Issam Tidjani, Co‑Founder & CEO of Cariqa
Direct Payments for EV Charging, the End of Price Chaos and Where Smart Charging Fits In
文字记录
由机器转录整理而成。译文为机器翻译,可能存在错误。
欢迎来到由RiDERgy推出的Smart Charge播客。我是RiDERgy的创始人兼首席执行官Claudio Geyken。这是您的节目,让您了解电动汽车和车队能源管理以及智能充电创新的所有内容。欧洲的公共充电基础设施是一场分割的噩梦。有3000多个运营商,每个都有自己的关税,电动汽车驾驶员在同一个快速充电器上支付两倍的费用,取决于他们使用哪张充电卡或应用程序。Karia的联合创始人兼首席执行官Issam了解这两方面的情况。
他在eBay学会了如何扩展市场,在Here Technologies看到汽车制造商如何拼命寻找充电解决方案,然后亲身体验了在Tesla网络外充电有多令人沮丧。在2021年,他与两位前同事一起冒了这个险。今天,Karia是一个14人的团队,打破了转销商链。充电点运营商保持记录商身份,直接设定自己的价格,该平台不收取入网费、不收月度订阅费,只从带来需求的人那里获得收入分享。有一个数字特别突出。
平均而言,充电点运营商的充电器使用率仅为8%到10%,但盈亏平衡点在20%以上。充电点运营商超过50%的成本与电价无关。Issam解释了为什么动态按充电、按小时定价是杠杆,为什么只有当总体拥有成本优势达到10%到20%时市场才会大规模转变,以及为什么他认为到2035年公共充电将占所有充电能量的50%。让我们开始充电吧。你好Issam,很高兴你今天来。你好吗?
嗨,谢谢邀请。我很好,刚从一种夏休回来,在海滩呆了几天很不错。是的,作为企业家,我们也需要放松一下。日常工作相当令人不安,或者至少我们尽力了,但每个人都尽力了。很好。是的,我之前听说你至少需要每天检查一次,以确保事情进展顺利。我可以确认我们也是一样。我很难完全放手。那么在我们进入Karia和围绕电动出行的话题之前,为了了解我们在和谁交谈,我总是想知道嘉宾的背景。
也许你可以告诉我们你来自哪里,以及在Karia之前你做了什么。当然。在Karia我是联合创始人兼首席执行官,但我的背景是在大型科技组织工作了大部分职业生涯。我在2006年开始在eBay的消费者市场部门开始职业生涯,当时正处于其高速增长阶段。然后我开始转变,仍然在B2C领域但更多从事消费电子产品,与诺基亚和微软合作,然后慢慢开始向B2B世界转变。
首先我们在Packet Enterprise做到了这一点,对物联网、边缘计算和云有了很好的理解,这很有趣,因为它给你一个很好的视角来理解。
公共充电基础设施最终是什么。在创立Karia之前的最后一站,也是我碰巧遇到我两位联合创始人Stefan和Tamara的地方,是Here Technologies,这是一家由大型德国汽车制造商和其他大型公司拥有的公司。这是一家地图和位置公司,我们开始在那里看到电动出行的转变。
这对于需要向客户提供充电服务、允许客户完成成功的长途旅行而不会过度压力以及如何找到充电站的汽车制造商来说是一个挑战。这也是我们自己开始驾驶电动汽车的时候,所以我们看到了这个差距并决定采取行动。那是哪一年?我们说的是2021年、2022年。好的。你对技术的兴趣是什么,或者你是如何踏上这段旅程的?你是一个早期的科技极客小孩,还是什么驱动力,可以说?
是的,我一直对技术感兴趣。我想很多与我父亲有关。我父亲曾为Olivetti工作,那是八十年代的意大利苹果公司。所以我一开始就记得家里有个人电脑。我想当我大约4岁时,家里已经有了一台个人电脑,我很快就明白了如何把它们拆开然后重新组装。我是互联网的早期用户。我想我第一次看到互联网时,全球用户少于。
一百万,1994年我真的被它迷住了。对我来说,你可以访问超越本地硬盘上内容的信息真的很吸引人,这引发了那种兴趣和热情,使我从早期就决定从事技术职业。后来在某个时刻,有一个问题:我是想获得计算机科学学位还是经济学学位?
我最终选择了经济学,因为我认为我可以把更多的技术部分作为爱好保留,括号内说,但对我来说,从金钱的角度了解事物的工作原理也很有趣。有道理。你在这些大型公司,特别是美国公司中担任的不同角色,你有什么类型的项目或职责?我一直都坐在市场营销和产品之间,例如在eBay我们是谷歌最大的客户。
我们每年在谷歌广告上投入数亿美元。但那时没有Martech,什么都没有。一切都是手动的,谷歌有一个API,所以最终公司决定启动一个大型项目,允许我们将广告堆栈连接到内部分析,并开始进行一些复杂的竞价,实际上使用数据来实时优化广告支出以最大化投资回报率。这是一个非常复杂的工作,因为涉及很多资金。
我们在多个国家运营,基本上涵盖你能想到的每一个类别,因此我们必须管理数百万个关键词的投资组合并相应地分配预算。你根本不可能手动做到这一点,所以。
然后它有所进展,因为当诺基亚和微软开始时,我们处于数字变得越来越重要的过渡时代,但人们仍然会离线购买手机或硬件,因为他们想看到它,想询问销售人员。所以对我们来说,挑战是:我们如何将数字信号与零售店内表现相匹配,不仅要建立依赖于关联的模型,还要尝试找到事件的因果关系。
我的职业生涯就这样继续了,我有点像是营销和驱动需求之间的桥梁,但同时也在另一方面,产品需要做什么来满足这些需求。那对创始人的旅程来说是一个很好的基础。是的,我会这么说。在这个过程中,你是否发现了围绕交通出行的特别有趣的项目,也许值得强调一下?
嗯,当我在那里的时候,我们开始从电动汽车充电点获得第一批数据,他们获取了站点的兴趣点,这样我们就可以在地图上标记它们,告诉人们他们可以在哪里充电。但这真的是开始阶段,关于电动汽车路线规划有很多讨论,这不是最简单的事情,因为……
这不像一般的汽油车路线规划,你不用担心油耗。你需要知道:这是最快的路线到达那里,你大约会在这个时间到达,这样还不错,但路线计算中不涉及油耗。而电动汽车路线规划要复杂得多,因为温度有影响,道路倾斜度有影响,路面粗糙度有影响,风向有影响,汽车本身,每辆车的表现都不同。然后每辆车的充电方式也不同。
每辆车的峰值功率不同,每辆车的充电曲线不同,你需要考虑所有这些变量,我只是列举了几个,然后计算一条路线,它会有效地告诉你:你会在这个时间到达,为了让你的旅程高效,你需要在这里和这里停下来充电。哇,有很多关联。那么这也是Karia的动力所在吗?或者你是如何最终决定Karia值得追求的?我是说,就像任何事情一样,这是多方面因素的组合,对吧?
如我之前提到的,我开始自己驾驶电动汽车,我对看到的情况并不是特别印象深刻。只是出于好奇,那是什么车?我认为那是特斯拉 Model Y。如果你想走出特斯拉网络之外,那就不可行,或者至少不像这样容易:你买一辆特斯拉,你插入超级充电站,然后你就可以了。
人们觉得这很神奇,但一旦你需要不同的充电器,情况就会迅速改变。那有点像这样,你可以看到当时市场在,现在仍然在,诚实地说,它还处于婴幼期。你可以看到从商业角度来说,特别是汽车制造商有越来越多的需求,因为他们真的需要把电动汽车推上路。这些在当时是一个非常、非常热门的话题。
你可以看到挑战是真实的,在某个时刻,我觉得那是当你找到那个东西的时候,你感到时机合适,机会是巨大的,你对它有一些了解的时候。
它给了你目标感,因为最终我有两个小孩,我希望他们有幸不用走在街上违背自己的意愿地吸入从排气管里出来的各种东西。所以这有点是所有因素的结合,然后在某个时刻,它需要一点勇气来做出跳跃,离开一份舒适的企业工作,去做一个完全理性的选择,即创办一家公司。但最终就是这样发生的。
那最初的设置是什么?你已经有联合创始人了吗?从一开始就是你们三个人,我认为那是创始团队,从那时起这个想法如何改变了?不,我单独开始了几个月,只是为了把一切整理好,给公司一些初步的形状,但很快之后,Stefano和Tamara加入了,这就是核心创始团队是如何开始的。
说实话,一开始的想法更多是修复整个事情的用户体验部分,这也不是特别好。但对于每一个初创公司来说,你开始的初创公司不是你最后得到的初创公司,这是一个旅程,你需要。
你需要做一些实验,收集一些失败,以及越过一些认识,最终得出真正重要的东西。对我们来说,我们充当传统电动出行提供商的角色,我们从充电点运营商那里购买能源,然后以特定的方式将其转售给电动汽车驾驶员,因为我们会说:
以电信风格每月支付给我们一定的费用,你得到一定的能源,然后你不用担心在哪里消耗这些能源。所以这是一个纯粹的订阅模式,我们不是第一个这样做的。我们对这个模式有相对不错的成功,但最终我们意识到行业中存在一个更深层的问题,实际上我们在帮助创造这个问题。这听起来很有趣,这就是在某个时刻我们。
决定好好照照镜子,问自己:尽管也许数字在上升,我们真的在正确的方向上吗?我们真的在制造长期有意义的东西吗?这是当我们与价值链两端的客户交谈时,所以与电动汽车驾驶员和充电点运营商交谈,我们意识到我们解决的不完全是正确的问题。这就是我们意识到市场开始进入新阶段的地方,因为直到现实中的2024年。
以2023年为例,充电站运营商的游戏名字就是:部署、部署、部署,抢占好位置,抢占电网基础设施。所以这是一场土地争夺战。而且电动车采用的轨迹可能被激励措施和新冠疫情引发的供应短缺拖累了一点。
因此,每个人都开始按照那条曲线来建设,当然,我们都知道2024年发生了什么,当时联邦政府决定一夜之间关闭政府激励措施。我们看到了发生了什么,我们也看到了当电动车的残值完全崩盘时发生了什么,因此电动车的吸引力有所减弱。
幸运的是,这是一个暂时的放缓,而不是持续的放缓。但这就是充电站运营商突然意识到的地方:好吧,我们地面上有很多产能。在某个时刻,基础设施部署的增长速度超过了电动车的采用速度,因此你有更多的充电器却更少的电动车。这也是因为整个后疫情通胀飙升,加上利率上升,这是为了遏制通胀。
廉价资本不再可得,突然之间,这些资本密集型公司需要数亿美元来部署和运营这些基础设施,这些公司在某个时刻不得不面对现实,即现在是时候让这些基础设施赚钱了。这就是你需要问自己的问题:好吧,作为充电站运营商,一旦你选定了位置,你还能做什么呢?所以这是一个房地产业务,位置很重要,但这是一次性的。
你不能只是说:哎呀,我们搞错了,让我们把所有东西都移到别的地方。我是说你可以,但成本高得惊人。因此,你需要尝试弄清楚你还能做什么。最终,利用率成为了游戏的名字。尽管有时候人们不想承认这一点,但大多数研究表明,价格总是排在前两位,是决定是否前往一个地点充电的关键因素之一。
这就是问题的症结所在,因为到目前为止,许多运营商一直在以B2B的方式运营,他们将能源转售给电动出行提供商,然后这个电动出行提供商会向下游的电动车驾驶员出售。这种模式的问题在于,作为充电站运营商,你突然成为了乘客。为什么是乘客呢?因为作为转售商,电动出行提供商拥有定价权。他们可以决定在充电站运营商提供的批发价格基础上增加多少利润,然后向下游出售。
问题在于这个市场已经被证明是极具弹性的,因此即使在每度电上增加几分钱也可能对利用率造成巨大影响。这就是你开始看到这种模式局限的地方,因为如果你无法控制自己的商业策略。
在规模上,这意味着超越你在充电站用支付终端能做的,或你在自己的应用程序中能做的,这需要投入大量精力和营销资金才能启动,而不是所有充电站运营商都能负担得起,因为他们要么没有资本,要么没有足够的已安装基础设施来证明用户下载又一个应用程序的合理性,突然之间你就看到问题所在了。对于80%、90%的需求,你都是乘客。而且这是一个双重陷阱,因为一方面你被定价高于。
另一方面,在这些出行提供商代表你的大部分需求的时刻,也存在利润抽取的风险,因为那时出行提供商可以来找你说,好吧,现在我代表你20%的流量,我想要30%的折扣,那你此时还有什么选择呢?有道理。所以总结一下,或者说找到问题的核心:你认为出行服务提供商可能会被取代,如果充电站运营商能够直接向电动车驾驶员设定价格,市场会更高效,对吧?
嗯,在某种意义上,可能需要被替代的不是这个参与者本身,更多的是底层商业模式,因为这正是我们做得不同的地方,对吧?这些出行提供商的诞生是因为需要便利,因为在欧洲有3000多个充电站运营商,可能现在更多了,因为我一年前一直在使用3000这个数字。我想现在这个数字已经增长了。
因此,对于终端用户来说,没有一个聚合层来整合基础设施是非常不切实际的。漫游枢纽将永远是必需的,这没有讨论的余地。但随后的问题是:你如何提供这层聚合呢?因为从历史上看,曾经有人试图模仿两件事,灵感来自两个行业。一个是燃油车,另一个是电信业务,不知何故,业界决定采取两者的糟糕特征。好的,详细说明一下。
所以最终,你有很多不透明度和刚性,这些是早期两种模式所固有的,而且,正如我所说的,我重申一遍,这是一个极其年轻的行业。我认为你甚至可以从数字上看,欧洲电动或插电式混合动力汽车作为总已安装汽车基数的百分比,这个数字根据国家的不同在3%到5%之间波动。
所以你可以看到,你不能期望这是一个成熟的市场,其中95%的客户充其量还没有进入市场。我会说,市场需要一些东西,需要一些起作用的、简单的东西,因此你寻找具体的参考框架,然后采用了它们。然后,当然,你还没有经历过有时候是监管、有时候只是市场自我调整的那些周期,这就是为什么我说当前模式中仍然存在很多缺点。
但这正是问题所在,对吧,转售商链条是唯一允许这种聚合层的模式吗?答案确实是否定的,因为还有很多其他行业存在相同的问题,而且已经通过平台模式解决了。这意味着你不会从基础设施提供商手中夺走商家身份,所以CPO可以保持卖家身份,可以自由独立地向最终客户销售他们的基础设施,中间没有人干扰。你可以做到这一点,而不需要,
,让最终客户失去在一个地方访问所有内容的便利。这正是我们所做的,这正是我们做得不同的地方:对最终客户来说,什么都没有改变。你去了,你在地图上找到你所在地的所有充电站,你可以像使用普通充电应用一样开始充电,这没有改变,也不应该改变。但同时,基础业务模式和经济学完全不同。其他行业有类似的运营方式吗,比如运营商模式?也许你从他们那里获得了灵感?
