to figure things out with an app. You will need to figure out where the charger is, even if it's around the block from your house. If you're used to going to the gas station, maybe you just don't mind. So the thing is, you see that a lot of companies that used to sell BEV only in China are going to
Also sell EVs. Xiaomi is one of them, because there will be a huge crowd for it, and it just shows you that, yeah, that is even more danger to us, I feel, because it just shows you these cars are just so competitive that for us to stay competitive as Europe, it is going to be so challenging. I think half the people here just don't want to know, but that is really not that interesting. And switching gears - but also a good segue.
BYD announced with Octopus Energy in the UK a big V2G program that they just launched, and it got me quite excited about this. For the listeners, it's like a £300 package, I think, with leasing a car, and then you get driving for free if you adhere to the V2G conditions of Octopus Energy. What do you make of that particular announcement, and in general, as an EV driver, what's your take on V2G and what would be your ideal
smart charging V2G package, so to say, in your day to day? Yeah, that UK package is super interesting, and it really shows you that here we have an agile energy player in the UK that is taking over half the market and becoming a real UK colossus. And you can see that a company like BYD comes in - and that could have been a Tesla deal, you know, they have a Powerwall. They started selling it in way more countries over the last weeks in
Europe than ever before. I think they feel the threat, and it shows you that BYD just comes in there. They have more models to offer, they have batteries to go around, and they will just sell you this stuff - and they can subsidize if they want, whatever. And it's just, in the UK I think these things make so much sense, because - we talked about this already - the public charging is a bit hit and miss, definitely pricing wise. And as far as I'm aware,
the numbers in the UK are like 50% of people can park in their own driveway. And yeah, that is an amount that in most European countries we don't get close to, so the market potential there for home charging and home batteries is crazy big. There's just such a big potential customer group, and yeah, these incentives to get a good monthly price and then even good energy rates - you will just plug it in when you get home anyway, and the
app takes care of it. They know your vehicle, they know your energy rhythm, so yeah, these things are like a no-brainer. The mathematics add up three times over. It's just so absurd. And I think that is also the part of - yeah, many car companies will not go to that stage where they sort of really - like, they sort of will become a part-time energy company, or at least they could have been. And I think this potential, yeah,
for a company like BYD is natural because they come from the battery side of things, but that is just, yeah, completely unusual of course in the industry. And yeah, I would expect such offers coming to any European country that has an Octopus-like player - could happen yesterday. I think the potential is huge. The company - I'm so used to a country like the Netherlands that I'm always focused on the public charging side. So in the Netherlands it's
so unusual - for a huge group of people it's highly unusual that you park in front of your own house, like on your own property. That's not the norm. Clearly there are a lot of properties where people own cars and it's very different, but yeah, as soon as you get close to Amsterdam this will become completely unusual. And there's a million people there, which is already close to 10% of the country anyway, so we have to do things publicly.
And that is why I'm super eager to see public charging testing going to a stage where every charger cooperates, way more apps support this, and mainly, really, this incentive for me to plug in at the right time - or know when I should - because that is really where I think right now we're just missing out so much. People are unaware. Like, how many people in Europe even know the kWh price at their house? I feel like that is just not
- clearly, thanks to things happening in the east, this has changed a bit, so some people clearly found out. But yeah, it's still just - I think, and that is also where I just wonder if the EU is just alert enough to understand that, yeah, kWh education - we should get it in school. It's just basic. And if you had to - maybe you have thought about it - but if you had to
imagine what would be the ideal future V2G case. I've put some thought into it, obviously, and what we think is that the user should have a seamless experience in the sense of not having too much manual input. Somehow the app should learn from past behavior, or from integrations within your calendar or other types of data points that are useful to understand the user's preferences, so that you just have to plug in and it
- probably the app would learn when you would like to plug in and when you would like to leave again and use the vehicle, so that the mobility needs are, more and more with time, learned. And then it just automatically schedules the charging so that you are able to drive the next kilometer range that you need. If there's an exception you might be able to specify it, but that should be the exception rather than the
rule, and then you minimize your cost as much as you can, even maybe as far to zero, as in the Octopus case in the UK, for a public charger. But for private, or for a public charger - is that so... how would you, have you put some thought into, or what would you think, what would be the ideal case in the hopefully very upcoming future? Yeah, well, I think that definitely the automation part of