嗯,我来自市场平台领域,对吧?我在eBay工作过。eBay的运作方式正是这样的。如果你看看亚马逊,亚马逊有双重角色,你可以从亚马逊购买,但亚马逊也有一个市场,价格由卖家决定。打车应用也是这样,酒店行业也是这样。酒店行业是随着在线旅行社的兴起而诞生的,你可以想象Expedia这样的公司,他们会从酒店或航空公司购买容量,然后以他们想要的价格向下游销售。
但你可以清楚地看到,这种模式现在已经随着Booking.com的兴起而过时了,酒店以合适的价格推广其物业,这就是行业的运作方式。所以如我所说,我们在这里并没有重新发明轮子。我们正在采用已被证明对极度分散的行业更好的成熟商业模式,并使其适用于电动汽车充电行业。明白了。那么你是在什么时刻意识到旧商业模式存在问题的呢?
是通过与客户交谈,与双方的客户交谈。因为我们还没有讨论过电动汽车驾驶员,但对电动汽车驾驶员本身来说这也不容易。如果你想想,我们喜欢这样做平行比较:公共充电行业今天的定价方式,就相当于你今天走进当地超市想要买一公斤橙子。
货架上没有价签,你拿了一公斤橙子去付款,然后在收银台收银员会问你,好的,你打算怎么付款?根据你的回答,可能是:我有N26的Mastercard,我有Revolut的Visa,我有德意志银行的Mastercard,我想付现金,这无关紧要。然后根据你的回答,你支付的价格可能是1.5倍、2倍。那么你会怎么想?不太好。它会造成焦虑,对吧?
然而这正是公共充电市场今天的运作方式。对于同一个充电站、同一地点、相同的服务、所有条件相同的情况,根据你的充电提供商是谁,你可能要付50种不同的价格。如果你不小心,这个价格可能很容易翻倍。所以在Carria上,价格是预先透明的;基本上一公斤橙子就是一个价格。
我们有这样的理念,认为基础价格对所有人都应该相同,你不应该因为选择充电方式而被惩罚,这在某种程度上与欧洲监管机构在AFIR中一直试图做的事情保持一致,他们试图制定一些相当严格的反歧视规则,声明任何价格差异都必须有正当理由。监管已经解决问题了吗?根本没有。它会吗?拭目以待。法规的修订将在今年晚些时候出台。
我们将看欧盟委员会决定对此做什么,但很明显,问题从卖家总是运营基础设施的那一刻就解决了,而不是中间有其他人。而漫游平台,你已经提到过了,如果平台本身由Carria提供,漫游平台的角色是什么?好的,我们需要区分电动汽车充电协议的连接性和商业交易发生方式的基础业务模式,对吧?
所以这是两条独立的轨道。漫游中心在提供连接性方面做得很好,我认为它们会继续存在,因为有时与所有人进行一对一的连接没有意义。我想可以说,尽管电动汽车充电协议是标准的,在标准下运行,但那里有很多方言,与所有人进行直接连接给各公司的技术团队造成了压力。
有时一个漫游中心将这种复杂性抽象到一个地方就很有意义了。但当你说各方之间的连接时,如果只有CPO和电动汽车驾驶员,你需要有一个聚合层。这就是我说EMSP角色不会消失的原因。在电动汽车充电连接协议的架构中,我们自己充当移动服务提供商。这就是我说我们需要进行区分的原因
连接性的建立方式,以及你如何以一致的方式访问整个欧洲的充电基础设施,和下面的资金流以及下面的计费方式,这是一个完全独立的话题。你需要分离这两个层次,两者对于充电会话的发生、定价和计费都是必需的。但这两件事今天没有结合在一起;它们是两个完全独立协议的组成部分。一方面你有闭环电动汽车充电协议,如OCPI或OICP。
另一方面,你有开放式支付,比如万事达卡或维萨卡,以及与之相关的所有账单、发票和会计流程。所以对我来说,漫游中心将继续存在,它们是必需的,它们是有用的,我认为它们不会消失。所以对于这两个层面,我们需要漫游中心和像Carria这样的平台,这些平台也有EMSP角色,可能会有比今天更多的平台,但不一定是我们今天所知道的MSP。
我的看法是,作为转售商的EMSP由于多种原因,我认为不是一个能够长期持续的商业模式。主要是因为利润空间会越来越小。为了完成一个充电会话而进行两次财务交易意义不大,一次是CPO向EMSP的发票,然后是EMSP向最终客户的所有发票。为什么不只做一次呢?这样更简单,更快。另一方面,目前市场仍然相对较小,所以
交易量从信用风险角度来看仍然是可管理的。当这些交易量开始达到数千万甚至数亿级别时,如果不是每月的话,作为EMSP你可能会有来自CPO的数千万份发票,这让CPO
在信用风险方面处于一个非常不利的位置,因为如果EMSP在那个月破产,你已经提供的数千万值的能源,你需要为此支付给电网提供商、电力供应商的账单,没有保证你会看到那笔钱,因为你是无担保债权人。我相信在某个时刻金融监管机构也会开始仔细查看这个行业,因为现在还比较容易管理,但是
我认为这种情况不会永远持续下去。是否有其他角色,这是一个相当颠覆性的观点,让人们审视这个行业并完全重新思考它也很酷,我们在电动出行行业迄今所知的另一种角色或运营方式,你认为在未来可能会有所不同吗?嗯,这是个好问题。我需要更仔细地思考一下,但我感觉总的来说,我们知道有很多关于接下来会发生什么的讨论。所以,假设。
如果充电协议有效,支付流程有效,可靠性达到一个点,错误率从今天的约14%下降到百分之零点几的范围,我们现在有一个情况,法律规定ISO 15118是新安装充电站的强制性要求,它支持即插即充和V2G。当然,这开启了新可能性的领域,在身份验证方面,所以即插即充变得更容易接近和普及,这应该会让最终客户更容易,但随后有一整套关于如何的讨论。
电动汽车充电成为能源市场的更活跃参与者,我们如何能够帮助提高整体电网稳定性,我们如何能够避免部署过多固定电池,因为我们有很多不在移动80%时间的千瓦时,我们如何能够让它们对稳定电网、稳定全天电价做出贡献,因为有趣的是有时候汽车未使用的时间和能源需求最大的时间有一点。
很好的匹配。所以我猜这将是下一个大话题,电动汽车充电如何将以更集成的方式成为整体能源生态系统的一部分。是的,我们会谈到这个,如你所知这个播客叫做Smart Charge by RiDERgy。所以我肯定迫不及待地想深入探讨这个。但在我们这样做之前,为了全面了解Carria,你能分享一下公司目前的规模吗?
我们增长得相当不错。我们是一家获得风险投资支持的初创公司,所以我们按里程碑运营。迄今为止,我们在种子前融资和种子融资轮中筹集了大约500万美元。我们是一个小团队,我们想尽可能长时间地保持小团队。目前我们是14人团队,分布在德国、英国和乌克兰,所以我们是一个相当多样化的团队。我们想保持小规模的原因是它给了你敏捷性。
当然这意味着有很多事情要做,如果某些事情没有完成也没人来救援,但同时我觉得有一个小的、精悍的团队能够真正快速应对市场需求或客户需求并将它们结合在一起,这是有意义的。我们在招聘人员时非常挑剔,我们想确保我们有一个非常团结的团队,具有多样化的观点和多样化的技能集。
但总的来说,我们想尽可能长时间地保持尽可能小的规模,直到我们精疲力尽。你们总部在柏林这里,对吧?总部在柏林,目前的运营,是只在德国,还是你们已经在其他市场运营或想要运营?从历史上看,我们一直在德国和奥地利运营。这些是我们的核心市场。我们最近在几周前开放了意大利。
由于团队成员大多是意大利人,我猜这只是时间问题。对我们来说也是测试不同市场的好方法,这个市场有不同的成熟度阶段和不同的电动汽车市场渗透率,以便在我们开始泛欧洲扩展之前了解是否需要意识到任何差异。计划是在年底前实现泛欧洲扩展,我们在现在和那时之间有一些相当不错的公告在管道中。
平台本身在全球是可扩展的,如果我们愿意,我们明天就可以去美国,但这变成了一个专注的问题。这就是为什么我们在说我们想要开始在德国和奥地利运营平台、学习、并确保我们有一个极其稳健的时候是相当谨慎的。
平台,然后向这些地区以外的合作伙伴开放。是否存在对Karia没有意义的地区?例如,CPO的数量或市场结构如何?当然,市场越分散,平台就越有意义,但即便如此,即使你有10家不同的CPO,它仍然是有意义的,因为。
你无论如何都需要一个聚合层来支持汽车OEM、租车公司或打车公司等需要为其车队提供充电的公司,他们更喜欢在一个单一的聚合层中完成。所以最终,除非只有一两家CPO,否则它仍然是有意义的。有道理。当你创办公司时,你说过之前在大公司工作过很多年,相比之前的公司角色,成为创始人时有没有经历过很大的冲击?
这是不同的。我是说,如果我说没有区别那就是在撒谎。同时,任何事情都有权衡,对吧?所以在你的公司工作中,你的薪水在月底到账,你知道有支持结构,你知道总是有救兵在附近。但同时,我觉得你在创办初创公司时获得的学习曲线是
相比在公司工作的学习曲线要陡得多。我常说创办初创公司从经济角度来看是完全非理性的,因为局势对你很不利。但同时,我觉得这段旅程和学到的东西是无价的,不管结果如何。
我仍然相信Carri将会取得极大的成功,它具备一家非常成功的公司的所有特征。但同时我知道,学习本身、这段旅程,以及你必须关注许多在公司世界中通常不会是你自己事务的东西,这对其他所有方面都是有回报的。如果你必须提到一个关键的学习,这是你已经可以说会因为Carri而伴随你一生的东西。在某种意义上,它是
清晰。在某种意义上,它是相对快速地找到清晰的能力,然后据此采取行动的能力。我认为当然你有初创公司失败的典型原因,通常是你没钱了或创始人吵架了。但对我来说,还有一个可能不那么为人所知的原因,就是有太多好主意,试图追赶所有东西。在某个时刻,当你深陷其中时,如果一切都很重要,你就有问题了。
在这种时候,有能力退一步,尽管同时你还在为生存而奋力游泳,并且清楚地了解你需要做什么才能在未来成功,这是公司世界很难同样地教给你的东西。有道理。你说有三位创始人。你是如何选择你的另外两位创始人的,你们如何分配责任?我们彼此选择了对方,某种程度上。这不是,不是我在做选角,就像X因素秀。
真的是你和人交谈,然后分享这个想法,最终,如果你一起工作过,你就会降低很多决策的风险,因为你已经有点了解了对方,积极的一面、消极的一面、偏见和所有事情,你知道你可以长期和这个人合作,你已经证明了你可以和这个人合作,对吧?
我们分配任务的方式相对直接,因为我们基本上是100%互补的。我们三个人之间几乎没有重叠,或者如果你算上一年后加入我们的Mario,就是四个人。我们都有不同的背景。Stefano非常技术性,拥有计算机科学背景和人工智能学术背景。Tamara是一位技能高超的销售人员和人际交往高手。
我更多地从事产品、战略方面的工作,并尝试为问题找到创意解决方案。Mario呢,如果你愿意说的话,是那位有投资银行背景的人,非常严谨、非常有条理,能让我们像瑞士钟表一样精确运转。所以对我们来说,互不干扰是很自然的。听起来不错。你把你的Connect API比作Stripe对支付的做法。这是一个恰当的比较吗,或者你认为也存在哪些差异?
在我看来,这是一个恰当的比较。我让你自己去判断。但要给这个说法增加实质内容,你需要想象回到2000年代初期,那时如果你想启动你的电子商务网站,你必须去你的银行获取一个收单账户。
然后你必须与Visa、Mastercard、Amex谈判连接,然后连接到PayPal,因为那就是市场的结构方式。Stripe不是第一个创建抽象层来简化整个过程的,但早期的解决方案不完全是对开发者友好的,相当笨重。
就在那时,Stripe突然决定为开发者构建一些东西,一些在以前需要三个月才能完成的工作,现在你可以在一个下午完成,因为你必须处理的所有复杂性都已经由Stripe处理了,你所需要的只是一个API,你可以将其连接到你的结账系统来处理支付,对吧?这就是Stripe如今成为现在这样的原因。
如果你看EV充电世界,如果今天,比如说,我是一家德国汽车制造商,但真的是世界上任何OEM、任何汽车制造商、车队解决方案提供商或租车公司,随便说,我需要为我的客户提供充电。今天我有不同的选择,对吧?我自己成为电动出行提供商,意味着我需要建立与漫游中心和充电点运营商的所有连接,在有意义的地方。所以我需要为此组建一支团队。
你需要建立一个商业团队,与不同的充电运营商和漫游枢纽等等进行交易谈判。你需要运营团队来处理所有的发票流入,检查发票,核实它们是否与充电交易相符等等。为了让所有这一切正常运作,大概需要9到12个月,对吧?现实中你的另一个选择是从某个成熟的电动出行服务提供商那里购买API服务。但这样的话,你需要支付SaaS费用。
要为你的客户提供充电服务,你赚不到任何钱。你可能会以高于成本的价格向客户提供充电,因为这些价格是电动出行服务提供商维持生计所需的。可以是任何组合,但最后你会意识到充电永远不会成为你的利润中心。它将是一个成本中心。所以通过这些API进行的每一次充电会话,每一个使用这个API的用户都将给你带来成本。这就是我们出现的地方,对吧,我想你开始能看到这个相似之处了。
这就是我们的API免费使用的地方。或者说免费连接,因为它也可能比完整的API集成更简便,这是一个简单的入门解决方案,可能更针对地图提供商。但在这两种情况下,使用该服务都没有任何成本。没有上线费,没有月费。实际上,当涉及充电时,我们帮助你将用户群货币化,因为平台模式的妙处在于它允许你让那些拥有大型车队且需要充电的人
成为充电运营商和我们的合作伙伴,这意味着我们会将我们收入的一部分分享给他们,以换取他们为充电运营商带来客户。突然间你可以看到,退一步看,摆脱Stripe类比的束缚,突然间价值链中的三个关键参与者的激励措施都保持一致了,因为充电运营商实际上可以积极主动地按照他们自己的条件推广他们自己的基础设施。
你有那些能接触到这些需求池的人,他们可以将用户货币化而不是试图从客户身上赚钱。你有最终客户,他们获得直接来自充电运营商的公平和透明的价格。在我们看来,这是这个市场能够繁荣和扩展的唯一方式。有意思。那这些应用,沿着Stripe的类比,Stripe不是提供一个应用,它只是一个API,开发者需要在他们的应用中整合。
所以你是说车队公司和原始设备制造商会有他们自己的应用,对吧?他们已经有了。只是它是由其他人提供的白标解决方案或其他人建立的API,这个"其他人"通常是电动出行服务提供商。这是有道理的。所以是的,我认为这是一个公平的比较。支付方式也是通过这个API来的,对吧?一切都以类似Stripe的方式来管理。对你来说提供充电服务基本上没有复杂性。可能只是一个随意的问题:为什么Stripe不能进入这个行业
并做同样的事情呢?这是你在考虑的风险吗?我是说,这是一些风险投资公司提出的典型问题,我必须说有点令人恼火。"如果谷歌进来呢?"是的,当然,但现实是充电行业存在大量的复杂性,我不相信市场已经成熟到足以让Stripe这样的公司进来自己构建。
我认为这个市场会越来越受到关注,但通常这种情况下对于这些公司来说更多是一种合作性的做法,而不是自己进入竞技场。这是有道理的。对于这些参与者需要与你进行的集成,通常谁最快?是更多的充电运营商还是另一方,车队和原始设备制造商?嗯,在供应端,我想现在我们已经有了非常成熟的上线流程,速度可以相对较快。当然,有时这取决于一些因素。
你不能忽视这样一个事实,即一些充电运营商属于大型公司,这些公司有自己的内部流程,我们需要尊重这一点并按照他们自己的时间表进行。但从工作量的角度来看,实际上相当容易,而且他们这一方不需要任何开发工作,因此进展会相对较快。在需求端,这取决于具体情况。我会说我们迄今为止的经验是地图提供商最快,比如HERE,比如A Better Route Planner,还有谷歌。
还没有。然后我认为其他的,我们现在正在探索合作伙伴关系,我们处于相当高级的讨论阶段,但我们知道一旦你开始涉及公用事业应用或汽车产品,事情就会变得有点复杂,集成周期可能会达到6到9个月。但那就是现实。小公司呢,它们是否有能力做这个,或者它们可能缺乏开发资源,或者它们可能需要从第三方购买呢?
不,我认为一般来说我们也看到年轻的初创公司在实施我们的API,所以它真的非常容易。我是说,如果你愿意,一周内你就可以启动并运行。我们发布API那天,我们演示了,这不是舞台表演,我们出现在充电站。我不是一个代码员。我是说,我理解代码,但我不会编写代码,对吧?而
我们故意什么都没带就出现在充电站,只有生产环境API的密钥和Lovable,这是一个实时编码应用,15分钟内我们就构建了一个可正常工作的充电应用,让我能够在一个真实的充电站进行充电。所以文档做得非常好,实施起来也很简单,我会说每个人都能做到。是的,特别是在当今人工智能时代。我这些天对人工智能的潜力也感到兴奋。这真的是什么东西吗?
你怎么看待人工智能的发展,它如何帮助Carria,或者它如何改变市场上的产品?好吧,对于我们的内部开发,说实话那是个要问Stefano的问题,因为我没有完全参与其中。我知道它在被使用,但我们不是在疯狂地对所有事情进行实时编码,因为这很冒险,特别是在涉及关键任务基础设施时,因为它必须要能工作,对吧?
你不能有一些经过实时编码的东西,然后糟糕了,它不工作,突然之间某个人被困在充电器前只有2%的电池,而充电器不工作,对吧?所以我们根本做不了。但是当然,我们能负责任地使用它吗?绝对可以,这就是我们在做的。
我们已经在使用人工智能处理不同的目的,比如我们的智能定价,这是世界上第一个基于人工智能的动态定价引擎,它查看多个变量,可以帮助确定每个充电点运营商的每个位置的最佳价格。这是通过程序完成的,所以你不必去改变每个充电站的价格,我们以自动化的方式做这件事。我还看到了人工智能客户支持方面的一些不错进展,这相当不错。
我对这个可能的发展方向有自己的想法,但这还有待观察。我认为你可以看到像Monta这样的公司开始涉足自我修复充电基础设施,在用户注意到之前就发现错误,这也相当不错。所以我认为人工智能在这个业务中绝对有一席之地,当然当我们进入电网部分,预测电网将如何表现以及如何对其进行补偿时。
显然你需要一个更实时的、代理式的方式来做这件事,而不是让电网运营商在DSO级别说"嘿,我需要更多能源"之类的。所以这绝对有其用武之地,绝对有。是的,还有改进的空间。从我们已经和一些人交谈过的情况来看,也许还有什么我们在产品集成或系统架构方面遗漏的。所以你肯定有面向CPOs的连接,你有面向他们的连接。
车队或与最终客户有联系的OEM,是否有我们在你的产品中遗漏的其他相互连接?不,我认为我们不需要把它看得比实际复杂。对我们来说,这真的是关于连接人的,就以我之前工作的公司的座右铭来说。在某种方面,对我们来说就是我们想要创造一个更健康的
价值链,能够与市场一起扩展。连接车辆,这是其中的一部分。我们已经在玩车辆连接好几年了,但对我们来说这不一定是我们目前业务的核心。这可能会改变,这就是为什么我们继续在这方面探索,但这不是我们积极使用的东西,除了给最终客户便利,让他们在应用上看到自己车的充电状态。
我们知道潜力远大于此,在某个时刻问题是这个数据点将来自哪里,是来自汽车制造商的API,还是来自ISO 15118电力线通信?这还有待观察。但是是的,这绝对是一些东西,特别是在V2G和智能充电用例方面,将是至关重要的。回到价格透明度,你在一年前已经提到过
,你认为它会作为监管推动而来,还是市场会决定,或者在你看来是两者的混合?我的希望是它不会通过监管而来,因为我相信如果市场无法自我调节并迫使监管者进行干预,通常结果是不够理想的。它创造的情况不一定是市场需要的,也不是公司需要的来蓬勃发展,因为通常监管者强制的政策,特别是在定价方面,往往是极其僵化的。
它们倾向于偏向某些参与者而不是其他人。所以我的希望是市场会调整自己,学会如何自我调节,而不是陷入一个我们被迫让监管者比他们已经做的要进行更多干预的局面。对于电动汽车驾驶员有很多批评,我自己也经历过,我认为你的观点完全正确,现在的市场在价格透明度和高价格方面有一些问题,特别是在公共充电器上。
你认为如果Carria成功的话,我们能获得什么,不仅仅是价格透明度,还有公共充电点的价格下降?好吧,价格下降只能来自一个地方,或者也许两个。一个是我们肯定能够做出贡献的;另一个则少一些。所以我们能贡献较少的那个是
我相信如今电网费用的结构方式不是为电动汽车充电世界设计的,在那里你会有那么一天达到从电网中吸取的峰值容量。但如果这只是一次性的,然后你在其他时间一直支付高得离谱的费用,而你的充电站在闲置,当然CPOs需要把这个成本转嫁给最终客户。
所以这是一个,我知道人们在讨论使电网费用基于拥堵情况,也更加动态化,这肯定会有助于降低充电点运营商的固定成本。另一个实际上的因素是利用率,因为现实是充电点运营商的成本中超过50%来自于电力成本之外的其他因素。
在这种情况下,插座交付的千瓦时越多,你就能更好地摊销那些超出能源动态成本的固定成本,这样价格就会下降。那么这将如何发生呢?当然我们需要每个充电点服务更多的电动汽车。所以我认为在基础设施部署上需要更有思虑一些,在我们能做的地方最大化现有资源,最终在我们需要的地方建设。
这样会有助于改善利用率。当然我们也需要避免陷入噩梦般的情景,即在高峰出行日,站点被挤满,这也不是个好体验。我听说过一些电动车车主在夏季长途旅行时的故事,说某些地点完全堵塞,车队排得很长几乎都要影响交通了。比如在哪里呢?我自己在意大利见过这种情况。
今天早上我听到另一个人讲述了在法国的情况,那里人们实际上不得不疏导交通,因为队伍变得太长了,甚至还堵住了进入服务区的入口,那些只想去餐厅的人都进不去。所以当然这些是例外,但同时,这可能有点趣闻性,每年开几千公里,即使是用电动汽车长途驾驶,有时候这也受到人们往往都选择在同一地点停留的事实驱动。
都在同一个地点。然后有时候你会发现自己在某个特定区域的一个地点完全堵塞,而你再开一公里就会看到一个完全空闲的充电站,满功率容量,意味着你也能更快地驶离。但这就是我认为使用价格作为重新分配基础设施容量的策略之一,能够让基础设施真正优化的地方。是的。实际上就在昨天,我认为这不仅适用于电动汽车充电器。我在坐火车。
我要从郊区返回柏林,我想坐下午7点的火车,高峰时段,周日下午7点,返回柏林的地区火车,所以人满为患,我没能上去,而一小时后的火车却有那么多空位。所以我想我们也不能为了全年那一刻的拥堵就设计整个充电基础设施,但我们确实需要更聪明的机制。这正是问题所在,对吧?当你听到那些声明,到2028年我们将需要500万个充电点。
当然,为了什么?为了一年中那两天基础设施在特定地点拥堵的时候?我认为我们比那更聪明,我认为会有一个包括动态定价的组合,会阻止高峰时段,如果你必须在高峰时段旅行,当然可以,但最终你需要支付更多费用。这将涉及汽车和应用中的路由引擎变得更聪明,告诉你,你知道吗。
也许你应该早一点或晚一点旅行,因为你会面临拥堵的风险,这会大大延长你的旅程。因为不仅你要等待充电,这是双重打击,你要等待,而且当站点拥堵时它也不会输出
连接器规范上的额定功率,因为很少有运营商的电网连接能够支持每个插座的额定功率,因为电网费用很昂贵。突然你会发现自己在用60千瓦给一个大型100千瓦时电池充电,那怎么办?你会浪费一小时。是的,非常好的观点。谈到电网费用、负荷管理等等,你看到了动态电网费用。我同意这可能是一个很好的方式,特别是处理电网级别的拥堵并降低成本。
这是你密切关注的话题吗?你看到它已经开始出现了吗?你是否了解某些国家做得更好的情况?好吧,我不是密切关注,因为我需要挑选我的战场,但我们在密切关注。我知道德国有一些良好的意图。我知道北欧国家已经在研究这样的东西。通常这就是电网成熟度的传播方式,从北到南。但对我来说这必须发生。你不能有我们今天拥有的那些情况。
是的,关于你的人工智能价格预测,你说它考虑了各种因素,你是如何权衡这些因素的?最终它一定相当复杂,尤其是考虑到我们刚才讨论的例子。在夏季,你需要考虑司机的需求,你需要考虑电网,你可能还需要考虑本地电网等等。所以现在这个模型还不是电网感知的,因为我们需要先解决更大的问题,我们需要有一个有效的模型,因为你需要从简单开始,对吧?
我们现在看的是,如果你看一个平均充电点运营商,平均是指他们自己基础设施的平均利用率为8到10%,你会注意到这8到10%分布不均匀。有10%最多的基础设施真的是主力军,真的工作得很好,因为地点选择得当,因为它在电动汽车普及的热点,你能想到的一切。它可以是任何东西。
然后你通常有90%,充电基础设施的长尾,并没有被充分利用,有时候我们看到利用率低至1%的情况。记住收支平衡的甜蜜点大约在20到23%。真的吗?所以我们离充电点还很远
运营商业务直接盈利。这就是为什么有时候说充电点运营商很贪心、想要囤积尽可能多钱的说法有点不公平。用他们当替罪羊很容易,但有时如果你现实地看电动车充电的经济学,这是对未来的一个赌注。这不是你今天在做的事情,但尽管如此,廉价资本已经消失了,所以你需要做点什么来维持运营。
但是,回到这个话题:你有10%运营得非常好,90%还能做得更好。但关键的是,运营良好的站点全天也不是都运营良好。它们有自己的高峰时段,通常你看到的是快餐连锁店停车场的充电点,充电位置,在午餐时间、晚餐时间和周日下午运营得很好。这是有道理的。
然后你有超市,它在下午5点到7点或8点之间运营得很好。所以情况差异很大。这正是我们现在优化的内容。我们查看多个变量,从历史表现、逐年对比、30天平均值,再加上社会人口统计、市场渗透率,相当多的变量。Stefano对所有这些情况有更好的了解。
这使我们能够为你网络中的每个充电站定义最优的定价方案,具体到每小时、每天。这意味着作为一个充电点运营商,你可以避免降低所有地方的价格来试图增加利用率,因为这也意味着会蚕食运营良好的站点的盈利能力。
而对于其他的站点,你本可以使用smart pricing做得更好。通过我们基于人工智能的定价,你可以保持利用率高的站点的盈利能力,因为模型会说那里没必要改变价格,但对于那些可能需要一点刺激来吸引更多驾驶员的站点,为什么不也激励那些考虑购买电动汽车的人呢?他们可以说,"我有一些很好的选择,可以方便地以公平的价格充电,即使我在家里没有充电桩。"
所以这就是我们在研究的。我认为电网容量以及最终的现货市场定价是我们正在关注的话题。我们与Lichtblick进行了一些实验,成果相当不错,但这只是一个优先事项的问题。它会来吗?绝对会。什么时候,这也取决于充电点运营商何时会
调整他们的采购策略,更多地转向现货市场定价,而不是进行固定采购来避免例如冬季定价激增。所以他们更喜欢可预测性而不是动态定价。明白了。那么与Lichtblick合作时具体是怎样成功的,或者说范围是什么?所以与Lichtblick合作,在某个时刻,你还记得那一周、那个周末,价格一度跌到€-500,Lichtblick决定他们要提供免费充电。
最后,因为价格是负的,作为一个充电点运营商,即使免费向驾驶员提供产品,你仍然可以赚钱。驾驶员的反应非常非常好。很酷。是的,说到这个,我认为正如你所说的,很多电动车驾驶员觉得充电点运营商在利用他们。从更乐观和现实的角度看,可能也基于你的数据:你说需要23%的利用率,我们能实现什么价格?