things is just so important, because clearly there will just not be this acceptance that people don't want to be pushing buttons all day, plugging in at the right time - these things don't make any sense. But if you can remotely start things, and if they just happen because the system knows that it's the right thing to do - or the reward you simply set, that you want to be rewarded and the system will be more aggressive about it - you can live
with it because you're flexible enough. Clearly people live different lives, so there should be different settings. But I wonder a lot about how we can make such things work in public, because really, when I look at a city like where I live in Amsterdam, I actively - yeah, I have this curious mind where I just wonder: OK, we have been growing the charging network a lot, but still, the fleet, even though the Amsterdam fleet is very electrified,
there's still a lot of old cars around. And yeah, how would it actually look to sort of go full - like if everybody had an EV? We would simply need many more plugs in public places to make a V2G case work, and it would be so easy to see how it could work, because I think it would make total sense. You create more flex if more people can plug in, you have more flexibility. So ideally you want that, but do
you actually want to see this city full of chargers? That is a very dubious one. So I always wonder how that could actually look, and I think that you see in the neighborhoods that are more recently built what happens in a place like Amsterdam - and I guess the same here - is that way more cars are actually put under buildings, etc. And I think as soon as you have a big garage and stuff, to have
a battery there, plugs everywhere - literally a garage. If you build a garage today and you don't put in the wiring for these kinds of models, then I think you're just - yeah, either you don't want to join where we're going, or the incentives are maybe just wrong in your market. But I think this is really where the EU has to be signaling and really push these member states, because if these things are happening in
Denmark, they will never build a new garage without plugs. And in Sweden, I've been to parking garages where the whole deck has chargers. I hardly see that in the Netherlands, but in Sweden it's quite common. And you see that they are also smart about it, because these chargers aren't fast, but it doesn't matter - these cars just stay there, they just plug in, they charge slowly, it's affordable. In these scenarios, that's exactly
what you want. But the idea - I want to see those things around the EU, and ideally just globally. But you can see that it's going at very different speeds around Europe, and I think that's a risk we shouldn't be taking. Because the thing is, people say that China moves so fast because they don't have the oil. Well, we don't have the oil either, so why aren't we moving as
fast, or faster? We can move faster - nothing is stopping us. All right, yeah, with that sentence, maybe you have a last message you would like to leave listeners with. Well, mainly to just try driving electric. Maybe you don't own an EV, but take my advice: rent one for the weekend, for the day, try a shared car, because the chances are just so very low that you won't enjoy it, that yeah, you should. Felix, thank
you, and keep it up. I think you're doing a great job.
Wow, what an episode with Felix - Electric Felix - who is clearly passionate about the industry and has shown us in so many ways his expertise and his experiences. The most fascinating ones for me are the Netherlands, the geographical differences between the different countries, the incentives clearly being key for an effective transition to EVs, and incentivizing people with tax breaks, for example, having enough charge points everywhere, having the Chinese with very cheap electric vehicles, but also down to 10 cents per kWh type of pricing. There's also
the Xiaomi and other types of software dominance, and experiences from Tesla as well, and how to purchase cars and how to pay for electric charging - that needs to definitely be the case to motivate people to make the transition. His personal story was also quite fun, and understanding his why with the electric motorbikes, and also his experiences in most EU countries and comparing them with Germany, unfortunately having yet to deliver better results, but I'm sure we will do better. And his view on
smart charging, his experiences as he tested the Amsterdam pilot - and there as well, having to combine spot market-based charging as well as DSO grid congestion will make it very smart - or the V2G case, which shouldn't be limited only to Renault 5s in Utrecht. There's still a way to go, but it's already a start. Yeah, I think it was a great episode. I hope you liked it. Feel free to share and tune in next time.
节目笔记
What makes EV uptake soar in one country and stall in another? Electric Felix (Felix Hamer) joins us to explain how policy, pricing and technology shape adoption from Amsterdam to Shenzhen. He walks us through his wide-ranging practical EV experience starting with electric motorbikes, compares tax breaks and charging-point density across EU markets, and reveals China’s advantage with ten-cent-per-kWh rates. Highlights include: - Lessons from Amsterdam’s smart-charging pilot: spot-market pricing, DSO grid management and smart-charging strategies - How Xiaomi and Tesla user interfaces influence payment models and customer experience - The road ahead for vehicle-to-grid beyond Utrecht’s Renault 5 trial Join us for a concise tour of the incentives, pilots and platforms driving Europe’s EV future.