所以如果有一个电动车驾驶员,或者某个对电动车驾驶持怀疑态度的人,因为他们看到公共充电的高价格,我们最终能实现什么,或者利用率提高后我们能达到什么价格?当然不是接近家庭电价,但什么是可以实现的?我认为我们不一定应该看一个目标价格,而是更多地计算什么更方便,或什么在经济上更有效。
因为在采用新技术时有多个因素会影响它是否成功。所以现在我们需要以人们今天使用的东西作为参考框架,即汽油车或柴油车。你需要进行比较,因为基本上最后是关于总体拥有成本的。这个总体拥有成本大于还是小于拥有汽油车?如果更低,人们就会采用。如果更高...
在我的经济学研究中,我几乎没有看到过一个比现有技术更昂贵来做同样工作的技术被采用的情况。所以对我来说,这不是关于每度电的价格本身。汽车会比汽油车更便宜吗?所以你购买电动车的初始资本支出会比汽油车更低吗?是的,很好。那残值呢?
我买的东西4年后就一文不值,还是我能在4年后卖出去还能有不错的残值?这对于车队用车和租赁公司也很重要。然后,运营成本会更便宜吗?当然,你还要考虑维护,我们知道电动车的维护成本低于汽油车,因为运动部件更少,还有能源成本。
当然,现在,如果你完全依赖公共充电,取决于你住在哪里,但不一定。我想你差不多持平,考虑到油价冲击把德国的油价从€1.60提高到€2每升,以此作为参考。那时我觉得电动车成本在下降,所以我们现在有点持平。但现实是你还需要考虑转换成本,而感知优势需要至少便宜10%到20%,从总体拥有成本的角度,才能让某人做出这个转变。
那么我们要看的是:每度电的成本是多少,才能实现那15-20%的节省,说服人们做出改变?而且这个数字会越来越低,因为越来越多的人采用电动车,电动车数量越来越多。抱歉,更多的人觉得这很正常,他们不是小白鼠,不是在冒风险,因为他们看到每个人都在这样做。所以你可能可以接受价格平价甚至低5%的情况。
但这就是你需要看待这个问题的方式。最终,对于普通人来说,他们不是那种典型的电动车早期采用者,那种人通常是从事IT的极客,他们买电动车是为了技术,也是为了环保,当你进入大众市场时,这就成了一个经济学问题,不再是技术或环保问题。
这就是为什么我愿意指出一个具体的度电价格,我认为这个价格会很有吸引力。因为现在,如果你和普通人谈话,就像你说的那样,他们会提出异议:不,对我来说太贵了。但一旦成本,我们已经接近了,使电动车实际上变得更便宜,如果运营成本没有随之下降……我是说,当然柴油价格会上升,但理想情况下我们也应该有一个更便宜的选择。有很多研究员指出了这一点。
对于今天的普通电动车驾驶员来说,被认为公平和有趣的价格大约是交流电39美分,直流电49美分。这被认为是一个还不错的价格,人们可以接受。但同样,你可以有这个理想价格,但如果你作为充电点运营商的经济状况无法支持它,你就不能真正要求充电点运营商盲目追随。这需要更好的协调方式,这很好地引出了智能充电和V2G的话题。
你已经和Lichtblick一起做了一个很酷的项目。你认为我们也能做到智能充电、V2G和公共充电,从而降得更低吗?就像你说的,你甚至能提供免费充电。那多酷啊?如果这些类型的案例开始积累,我们肯定会赢得大众。你可以每升汽油花2欧元,或者你甚至可以在一天中的某些时间免费驾驶。多酷啊?或者甚至还能获得报酬。
这取决于你如何看待它,因为对我来说有几件事不是完全清楚的。例如,当涉及到智能充电时,当然现在我对公共充电更加关注,因为那是我们今天讨论的问题所在,真正的问题是:谁在向电网销售智能充电服务?因为有多个参与者:充电点运营商可以做这个,充电点管理系统提供商也可以做。
有充电运营商,有些充电运营商试图定位自己为协调这一切的人。然后你有汽车制造商,因为汽车制造商是有权访问汽车并能调节汽车吸取多少能量的人。所以我仍然不清楚的是:你如何确保这三、四、五个参与者能够真正为了共同利益进行合作?除此之外,你还有最终客户需要从中获得一些东西。那么你怎么做呢?你如何保持所有这些参与者同步并获得报酬?
你如何确保电网运营商不会购买相同的产品两次?对我来说,其中有价值吗?是的,可能在某些国家比其他国家更有价值,因为我们知道,例如,荷兰的电网完全过载,电动车充电是一个真正的问题,因为每个人都在街道上的交流墙盒上充电,这就造成了问题。这个问题在其他地方的规模是否相同?可能不是,那么它就变成了更多的……
它变成了更多的充电点运营商采购话题,他们购买动态定价的服务,因为当然,如果你能说,好吧,在8点插上你的车,但请让我不要在晚上6点到午夜之间抽取任何能量,我会让你把车插到第二天早上,当你需要出门时,你的车已经充满了,那么是的,那就说得通了。V2G也是一样的,对吧?所以我认为第一个问题是,V2G会……
首先成为一个信任问题,因为我们需要说服驾驶员,是的,我们会从你的车里抽取能量,但别担心,我们会把它还给你。然后你可以在差价上进行很好的套利,在交易上。然后这是否会成为在公共充电上和在家庭充电上一样有吸引力的使用场景还有待观察,因为我能看到家庭和办公充电是V2G的更好使用场景,因为汽车显然是连接在……
整天不停地连接,而且你没有占用某人可能需要使用以有效充电的充电设施。所以我们也需要考虑这个方面。完全同意。我们刚才谈到的利用率有点冲突,对吧?如果你有一辆车插在那里的时间比应该充电的时间长,那就是机会成本。我认为我能看到晚上6点到第二天早上6点之间的窗口,你有12个小时,现实中在晚上……
你没有很多汽车的流转,所以这完全有意义。但在白天,我很难看到你如何能在能量交付的利用率目标上与期望有人让汽车整天停在那里、电池为电网服务的期望相符。我不认为这是进行V2G的可行方式。那么你对未来的愿景是什么,就像你说的,在整个汽车车队中,电动车采用的绝对数字现在大约是5%,一旦我们真正摆脱化石燃料,你正在朝着什么愿景工作?
你怎么看待这个未来?完全摆脱化石燃料需要一段时间。我认为没必要自欺欺人。我相信电动汽车的普及速度在加快,我们看到新车价格下降,性能变好,充电速度更快。总的来说,我们正朝着正确的方向发展。我完全可以想象在5年内电动汽车占新注册汽车的50%以上。
但是旧车更新换代需要更长的时间,所以我认为要实现整个车队的完全更新可能需要到2030年代后期,大约2035年。你认为主要是公共充电吗?比如我们在柏林和其他城市街道上看到的这些汽车,它们在哪里充电?这是个有趣的问题,因为过去总有这样一个说法:80%的充电发生在家里。
但对我来说,这是反向相关的结果:作为司机,问题是我能在家里安装壁挂式充电桩吗?如果可以,我就买电动汽车,否则就等待。这个时代已经过去了,对吧?而且即使在今天,公共充电已经占到总充电能量的30%左右。
有多家研究机构指出这个数字在长期内会变成50%左右,到2035年左右。你可以看到这正在发生,正如你所说,有很多人,特别是住在汉堡、柏林这样的大城市和人口密集区的人……
无法停在自己的地下停车位,因此自然无法获得私人充电器,或者建筑物出于各种原因根本不允许。在这种情况下,当然需要确保基础设施能够满足这些人的充电需求。当然,这对不同政府和地方市政部门来说是个不错的挑战。
老实说,随着越来越多人对长距离旅行充满信心,长距离旅行必须在公共场所进行,别无选择,因此我相当看好公共充电能轻松占到电动汽车总充电能量的50%。那城市中会更多采用交流还是直流充电呢?这是个好问题。我认为这在一定程度上是基于意见的讨论,因为存在不同的阵营。
我认为直流充电很有价值,在长距离旅行等方面是必不可少的。我觉得这个需求已经被证明了。我认为大型直流充电器有其用武之地,比如在超市停车场或者最终会被改造的加油站,当你真正需要快速充电时。但个人而言,我仍然认为交流充电很有价值。
我倾向于在城市中使用交流充电器进行所有充电,不是因为我附近没有直流充电器,而是因为如果我不急的话,我就不在乎。我很乐意插上车然后等它充好,这对我来说完全没问题。我周围有足够的选择,它就是有效。老实说,与我们今天讨论的大功率400千瓦充电器相比,它对电网容量的压力要小得多。现在,当我们进入到,我们已经进入了远景规划部分。
那么从长期来看,你对Karia的愿景是什么?对我们来说,我们真正想要成为行业的商业互操作性层,这是我们的重点。我们想确保创建一个健康而充满活力的生态系统,使充电点运营商能够在任何地方直接销售他们的能源给他们的客户,并且通过单一输入在规模上积极推动他们的商业策略。
这就是我们要做的,我们知道如果你做个对比,当汽油被逐步淘汰,电力成为主要燃料,即使不算中国,这也是一个1万亿美元的市场。所以我们不需要沉迷于寻找新的收入来源。我们只需要专注于让充电点运营商能够很好地销售他们的能源。
我们需要让开发者在连接端能够很好地工作,确保他们拥有可靠和稳健的产品。是的,我认为这就是我们的工作。所以你开电动汽车来的,通常你也开电动汽车,这不错。当你在充电桩上只有20分钟时,你通常喜欢怎么度过这段时间?我希望有很多选择,但通常这最后都是带我的孩子去上厕所,结果比汽车充好还要晚。有个有趣的事实是,汽车充好了比家人准备好继续出发还快。
所以对我来说,是的,开电动汽车会浪费很多时间,我不同意这个看法。因为我可以向你保证,我总是尽量做个好公民,在80%时拔掉充电插头。我不需要更多。但现实地说,更像是85%,因为孩子们上厕所、伸腿、吃东西所花的时间比汽车充电所花的时间还长。你也经常从柏林开长途车到意大利。所以这是可能的,很多德国人喜欢这样做,我一直在做。我已经习惯了。
沿途有很多充电选择。老实说,我已经达到了一种程度,即使电池里只剩5公里的续航里程,以"乌龟模式"到达我也不介意,因为我知道即使一个充电器不工作,我也能在某处找到替代方案。我还有个故事,那是去年夏天,我独自驾车带着两个孩子坐在后座。从意大利回来需要1100公里。
我住在米兰附近,所以从柏林出发要1100公里,我一口气开过去。我记得当时晚上11点左右,所以我们已经接近了,但还有几个小时的车程。我的电量只有5%,我问自己:希望这个充电器能用。我知道我有其他选择,但你还是会问自己,如果它们都失败了怎么办?不过,我认为现在你可以放松得多,而且你能看到这种进步。真是太疯狂了。
我在2021年做了第一次长途旅行,如果你现在做这件事,情况完全不同。充电器更快,你还没准备好就已经充好了,而且你有这么多选择,所以在我看来,里程焦虑已经成为过去,或者说只有从未开过电动车的人才会有。现在更像是充电焦虑,意思是:我会被坑吗,或者充电器能用吗?但那是另一回事,需要不同的解决方案。
说实话,第一代电动车,我自己也买过日产聆风,确实续航里程非常有限。现在情况完全不同了,我确实认为这可能是落伍的想法。而且我们才刚开始,在提高续航和充电速度方面还有很大的进步空间。所以我认为,如你所说,你们这样的解决方案和其他方案会继续改进。那么,你使用什么来支付和导航呢?让我试试猜一下。很好。好的,Isam,非常感谢你的时间和精力,祝Karia一切顺利。
非常感谢你邀请我。很荣幸,也祝你一切顺利。谢谢。对话中有三件事给我留下了深刻印象。首先,价格透明问题不会仅通过监管来解决,而是通过让运营商再次成为卖方来解决。Karia将定价权保留给CPO,在需求端不收取费用,而是与那些吸引驾驶员的人(如OEM厂商和车队)分享收入。其次,经济学的生死存亡取决于利用率:每天8到10%才能盈亏平衡,超过20%才能盈利。杠杆不是笼统的折扣,而是更聪明的定价。
我喜欢Liftlike的例子,在5月电价为负时提供免费充电。这样一来,就能逐小时、并排地进行,由人工智能驱动,不会蚕食有利可图的充电器。这就是智能充电定价。第三,充电不再只是一个能源业务。当电价为负时,充电可以免费,通过V2G,你甚至可以在公共充电器上用你的电动汽车赚钱,而运营商仍然通过出售电网服务来赚钱。Issam关于"没有标价的超市橙子"的类比很贴切。
只要价格取决于你拿出哪张卡,大众市场就会袖手旁观。改变这一状况的平台不需要重新发明轮子,只需将经过验证的市场模式应用到充电桩上。想看看这在实践中是什么样子吗?观看Connect API的发布,从零到在真实充电器上工作的充电应用只需15分钟。太不可思议了。如果你曾经在意大利的充电器旁被卡住,身边还有2个孩子,电量只有5%,只需记住一点:通常汽车会比家人准备好得更快。下次见。
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. Europe's public charging infrastructure is a fragmentation nightmare. Over 3,000 operators, each with their own tariff, and the EV driver pays double at the same fast charger, depending on which charging card or app they use. Issam, co-founder and CEO of Karia, knows both sides.
He learned how to scale marketplaces at eBay, saw at Here Technologies how automakers were desperately searching for charging solutions, and then experienced firsthand how frustrating charging outside the Tesla network is. In 2021, he took the plunge with two former colleagues. Today, Karia is a 14-person team breaking the reseller chain. CPOs stay the merchant of record, set their own prices directly, and the platform charges no onboarding fee, no monthly subscription, just revenue share with those who bring demand. One number stands out.
The average CPO utilizes their chargers at only 8 to 10%, but break-even sits above 20%. And over 50% of CPO costs have nothing to do with the electricity price. Issam explains why dynamic per-charging, per-hour pricing is the lever, why the mass market only flips at a 10 to 20% TCO advantage, and why he sees public charging hitting 50% of all charged energy by 2035. Let's get charging. Hello Issam, nice that you're here today. How are you? Hi, thanks for having me. I'm very good, just came back from a kind of summer break, so it was nice to be by the beach for a few days.
Yes, we also need to relax a bit as entrepreneurs. The day-to-day is quite unnerving, or at least we try to, but one does the best that one can. Very good. Yeah, I heard before you need to also check in every day at least, to make sure that things are going well. I can confirm for us it's the same. I have difficulties to completely let go. So before we jump into Karia and the topics around e-mobility, to get an understanding of who we're talking to, I like to always know the background of the guest.
So maybe you can tell us a bit where you're from and what you did before Karia. Absolutely. At Karia I'm the co-founder and CEO, but my background has been working for large tech organizations for the majority of my career. I started my career back in 2006 at eBay, in consumer marketplaces during their hypergrowth phase. Then I started moving, still in B2C but more on consumer electronics, with Nokia and Microsoft, and then started slowly moving to the B2B world.
First we did that at Packet Enterprise, getting a good understanding of IoT, edge computing, cloud, which is kind of interesting because it gives you a good perspective on what the.
Public charging infrastructure is in the end. The last port of call before starting Karia, which is also where I happened to meet my two co-founders Stefan and Tamara, was Here Technologies, which is a company owned by the large German car manufacturers and other large corporations. It's a mapping and location company, and that's where we started seeing the e-mobility transition happening.
How this was a challenge for car manufacturers that needed to offer charging services to their customers, allowing their customers to complete successful long-distance trips without too much stress, and how to find charging stations. It was also the time when we started driving electric cars ourselves, so we saw the gap and decided to do something about it. That was back in which year? We are talking about 2021, 2022. OK. And what was your interest in technology, or how did you end up on this journey? Were you like an early geek child, or what was the impetus, so to say?
Yeah, I've always been interested in tech. I guess a lot has to do with my father. My father used to work for Olivetti, which was the Italian Apple of the eighties. So we had personal computers at home for as long as I can remember. I think when I was around 4, we already had a personal computer at home, and it didn't take long for me to understand how to take them apart and put them back together. I was one of the early users of the Internet. I think the first time I got to see the Internet, there were less than.
A million users worldwide, and I got really fascinated by it in 1994. It was really fascinating for me that you could access information beyond what was on your local hard drive, and that sparked that interest and enthusiasm that convinced me to pursue a career in tech from the early days. Then at some point there was a question: do I want to get a degree in computer science or economics?
I opted for economics in the end because I figured I could keep the more techie part as a hobby, between brackets, but it was interesting for me to also get a good understanding of how things work from the money side, if you want. Makes sense. And the different roles you had within these large, especially American, companies - what type of projects or responsibilities did you have? I've always been sitting in between marketing and product in a way, because for example at eBay we were the biggest customer of Google by far.
We were investing hundreds of millions of dollars every year in Google Ads. But back then there was no Martech, no nothing. Everything was manual, and Google had an API, so ultimately the company decided to put up a big project that would allow us to connect the advertising stack to the internal analytics and start really doing some sophisticated bidding, actually using data to optimize the advertising spend in real time to maximize ROI in the end. It was a very complex endeavor because there was a lot of money involved.
We were operating across a multitude of countries across basically every single category that you could think of, and therefore that resulted in us having to manage portfolios of millions of keywords and allocating budget accordingly. There is no chance that you can do it manually, so.
And then it progressed because when it came to Nokia and Microsoft, we were at the transition era where digital was becoming more and more important in the consumer journey, but still people would buy the phone or the hardware offline because they wanted to see it, they wanted to ask the sales staff. So for us the challenge there was: how do we match digital signals to retail in-store performance, and build not only models that would rely on correlation but also try to find the causation of events.
And my career continued like that, with me being a little bit the bridge between what is marketing and how you drive demand, but also on the other side, what the product needs to do to match these needs. That's a good foundation for the founder journey then. Yeah, I would say so. And within that, were there particular projects around mobility that you found quite interesting, maybe worth highlighting?
Well, when I was there we were starting to get the first data from EV charging points - they took POIs for stations so that we could place them on a map and tell people where they can charge. But it was really the beginning, and there were a lot of conversations around EV routing, which is not exactly the most trivial thing to do because...
It's not like general petrol car routing, where you don't really worry about consumption. You need to know: this is the fastest route to go there, you will arrive at around this time - and that's kind of good, but there is no consumption involved in the calculation of the route. Whereas EV routing is much more complex because temperature has an effect, road inclination has an effect, road roughness has an effect, wind direction has an effect, and the car itself - every car behaves differently. And then every car charges differently.
Every car has different peak powers, every car has a different charging curve, and you need to take all of these variables - and I'm naming just a few - to then compute a route that will effectively tell the person: you will arrive by this time, and you need to stop here and here for your journey to be efficient. Wow, quite a lot of correlations. And was this also the impetus for Karia, or how did you then end up deciding that Karia was worthwhile pursuing as an idea? I mean, as with everything, it's a mix of things, right?
As I mentioned before, I started driving an electric car myself and I was not particularly impressed by what I saw. And which car was it, just out of curiosity? I think it was a Tesla Model Y. And if you wanted to go outside of the Tesla network, that was just not doable, or at least it was not as easy as: you get a Tesla, you plug into the Supercharger and you're good to go.
Which people feel is magical, but the moment you need a different charger, the picture changes quite quickly. So it was a little bit of that, and you could see that the market was, and is, to be honest, still in its infancy. You could see on the business side that car manufacturers in particular had an increasing need because they really needed to put EVs on the road. These were a very, very hot topic back then.
You could see that the challenge was real, and at some point - I feel that is when you find that thing where you feel the timing is right, the opportunity is huge, and you know a couple of things about it.
And it's something that gives you purpose, because ultimately I have two small children and I would like them to have the privilege of not walking around on the streets inhaling against their will all the kind of stuff that comes out of exhaust tailpipes. So it was a bit of a combination of everything, and then at some point it takes a little bit of courage to make the jump and leave a cushy corporate job to make the completely rational choice of starting a company. But that's how it went in the end.
And what was the initial setup? Were you already having co-founders? Was it from the get-go the three of you - I think that's the founding team - and how did the idea change from back then? No, I started solo for a few months just to kind of get everything put together and get some initial shape of the company in place, but then quickly after, Stefano and Tamara joined, and that's how the core founding team got started.
To be honest, at the beginning the idea was more to fix the user experience part of the whole thing, which also was not particularly great. But as for every startup, the startup that you start with is not the startup that you end up with - it's a journey, and you need to.
You need to do a bit of experiments, collect a few failures, and get across a few realizations to eventually end up with what really matters. For us, we were acting as a traditional e-mobility provider - we were buying energy from the charge point operators and then reselling it to the EV driver with a particular spin, because we would say:
Pay us telco-style a certain amount of money every month, you get a certain amount of energy, and then you don't have to worry where you consume this energy. So it was a pure subscription model - we were not the first ones doing that. We had relatively good success with that model, but ultimately what we realized is that there was a deeper problem in the industry, and actually we were contributing to creating the problem. That sounds interesting, and that's where at some point we.
Decided to have a good look in the mirror and say: are we really going in the right direction, despite maybe the numbers going up? Are we really making something that is meaningful in the long run? And this is where, speaking to customers on both sides of the value chain - so to EV drivers and to charge point operators - we realized that we were solving not exactly the correct problem. And that's where we realized that the market was starting to edge towards a new phase, because until realistically 2024.
For 2023, let's say, the name of the game for charge point operators was: deploy, deploy, deploy - grab the good location, grab the grid infrastructure. So it was a land grab. And the trajectory of adoption of EVs was probably dragged a little bit by incentives and scarcity driven by COVID.
And therefore everybody started building towards that curve - which, of course, we all know what happened in 2024 when the federal government decided to shut down the government incentive overnight. We saw what happened, and we also saw what happened when the residual value of EVs completely hit the ground, and therefore the case for EVs kind of toned down a little bit.
Thankfully it was a temporary slowdown and not a continued one. But this is where charge point operators then all of a sudden realized: OK, we have a lot of capacity on the ground. At some point the infrastructure deployment was growing faster than the adoption of EVs, and therefore you had more chargers for fewer EVs. And that's also where, because of the whole post-COVID inflation spike that we had, plus interest rates going up as an attempt to curb that inflation.
Cheap capital was no longer available, and all of a sudden you have capital-intensive companies that need hundreds of millions to deploy and operate this infrastructure - companies that at some point had to face the reality that now it's time to get this infrastructure to make money. And this is where you ask yourself the question: OK, what is it that you can do as a charge point operator once you have selected the location? So it's a real estate business - location matters a lot - but it's a one-off.
You cannot just say: oops, we got it wrong, let's move everything somewhere else. I mean you can, but it's incredibly expensive. And therefore you need to then try to figure out what else you can do. Ultimately, utilization becomes the name of the game. Despite sometimes people not wanting to think that's the case, the majority of research shows that price always shows up in the top two as one of the key deciding factors on whether to go and charge at one location or another.
And this is where it becomes the crux of the problem, because up to now a lot of operators were operating in a B2B fashion - they were reselling their energy to the e-mobility provider, and then this e-mobility provider would sell it downstream to the EV driver. The problem with this model is that as a CPO you all of a sudden become a passenger. Why a passenger? Because as a reseller, the e-mobility provider has pricing power. They can decide how much margin to add to the wholesale price provided by the CPO, and then sell it downstream.
The problem is that this market has been proven to be extremely elastic, and therefore even a few cents on top of the kilowatt hour can make a huge difference in terms of utilization. And this is where you start seeing the limit of the model, because if you are not in control of your own commercial strategy.
At scale - which means beyond what you can do at the station with a payment terminal, or what you can do in your own app, which requires a lot of energy and marketing dollars to get off the ground, and not all CPOs can afford that because they either don't have the capital or they don't have enough installed infrastructure to justify users downloading yet another app - all of a sudden you see where the problem is going. You are a passenger for 80%, 90% of your demand. And it's a double trap, because on one side you get priced higher than.
And on the other side, at the moment that these mobility providers are representing a large amount of your demand, it's also the risk of margin extraction, because then the mobility provider can come to you and say, well, I mean, now I represent 20% of your traffic, I want a 30% discount - and what choice do you have at that point? Makes sense. So summarizing, or getting to the core of the problem: you think the mobility service providers could be replaced, and the market would be more efficient if the CPOs were to directly be able to set a price to the EV driver, right?
Well, in a way, it's not the actor itself that maybe needs replacement - it's more the underlying business model, because that's what we are doing differently, right? These mobility providers were born out of the need for convenience, because in Europe you have more than 3,000 charge point operators, and probably more by now, because I've been using that 3,000 figure for a year. I guess by now the number has grown.
And therefore it's highly impractical for an end customer to not have an aggregation layer that can bring the infrastructure together. Roaming hubs will always be needed - there is no discussion about that. But then the question is: how do you provide this layer of aggregation? Because historically there was an attempt to mimic two things, taking inspiration from two industries. One is fuel cars and the other one is the telco business, and somehow the industry decided to take the bad traits of both. OK, elaborate on that.
So ultimately you have a lot of intransparency and rigidity that are endemic of the early days of both models, and somehow, as I said, and I repeat, this is an extremely young industry. I think you can look at it even just by the numbers - the total percentage of cars that are electric or plug-in as a share of the total installed base of cars in Europe - and this number is oscillating, depending on the country, between 3 and 5%.
So you can see how you cannot expect this to be a mature market where 95% of your customers, at best, are not yet in the market. I would say it's normal that the market needed something, and needed something that worked, that was simple - and therefore you look for specific frames of reference and you took them. And then, of course, you haven't gone through those cycles of sometimes regulations, sometimes just the market adjusting itself, and that's why I say there are still a lot of downsides in the current model.
But that's exactly to the point, right - is the reseller chain the only model that allows this layer of aggregation? And the answer is really no, because you have a lot of other industries where we have the same problem, and it has been solved by a platform model. Which means that you do not take away the role of merchant of record from the infrastructure provider - so the CPO can stay as the seller, can market their infrastructure freely and independently to the end customer without having somebody interfering in the middle. And you can do it without -
- getting the end customer to lose the convenience of accessing everything in one single place. And that's what we do, that's what we do differently: for the end customer, nothing changes. You go, you find all your stations on a map wherever you are, and you can start charging like a normal charging app - that doesn't change and shouldn't change. But at the same time, the underlying business model and economics are completely different. And what other industries operate similarly, like the carrier model? Maybe you took inspiration from them?
Well, I'm coming from marketplaces, right? I worked at eBay. eBay works exactly that way. If you look at Amazon, Amazon has a dual role - you can either buy from Amazon, but Amazon also has a marketplace where prices are decided by the sellers. And the same goes for ride-hailing apps, and the same goes for the hotel industry. The hotel industry was born with OTAs - online travel agencies - and you can imagine the Expedias of the world, where they would buy capacity from hotels or from airlines and then sell it downstream at the price that they wanted.
But you can clearly see that now this model has become obsolete with the rise of, you know, Booking.com - where the hotel pushes the property at the right price, and that's how the industry works. So as I said, we're not reinventing the wheel here. We are taking proven business models that have proven to be better for industries that are incredibly fragmented and making them work for the EV charging industry. Got it. And what was the moment of realization where you recognized the problem with the old business model?
It's by talking to customers - talking to customers on both sides of the aisle. Because we haven't spoken yet about the EV driver, but this is not exactly easy for the EV drivers themselves. If you think about it, we always like to make the parallel: the public charging industry today, the way that it's priced, would be the equivalent of you entering your local supermarket today and wanting to buy a kilo of oranges.
There is no price tag on the shelf, and you get your kilo of oranges and you go to pay, and then at the till the cashier will ask you, OK, how would you intend to pay? Depending on your answer, which could be: I have my Mastercard from N26, I have my Visa from Revolut, I have my Mastercard from Deutsche Bank, I want to pay cash - it doesn't matter. And then depending on your answer, the price that you pay could be 1.5, 2 times more. So how would you feel about it? Not great. It creates anxiety, right?
And yet this is how the public charging market works today. For the same station, at the same location, same service, same everything, you can have 50 different prices depending on who your charging provider is. And this price - if you are not careful, you can easily pay double. So with Carria, the price is upfront; basically the kilo of oranges is one price.
We have this philosophy that we believe the base price should be the same for everyone and you should not be penalised by the way that you decide to charge, which in a way kind of aligns with what the European regulators have been attempting to do with AFIR, where they are trying to put in place some pretty strict anti-discrimination rules, saying that any price difference must be justified. Has the regulation solved the problem yet? No, not at all. Will it? To be seen. There is a revision of the regulation coming out later this year.
We will see what the European Commission has decided to do about it, but clearly the problem solves itself the moment that the seller is always the one that operates the infrastructure and not somebody else in the middle. And roaming platforms - you already mentioned them - what is the role of a roaming platform if the platform itself is provided by Carria? Well, we need to make a distinction between connectivity of EV charging protocols and the underlying business model of how the commercial transaction happens, right?
So it's two separate tracks. Roaming hubs are really good at offering connectivity, and I think that they are there to stay, because sometimes it doesn't make sense to do a one-on-one connection with everyone. I guess it's fair to say that despite EV charging protocols being a standard and operating under a standard, there are a lot of dialects out there, and doing a direct connection with everyone puts a strain on the tech teams of the respective companies.
While sometimes a roaming hub that abstracts this complexity into one single place makes perfect sense. But when you say connection between parties - if there are only CPOs and EV drivers, you need to have a layer of aggregation. That's why I said that the EMSP role does not disappear. In the schema of the EV charging connectivity protocols, we act as a mobility provider ourselves. That's why I said that we need to make a separation between
how the connectivity is established and how you can access the charging infrastructure across Europe in a consistent way, and how the money flows underneath and how billing happens underneath - that is a completely separate topic. You need to separate these two layers, both of which are needed for a charging session to happen, to be priced, and to be billed. But the two things are not tied together today; they are parts of two completely separate protocols. On one side you have the closed-loop EV charging protocols like OCPI or OICP.
And on the other side you have what are open-loop payments, like Mastercard or Visa, and all the billing, invoicing, and accounting streams that go together with them. So that's why to me roaming hubs are there to stay - they are needed, they are useful, I don't think they are going anywhere. So for these two layers we will need roaming hubs and platforms like Carria that also have this EMSP role, and there will probably be more of them than today, but not necessarily the MSP as we know it today.
My take is that the EMSP as a reseller is, for multiple reasons, not a business model that I believe will last for a long time. Namely because margins are going to become tighter and tighter. There is very little point in having two financial transactions to complete one charging session - one being the invoice from the CPO to the EMSP and then all the invoicing from the EMSP to the end customer. Why not just do it once? It's simpler, it's faster. On the other side, right now the market is still relatively small, so
the volumes are still manageable from a credit-risk perspective. When these volumes start becoming tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, on a monthly basis, the fact that you as an EMSP can have potentially tens of millions of invoices from a CPO puts a CPO
in a really not so good position when it comes to credit risk, because if the EMSP goes bankrupt in that month, the tens of millions worth of energy that you have already delivered - on which you would have to pay your bills to the grid provider, to the electricity provider - there is no guarantee that you will see that money, because you are an unsecured creditor. And I believe that at some point the financial regulator will also start having a closer look at the industry, because right now it is more manageable, but
I don't think that this is gonna be the case forever. Is there any other role - this is quite a disruptive view, which is also quite cool to have people looking at that industry and rethinking it completely - is there another role like that, a modus operandi that we know in the e-mobility industry so far, that you think could be different in the future? Well, that's a good question. I would need to think about it more closely, but I feel that in general we know that there are a lot of discussions about what's coming next. So, let's assume that.
If charging protocols work, payment flows work, reliability gets to a point where the error rates stop being around 14% today and get more into the 0.something percent range - we have a situation where now by law ISO 15118, which enables plug-and-charge and V2G, is mandatory for newly installed stations. That of course opens the realm of new possibilities, both on the authentication side - so plug-and-charge becoming a little bit more accessible and widespread, which should make it easier for the end customer - but then there is a whole discussion on how.
EV charging becomes more of an active participant in the energy market, and how we can help overall grid stability to become better, and how we can avoid having to deploy too many stationary batteries, because we have a lot of kilowatt-hours that are not moving for 80% of the time and how we can get them to contribute to stabilizing the grid, stabilizing the pricing of electricity throughout the day, because interestingly sometimes there is a bit of a.
Nice matching between when cars are not used and when energy is most requested. So I guess that's gonna be the next big topic - how EV charging will become part of the overall energy ecosystem in a more integrated way. Yeah, we'll come to that, as you know this podcast is called Smart Charge by RiDERgy. So I definitely can't wait to deep dive into that. But before we do that, just to get a full rounded understanding of Karia, what's the size of the company right now? Things that you can share with us?
We are growing quite nicely. We are a VC-backed startup, so we operate on milestones. To date we have raised around 5 million across our pre-seed and seed financing rounds. We are a small team and we want to stay a small team for as long as we can. Right now we are a team of 14, distributed across Germany, the UK, and Ukraine, so we are quite a diverse bunch of people. The reason why we want to stay small is because it gives you agility.
Of course it means there is a lot to do and nobody coming to the rescue if something is not done, but at the same time I feel there is a beauty in having a small, scrappy team that can really react quickly to market needs or customer needs and bring them together. We are very picky about how we hire people and we want to make sure that we have a very cohesive team with diverse perspectives and diverse skill sets.
But in general, we want to stay as small as possible for as long as we can, until our hands are bleeding, in a way. And you're based here in Berlin, right? The headquarters is here in Berlin, and the operations right now - is it only Germany, or do you have other markets that you already operate in or want to operate in? Historically we have been operating in Germany and Austria. These have been our core markets. We recently opened Italy a couple of weeks ago.
With the team being heavily Italian, I guess it was just a matter of time. It was for us also a good way of testing a different kind of market, which has a different stage of maturity and different market penetration of EVs, to understand if there are any differences we need to be aware of before we start going pan-European. The plan is to go pan-European by the end of the year, and we have some pretty nice announcements in the pipeline between now and then.
The platform itself is globally scalable - if we wanted to, we could go to the US tomorrow - but it becomes a matter of focus. That's why we were quite diligent in saying we want to start getting the platform up and running in Germany and Austria, learn, and make sure that we have an extremely robust.
Platform, and then open up to partners beyond these geographies. Are there any geographies that don't make sense for Karia? For example, the number of CPOs or how the market is structured? Of course the platform makes a ton of sense the more fragmented the market is, but that said, even if you have 10 different CPOs it still makes sense, because.
You would anyway need a layer of aggregation to support companies like automotive OEMs, rental car companies, or ride-hailing companies that need to offer charging to their fleets - they prefer to have it in one single aggregated layer. So ultimately, unless there is only one or two CPOs, it still makes sense. Makes sense. And when you started the company - you said you worked before in corporates a lot - was there a moment of big shock when you became a founder, compared to those previous corporate roles?
It's different. I mean, I would be lying to say otherwise. At the same time, for everything there is a trade-off, right? So in your corporate job, your salary comes at the end of the month and you know that you have a support structure and you know that there is always the cavalry around the corner. At the same time, I feel that the learning curve that you get when you found a startup is geometrically
steeper compared to the learning curve that you have in corporate. I always say that founding a startup is a completely irrational thing to do from an economical perspective because the odds are stacked heavily against you. But at the same time I feel that the journey and the learning is something that has no price, irrespective of the outcome.
I still believe that Carri is going to be extremely successful, and that it has all the hallmarks of being a very successful company. But at the same time I know that the learning itself and the journey, and the fact that you have to look at so many things that typically would not be your own business in a corporate world, that just pays off for everything else. If you had to mention one key learning that you can already say will stay with you thanks to Carri. In a way, it's
clarity. In a way it's the ability to find clarity relatively quickly and then act upon it. I think that of course you have the typical reasons why a startup dies, which is typically you run out of money or the founders fall out. But to me there is another one that is maybe less known, which is having too many good ideas and trying to chase everything. At some point you are so deep into it that if everything is important, you have a problem.
And that's where having the ability to take a step back, despite having to swim for your life in the meanwhile, and having a clear understanding of what you need to do to be successful down the line - it's something that the corporate world would really struggle to teach you the same way. Makes sense. And you said there are three founders. How did you choose your two other founders and how do you split responsibilities? We chose each other, in a way. It's not something - it's not me doing the casting like X Factor.
It's really that you talk to people and then you share the idea, and then ultimately, if you have worked together, you de-risk a lot of the decision-making process because you already know the other person a little bit - the positive side, the negative side, the biases and everything - and you know that you can work with this person in the long run and you have already proved that you can work with this person, right?
And the way that we divide the tasks is relatively straightforward because we are basically 100% complementary. We have very little overlap between the three of us - or the four of us if you include Mario, who joined us a year later. We all have different backgrounds. Stefano is highly technical, with a computer science background and an academic profile in artificial intelligence. Tamara is an exceptionally skilled salesperson and people person.
I am more on the product side, the strategy side, and just trying to find creative solutions to problems. And Mario, if you want, is the one with an investment banking background - very rigorous, very organized - who can keep us running like a Swiss clock. So for us it was very natural not to step on each other's toes. Sounds good. And you likened your Connect API to what Stripe does for payments. Is it a fair comparison, or in which way do you think there are also differences?
In my opinion it is a fair comparison. I'll let you decide about it. But to bring substance to that claim, you need to imagine going back to the early 2000s when, if you wanted to start your e-commerce website, you had to go to your bank and get an acquiring bank account.
And then you had to negotiate connections with Visa, with Mastercard, with Amex, and then connect to PayPal, because that's the way the market was structured. Stripe was not the first one to create an abstraction layer that would simplify the whole thing, but the earlier solutions were not exactly developer-friendly and were quite clumsy.
And that's where, all of a sudden, Stripe decided to build something for developers - something that would have taken three months of work before you could now do in an afternoon, because all the complexity you had to deal with was already taken care of by Stripe, and all you needed was an API that you could connect to your checkout system to process payments, right? That's how Stripe became what it is today.
And if you look at the EV charging world - if today, let's say, I'm a German car manufacturer, but really any OEM, any car manufacturer around the world, or a fleet solution provider or rental car company, you name it - and I need to offer charging to my customers. Today I have different choices, right? I become an e-mobility provider myself, meaning I need to build all the connectivity with roaming hubs and charge point operators directly where it makes sense. So I need to stand up a team for that.
You need to stand up a commercial team that negotiates deals with the different charge point operators and with the roaming hubs and so on and so forth. You would need the operations to deal with all the influx of invoices, checking the invoices, checking that they match the charging transactions, and so on and so forth. And all of this, to make it work properly, would take you 9 to 12 months, right? The other option that you have realistically is to buy an API service from one of the established e-mobility providers. But at that point, you pay a SaaS fee.
To offer charging to your customers, you're not making any money. You probably are going to offer to your customers inflated prices, because these are the prices that the eMSPs need to make a living. It can be any combination, but ultimately what you realize is charging will never be a profit center for you. It's going to be a cost center. So each charging session that happens via these APIs, each user that is using this API is going to be a cost for you. And this is where we come in, right, because I guess you can start seeing the parallel.
This is where our API is free to use. Or to connect, because it can also be easier than a full-fledged API integration, which is an easy on-ramp solution that is maybe more targeted to mapping providers. But in both cases, there is no cost to use the service. There is no onboarding fee, no monthly fee whatsoever. And actually, we help you monetize your user base when it comes to charging, because one of the beauties of the platform model is that it allows you to make those that have these large fleets that need charging
become affiliates to the CPO and to us, meaning that we recognize part of our revenue to them in exchange for them bringing the customers to the CPO. And all of a sudden you can see how, making a step back from the Stripe analogy, all of a sudden you have the three key players in the value chain that all of a sudden have aligned incentives, because the CPO can actually and actively promote their own infrastructure on their own terms.
You have those that have access to these pools of demand that can monetize the user without trying to make money out of the customer. And you have the end customer that has a fair and transparent price that is coming directly from the charge point operator. And this is, in our perspective, the only way that this market can flourish and scale. Interesting. And the apps - to take the analogy of Stripe - Stripe is not providing an app, it's just an API that developers need to integrate within their app.
So you're suggesting that the fleets and the OEMs would have their own app, right? They already do. It's just that it's a white label built by somebody else or an API built by somebody else, where this somebody else is typically the eMSP. Makes sense. So that's, yeah, I think it's a fair comparison. And the payment methods as well are coming through this API, right? Everything is managed similarly to Stripe. There is literally no complexity for you to offer charging services. Maybe a random question that just comes up: why couldn't Stripe enter the industry
and do the same? Is it a risk you're considering? I mean, it's the typical question that some VCs ask, and I have to say it's a little bit irritating. "What if Google comes in?" And yeah, sure, but the reality is that there is a lot of complexity in the recharging world, and I don't believe that the market is mature enough for a company like Stripe to come in and build it themselves.
I think that it's going to be a market that is going to be looked at more and more, but typically this is the situation where it's more of a partnership exercise for these companies rather than entering into the arena themselves. That makes sense. And for the integration that these players need to do with you, who is typically the fastest? Is it more the CPOs or more on the other side, the fleets and OEMs? Well, on the supply side, I guess that by now we have a very well established onboarding process and it can go relatively quickly. And of course it depends sometimes.
You can't ignore the fact that some of the CPOs are part of ginormous companies that have their own internal processes, and we need to respect that and go with their own timelines. But I'd say that from a lift perspective it's actually quite easy to do, and there is no development needed on their side, therefore things go relatively quickly. On the demand side, it depends. I would say that our experience so far is that mapping providers are the quickest - the likes of HERE, the likes of A Better Route Planner, you name it, Google.
Not yet. And then I think that the others - we are exploring partnerships right now and we are in pretty advanced discussions - but we know that the moment you start touching a utility application or an automotive product, things become a little bit more complicated and the integration cycles can go to timelines of 6 to 9 months. But that's just the reality. And are the small ones even able to do it, or do they maybe lack development resources, or do they need to just buy it from a third party then?
No, I think that in general we also see young startups that are implementing our API, so it's really, really easy. I mean, if you want to, in one week you are up and running. The day that we launched the API, we demonstrated how - and this was not staged - we showed up at the charging station. I'm not a coder. I mean, I understand code, but I cannot code, right? And
On purpose we showed up at the station with absolutely nothing, just the keys for the production environment of the API and Lovable, which is this vibe coding app, and in 15 minutes we built a functioning charging app that allowed me to physically charge at a real working station. So documentation is very well done, it's simple to implement, and I would say that everybody can do it. Yeah, especially now in the age of AI. I'm also quite excited these days about the potential of AI. Is it actually something?
How do you look at AI development and how does it help Carria, or how does it change the offering in the market? Well, for our internal development, that would be a question for Stefano, to be honest, because I'm not completely involved in that. I know that it's being used, but we are not vibe coding the hell out of everything because it's risky, in particular when it's a mission-critical infrastructure, because it needs to work, right?
You cannot have something that has been vibe coded on which, oops, doesn't work, and then all of a sudden you have somebody stranded with 2% battery at a charger that doesn't work, right? So we just cannot do that. But of course, can we use it responsibly? Absolutely, and that's what we do.
We are already using AI for different purposes, like our smart pricing, which is the world's first dynamic pricing engine based on AI that looks at multiple variables that can help determine what is the best price for each and every location of the charge point operator. This is done programmatically, so you don't have to go and change prices at every single station - we do it in an automated fashion. I also see some nice progress when it comes to AI customer support, which is pretty nice.
I have my own ideas about how this could progress, but that remains to be seen. I think you can see companies like Monta, for example, starting to get into self-healing charging infrastructure where errors are surfaced before a user notices, which is also quite nice. So I think AI definitely has a place in the business, and then of course when we move into the grid part and predicting how the grid is going to behave and how to compensate for that.
Clearly you need a more real-time, agentic way of doing it rather than having the grid operator at the DSO level saying, "Hey, I need more energy" or something like that. So there is definitely a place for it, definitely. Yeah, there's room for improvement. And talking from - we've already talked with a few - but maybe there's anything we missed in terms of product integration or system architecture. So you have definitely a connectivity towards the CPOs, you have a connectivity towards them.
The fleets or the OEMs that are having the end customer contact - is there any other interconnection that we have missed in your product? No, I don't think that we need to make it look more complicated than it already is. For us it's really about connecting people, in a way - just to name the motto of the company I used to work for. In a way, for us it's just that we want to create a healthier
value chain that can scale together with the market. And connecting vehicles - that is part of it. We have been playing with vehicle connectivity for a few years now, but for us it's not necessarily the core of our business for the time being. This might change, that's why we continue playing with it, but it's not something that we are actively using beyond giving the convenience to the end customer to see the state of charge on their own on the app.
We know that the potential is much bigger than that, and that at some point the question is where this data point is going to come from - is it going to come from the API of the automotive OEM, or is it going to come from the ISO 15118 power line communication? That remains to be seen. But yeah, that's definitely something that, in particular when it comes to V2G and smart charging use cases, is going to be crucial. And coming back to price transparency, you had already touched upon a year
- do you think it will come as a regulatory push, or will the market decide, or will it be a mix of both in your view? My hope is that it's not going to come through regulation, because my belief is that if a market fails to regulate itself and forces the regulator to intervene, typically the outcome is suboptimal. It creates situations that are not necessarily what the market needs and not what companies need to thrive, because typically regulator-mandated policies, in particular when it comes to pricing, tend to be extremely rigid.
And they tend to favor certain players more than others. So my hope is that the market will adjust itself and learn how to self-regulate rather than getting into a situation where we force the hand of the regulator to intervene more than they already have. And there is lots of criticism from EV drivers - that I myself have also experienced - and I think you're spot on that the market as it is right now is having some issues with price transparency and high prices, in particular at public chargers.
What do you think we could get if Carria was to be successful in terms of not only price transparency but also price reduction at public charge points? Well, price reduction can only come from one single place, or maybe two. One is something that we can certainly contribute to; the other one a little bit less. So the one where we can contribute less is that.
I believe that the way that the grid fees are structured today is not something that is designed for the EV charging world, where you will have the random day where you reach a peak capacity in terms of what you draw from the grid. But if this is a one-off and then you keep on paying an exorbitant amount for the rest of the time where your station is sitting idle, of course CPOs need to pass this cost to the end customer.
So this is something that - I know there are discussions about making grid fees congestion-based and also a little bit more dynamic - which would definitely contribute to lowering the fixed cost of charge point operators. The other one, realistically, is utilization, because the reality is that more than 50% of the cost of a CPO is coming from something other than the cost of electricity.
And in that situation, the more kilowatt hours are delivered by the plug, the more you can spread those fixed costs that are beyond the dynamic cost of energy, and that's where prices can go down. Then how will this happen? Of course we need to have more EVs per charging point. So I think there has to be a bit more thoughtful deployment of the infrastructure, maximizing what we have where we can, and eventually building where we need.
And that would contribute to improving utilization. Of course we also need to avoid getting ourselves into nightmare scenarios where, on peak traffic days, stations are slammed - and that's not a good experience either. I was hearing stories from fellow EV drivers traveling during the summer where you have certain locations that are completely jammed, where borderline you block the traffic because you have people queuing to charge. Where was that, for example? I saw this myself in Italy.
I got an account from another person this morning in France where actually people had to direct the traffic because the queue was becoming so long that it was also jamming the entrance to the service area for people that just wanted to go to the restaurant. So of course these are exceptions, but at the same time - and this is maybe anecdotal - by driving a few thousand kilometers a year, even long distance with an electric car, this is sometimes also driven by the fact that people tend to stop.
All at the same location. And then sometimes you find yourself with one location in a specific area that is completely jammed, and then you drive one kilometer more and it's a completely free station with full power capacity, meaning that you can also drive away quicker. But this is where I feel that using, among other strategies, price as a way to redistribute the capacity across the infrastructure would allow the infrastructure to be truly optimized. Yeah. Just yesterday, actually - I think it doesn't apply only to EV chargers. I was on a train.
I had to get back to Berlin from the outskirts, and I wanted to take a train at 7 p.m. - prime time, Sunday 7 p.m., regional train back to Berlin - so it was packed and I didn't manage to get on, whereas the train one hour later had so much space. So I guess we also cannot design the whole charging infrastructure for that one moment of the year where it's too jammed, but we do need smarter mechanisms. And that's exactly the problem, right? When you hear those claims - we will need 5 million charging points by 2028.
Sure, for what? For those two days a year where the infrastructure is congested in specific places? I think we are smarter than that, and I think there is going to be a combination of dynamic pricing that would discourage peak times - if you want to travel at peak time and you need to, sure, but eventually you would need to pay more. It's going to become about routing engines in cars and in apps becoming smarter and telling you, well, you know what.
Maybe you should travel a little bit earlier or a little bit later, because you're going to be incurring the risk of congestion, which will extend your journey significantly. Because not only do you have to wait to charge - it's a double whammy - you have to wait, but also when the station is jammed it delivers.
Not the power rating that is on the connector specification, because very few operators have grid connections that can support the rated power for each plug, because grid fees are expensive. And all of a sudden you find yourself charging a big 100 kWh battery at 60 kW - then what? You lose an hour. Yeah, very good point. And talking about grid fees and load management and so on - you're seeing dynamic grid fees. I agree that could be a very good way to especially deal with congestion at the grid level and reduce costs.
Is it a topic that you're following a lot? Do you see it coming already? Do you follow some countries where it's done better? Well, I'm not closely following because I need to pick my battles, but we're keeping an eye on it. I know that there are some good intentions in Germany. I know that the Nordics are already looking at something like that. Typically that's how grid maturity tends to travel, north to south. But to me that has to happen. You cannot have the situations that we have today.
Yeah, and in terms of your AI price forecast, you said it takes into account a variety of factors - how do you weigh those factors? Ultimately it must be quite complicated, especially given the example we just talked about. With drivers in the summertime, you need to consider their needs, you need to consider the grid, you need to consider probably local grids, and so on. So right now the model is not grid-aware because we needed to tackle bigger problems first and we need to have a model that works, because you need to start simple, right?
And what we are looking at right now is that if you look at an average charge point operator - by average I mean with an average utilization rate of their own infrastructure of 8 to 10% - what you will notice is that this 8 to 10% is not evenly distributed. You have 10% max of the infrastructure that is really a workhorse, that really works really well, because the location was spot on, because it's in a hotspot of EV adoption, you name it. It can be everything.
And then you have typically 90% - the long tail of charging infrastructure - that is not exactly being used, with situations where sometimes we see utilization rates of like 1%. And keep in mind that the break-even sweet spot is around 20 to 23%. Really? So we are still far away from a charge point
operator business being profitable outright. And that's why sometimes the claim that CPOs are greedy and want to hoard as much money as possible is a little bit unfair. It's easy to use them as scapegoats, but sometimes if you look realistically at the economics of EV charging, it's a bet on the future. It's not something that you are doing today, but nevertheless, cheap capital is over, so therefore you need to do something to stay afloat.
But then, also going back to the topic: you have 10% that works really well, 90% that could do better. But crucially also, the stations that work well do not work well throughout the day. They have their own peak moments, and typically what you see is that you have the charging point - the charging location - that is in a parking lot of a fast food chain, which would work really well at lunchtime, at dinnertime, and on Sunday afternoon. Makes sense.
And then you have the supermarket that would work really well between 5 p.m. and 7, 8 p.m. So it really varies. And that's what we are optimizing for right now. We're looking at multiple variables that go from historical performance, year over year, 30-day average, plus we layer on top social demographics, market penetration - quite a few variables. Stefano has a better picture of everything.
And that allows us to define what is the optimal pricing profile on an hourly basis, on a daily basis, for every single charging station in your network. Which means that as a CPO you can avoid dropping the price on everything in an attempt to increase utilization - because that also means cannibalizing the profitability of the stations that are working well.
While maybe for the others you could have done more using smart pricing. With our AI-based pricing, you can keep the profitability of the over-utilized stations because the model is going to say there's no need to change price there, but maybe for those that might require a little kick to get more drivers there - and why not also incentivize people who are considering buying an electric car? They can say, "I have some good options to charge conveniently at a fair price, even if I cannot have a wall box at home."
So that's what we're looking at. I think the topic of grid capacity and ultimately spot market pricing is something that we are looking at. We did some experiments with Lichtblick that were largely successful, but it is just a matter of deciding what to prioritize. And will it come? Absolutely. When - that also depends on when charge point operators will
adjust their procurement strategy more towards spot market pricing rather than working on fixed procurement to avoid, for example, the winter spikes in pricing. So they prefer predictability rather than dynamic pricing. Got it. And in which way was it successful with Lichtblick, or what was the scope? So with Lichtblick, at some point - you remember that week, that weekend where prices went down to like €-500 at some point - Lichtblick decided they were going to offer charging for free.
And ultimately, because the prices are negative, you can still make money as a CPO despite giving the product away for free to drivers. And drivers reacted really, really well. Very cool. Yeah, and talking about - I think as you said, a lot of EV drivers feel like CPOs are taking advantage. Taking a more optimistic and realistic look, maybe also based on your data: you said 23% is the utilization needed - what price can we achieve?
So if there's an EV driver, or somebody who is skeptical about EV driving because they see these high prices at public charging - what can we achieve eventually, or where will we get once utilization goes up? Prices that are of course not near household prices, but what is achievable? I think it's not necessarily a target price that we should look at, but it's more of a calculation on what is more convenient, or what is more economically effective.
Because there are multiple factors when it comes to adopting a new technology that would make it successful or not. So right now we need to take as a frame of reference what people use today, which is a petrol car or a diesel car. You need to factor in a comparison because, basically, ultimately it's about the total cost of ownership. Is this total cost of ownership greater or lower than owning a petrol car? If it's lower, people will adopt. If it's greater...
In my economic studies, I have hardly seen a case of a technology that is more expensive for doing the same job taking over. So that's why to me it's not about the price per se of the kilowatt hour. Are cars going to become cheaper than petrol cars? So the initial capex that you put down to buy an EV is going to become lower than a petrol car. Yes, great. What about the residual value?
Am I buying something that's then going to be worth nothing in 4 years, or can I sell it in 4 years and still have a decent residual value? And that's important also for fleet cars and leasing companies. And then, is it going to be cheaper to run it? Of course then you have maintenance, where we know that EVs have lower maintenance costs than petrol cars because there are fewer moving parts, and then you have the cost of energy.
Of course, right now, if you're relying exclusively on public charging, depending on where you live - but not necessarily. I guess that you go on par, considering the oil shock that brought prices from €1.60 to €2 per liter in Germany, just to take a reference. At that point I feel that electric cars are getting lower, so we are somehow at parity right now. But the reality is that you need to factor in also the switching costs, and the perceived advantage needs to be at least 10 to 20% cheaper in terms of TCO perspective for somebody to make the jump.
So what we're looking at is: what is the cost per kilowatt hour that would contribute to this perceived saving of 15–20% that would convince people to make the switch? And this number is going to become lower and lower, because the more people adopt, the more EVs are out there. Pardon me - the more they feel that this is normal, that they are not being guinea pigs, they're not taking a risk, because they're seeing everybody doing it. And therefore you can probably get away with, you know, parity or -5%.
But that's the way you need to look at the problem. Ultimately, for the average person - who is not the typical EV early adopter that tends to be a geek working in IT, who buys an EV for the technology and, in a way, for environmental qualifications - when you go to the mass market, it becomes an economics problem, no longer a tech or an environmental concern problem.
That's why I was willing to pinpoint you to a specific kilowatt hour price where I think it would be attractive enough. Because now, if you talk to the common person, exactly as you say, they will raise the objection: no, it's too expensive for me. But once the capex - and we are imminently there - makes EVs actually cheaper, if the operating costs don't follow... I mean, of course the diesel price goes up, but ideally we would also have a cheaper alternative. There are multiple researchers that point to that.
A price that is considered fair and interesting for the average EV driver today is around 39 cents on AC and 49 cents on DC. That's what is considered an OK price, and people can live with that. But then again, you can have this aspirational price, but of course if your economics as a CPO cannot support it, you cannot realistically ask the CPO to just blindly go for it. It has to be better orchestrated in a way, and that's a good segue to the topic of smart charging and V2G.
You already did a very cool project with Lichtblick. Do you think that we will be able also to have smart charging, V2G, and public charging - thereby even getting lower than that? As you said, you were able to offer something for free. How cool is that? If these types of stories start accumulating, we will definitely get the masses. You can either pay €2 per liter, or you can even drive for free at certain times of the day. How cool is that? Or even get paid.
It depends on the way you look at it, because to me there are a few things that are not completely clear. For example, when it comes to smart charging - and of course now I'm taking a bit more of an eye on public charging, because that's where the problem that we're talking about today lies - the real question is: who is selling smart charging services to the grid? Because you have multiple actors: you have the CPO that could do that, you have the CPMS provider that could do that.
You have the EMP - some EMPs are trying to position themselves to be the ones orchestrating that. And then you have the car manufacturer, because the car manufacturer is the one that has access to the car and can modulate how much energy the car draws, if any. So what I am still not clear on is: how do you make sure that these three, four, five actors can really cooperate for the greater good? And on top of that, you have the end customer that needs to get something out of it. So how do you do that? How do you keep all these players in sync and remunerated?
And how do you make sure that the grid operator doesn't buy the same product twice? To me, is there value in it? Yes, probably more in certain countries than others, because we know that, for example, the Netherlands have a completely overloaded grid and EV charging is a real problem there, because everybody is charging on AC wall boxes on the streets - that's creating the problem. Does the problem have the same magnitude everywhere? Probably not, and then it becomes more of a...
It becomes more of a procurement topic of CPOs that are buying on dynamic pricing, because of course if you can say, look, plug in your car at 8, but then please let me not draw any energy between 6 in the evening and midnight, I will let you keep the car plugged until the morning after and you will get your car full by the time you need to go - then yes, then it makes sense. And the same goes for V2G, right? So the first question is, I think that V2G is gonna...
Become first a trust topic, because we need to convince drivers that yeah, we're gonna draw energy from your car, but don't worry, we're gonna give it back to you. And then you can make a nice arbitrage on the delta, on the transaction. Then whether this is gonna be a use case that is gonna be as attractive on public charging as on home charging is to be seen, because I can see home and office charging as a better use case for V2G, because the car is clearly connected on a...
The entire day nonstop, and you're not hogging a charging facility that somebody might need to use to effectively charge. So we need to consider that aspect as well. Exactly. The utilization that we were just talking about is a bit of a conflict, right? There's an opportunity cost if you have a car plugged in longer than it should just to charge as fast as possible. I think I can see the window between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. the day after, where you have 12 hours where realistically at night...
You don't have a lot of turnover of cars, so that makes total sense. But during the day I struggle to see how you can fit utilization targets in terms of delivery of energy with the expectation of having somebody leaving the cars there all day with a battery at the service of the grid. I don't think that this is a viable way of doing V2G. And what's your vision towards - like you said, we are around 5% now in absolute numbers of adoption of EVs in the total car fleet or vehicle fleet - once we really get rid of fossil fuels, what's the vision you are working towards?
What do you envision? Well, getting completely rid of fossil fuels is going to take a while. I don't think that there is any point in us taking ourselves for a ride. I believe that it's increasing quite aggressively, and we see the price of new cars dropping, becoming better, charging faster. So by all means we are going in the right direction. I can totally see in 5 years electric cars being like 50% plus of the newly registered cars.
But then the replacement cycles of old cars is going to take a little bit longer, so I don't think that we will achieve a full fleet replacement until probably the late 2030s, 2035, something like that. And do you think it will be mostly public charging - like all these cars that we see in Berlin, for example, in other cities in the street - where will they charge? That's an interesting question, because historically there was always this statement: 80% of charging happens at home.
But to me that was the result of a reverse correlation, which was: as a driver, the question was, can I have a wall box at home? If yes, I would buy an electric car, otherwise I would wait. These times are over, right? And already today, public charging represents around 30% of the overall energy charged.
There are multiple researchers pointing to the fact that this number is gonna become more like 50% in the long run, by 2035 or something like that. And you can see that happening - as you said, you have a lot of people, particularly living in large and densely populated areas like Hamburg, Berlin, large urban centers that...
Cannot park in off-street parking and therefore are naturally disqualified from having access to a private charger, or simply the building does not allow for it for multiple reasons. At that point, of course, you need to make sure that the infrastructure is capable of dealing with this amount of people needing to charge. And of course this is gonna be a nice problem for the different governments of the local municipalities to see what can be done there.
And honestly, the more people gain confidence in traveling long distance - long distance you do it in public, you have no choice - and therefore I am quite bullish that public charging is gonna represent 50% easily of the total amount of energy delivered to electric cars. And will there be more AC or DC within cities, for example? That's a good question. I think that this becomes a bit of an opinion-based conversation because there are different camps.
I see the value of DC, and you could not live without it during long distance trips and so on and so forth. So I guess that's the need that's been demonstrated. I can see a place for these large DC chargers if you really need to charge quickly, for example, in supermarket chains, the parking of supermarket chains, or - pardon me - in petrol stations that are going to be reconverted eventually. But personally, I still see a lot of value in AC charging.
I tend to do all my urban charging on AC chargers, not because I don't have a DC charger nearby, but simply because if I'm not in a rush, I don't care. I'm happy to go plug my car and then pick it up when it's ready, and it's absolutely no problem to me. I have enough options around me where I live, and it just works. And honestly, it puts less of a strain on the grid capacity than the big 400 kW charger we've talked a lot about today. Now, as we are getting to - we're already at the visionary part.
So what is the vision for you for Karia, if you were to think long term? Well, for us, we really want to become this commercial interoperability layer of the industry, and that's what we are focused on. We want to make sure that we create a healthy and vibrant ecosystem where charge point operators can sell their energy directly across wherever their customers are, and they can actively drive their commercial strategy at scale with one single input.
That's what we are looking at, and we know that if you make the parallel - when fuel is going to be phased out and electricity is going to be the main fuel to get around - we see that even without counting China, this is a $1 trillion market. So we don't need to get obsessed about finding new revenue streams or anything. We just need to be focused on making it great for charge point operators to sell their energy.
We need to make it great for the developers on the connect side, to make sure that they have a reliable and robust product. Yeah, I think that's our job. So you arrived here with an EV, and usually you drive EVs - that's good. When you have like 20 minutes on a charger, what do you usually like to spend your time on? I wish I had a lot of choices, but typically that results in getting my kids to the toilet before the car is ready. And fun fact, the car is ready before the family is ready to move on.
So for me, this idea of - yeah, you lose a lot of time driving an EV - I don't see that. Because I can promise you that I always try to be a good citizen and leave the plug when it's 80%. I don't need more. But let's say that realistically it's more like 85%, because it takes longer for the kids to have done their toilet run and stretched their legs and eaten something than for the car to be ready. And you have done long trips to Italy from Berlin as well, all the time. So it's possible - a lot of Germans like to go, and I do it all the time. I'm used to it.
There are plenty of options to charge along the road. Honestly, I've brought it to a point where I also have no problem arriving in turtle mode with like 5 kilometers of range left in the battery, because I know that even if one charger doesn't work, I somehow have an alternative somewhere. I still have this anecdote - it was last summer, I was coming back alone with my two kids on the back seats. When I drive from Italy it's 1,100 kilometers.
I come from near Milan, so from Berlin it's 1,100 kilometers, and I do it in one go. I remember it was like 11 at night, so we were getting closer but still had a couple of hours to go. And I had like 5% and I asked myself: let's hope this charger works. I knew that I had options, but you ask yourself the question - what am I going to do if all of them fail? Nevertheless, I think that right now you can travel way more relaxed, and you can see the evolution. It's crazy.
I did my first long distance trip in 2021, and if you do it today, it's a completely different ball game. Chargers are faster, you are done before you're ready, and you have so many options that range anxiety, in my opinion, is a thing of the past - or a thing of somebody that has never driven an EV. Then it becomes more like charging anxiety, meaning: will I get ripped off, or will the charger work? But that's a different story, and it requires different solutions.
And to be fair, the first EV models - I myself also bought a Nissan Leaf where indeed the kilometer range was very, very limited. Nowadays it's a completely different ball game, and indeed I would say it's maybe legacy thinking. And we're just getting started, even in improving range and improving charging speed. So I think, as you said, solutions like yours and others will keep on improving. And which solution do you use to pay and to navigate? I'll try to make a guess. Very good. Well, Isam, thanks a lot for your time and energy, and best of luck with Karia.
Thanks a lot for having me. It was a pleasure, and best of luck. Thanks a lot. Three things stick from the conversation. First, the price transparency problem won't be solved by regulation alone, but by making the operator the seller again. Karia leaves pricing power with the CPO, charges no fees on the demand side, and instead shares revenue with those who bring drivers - like OEMs and fleets. Second, the economics live or die with utilization: 8 to 10% a day to break even, above 20% to profit. And the lever isn't blanket discounts, but smarter pricing.
I loved the Liftlike example with free charging when there were negative prices in May. So hour by hour, side by side, AI-driven without cannibalization of the profitable chargers. That's smart charging pricing. Third, charging is no longer just an energy business. When prices go negative, charging can be free, and with V2G, you can even get paid with your EV in public chargers, and the operator still makes money by selling grid services. Issam's supermarket without price tag orange analogy hits the mark.
As long as the price depends on which card you pull out, the mass market stays on the sidelines. The platform that changes this doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, just apply proven marketplace models to the charge point. Want to see what that looks like in practice? Watch the Connect API launch, 15 minutes from zero to working charging app at a real charger. Incredible. And if you're ever stuck at a charger in Italy with 2 kids and 5%, just remember the car's usually ready before the family is. See you next time.
节目笔记
The same charger, at the same location, can carry 50 different prices depending on which card you hold. Issam Tidjani, Co-Founder and CEO of Cariqa, argues the cause is the business model underneath public charging: as long as e-mobility providers buy energy from charge point operators and resell it, the operator becomes a passenger in its own business, priced by someone else and exposed to 80 to 90% of its demand coming from someone else. The conversation gets concrete about what that costs everyone. The same charger, at the same location, can carry 50 different prices depending on which card you hold, which Issam compares to a supermarket with no price tags where the till asks how you intend to pay. On the operator side the economics are unforgiving: average utilisation runs at 8 to 10% while break even sits around 20 to 23%, roughly 10% of stations do the real work, and more than half of an operator's cost has nothing to do with electricity. Cariqa's answer is a platform where the operator stays the merchant of record, plus a Connect API Issam likens to what Stripe did for online payments, free to integrate and built so a working charging app can be assembled in an afternoon. They also get into where this collides with the grid. Issam wants grid fees that are congestion based rather than punishing a single annual peak, is sceptical that Europe needs five million charge points to serve two congested days a year, and would rather the market found its own pricing discipline than have AFIR force it. On smart charging and V2G he is deliberately careful: the hard part is not the technology but getting operators, CPMS providers, e-mobility providers and carmakers to cooperate without the grid operator buying the same flexibility twice, and he sees home and office charging as the better fit for V2G because parking a car all day on a public charger fights the utilisation the industry needs. An episode about the plumbing under EV charging, and about what it takes for a market to fix its own incentives before someone else does it for it. Topics covered: - Why the reseller model makes charge point operators passengers - Price chaos and the case for one price per station - Utilisation economics and why charge point operators are not simply greedy - AI driven per station pricing, and a free weekend on negative power prices - Grid fees, congestion and the case against building for peak days - Where V2G actually fits, and where it does not
提到的资源
嘉宾的公司
- Cariqa
Issam Tidjani's company: direct payments infrastructure for EV charging, where the operator stays the seller.
- Cariqa Connect API
The API compared to Stripe in the episode: OEMs, fleets and apps offer charging at the operator's own price.
- Cariqa API documentation
The documentation Issam calls simple to implement.
- A Better Routeplanner enables charging via Cariqa Connect
Cariqa's announcement of the route planner Issam names among the mapping providers that integrate fastest.
法规与标准
- AFIR: Regulation (EU) 2023/1804
The EU regulation on alternative fuels infrastructure, including payment and price transparency rules. Issam expects a revision later in 2026.
- ISO 15118 (Part 1: general information and use cases)
The vehicle to grid communication standard behind plug and charge and V2G.
- OCPI (Open Charge Point Interface)
Open roaming protocol between charge point operators and e-mobility providers, maintained by the EVRoaming Foundation.
- OICP (Open InterCharge Protocol)
Hubject's roaming protocol, released as open source in 2019.
公司与工具
- HERE Technologies
The mapping and location company where Issam worked before founding Cariqa.
- A Better Routeplanner
The EV route planner, one of the mapping providers integrating the Connect API.
- Lovable
The AI app builder used to build a working charging app on the Connect API in minutes.
- Monta
Charging software company Issam names for self-healing charging infrastructure.
- Stripe
The payments platform Issam compares the Connect API to.
- LichtBlick
The energy provider Issam describes offering free charging during negative power prices.