”When you are driving an electric car, you don’t necessarily drive to the gas station anymore, it has moved to your home.” So, it is a major shift in behaviour and experience we are seeing now.” This was one of the opening statements from Nathalie Kinell from CLEVER Sverige AB, who was presenting at the second edition of Future Transportation Square.
CLEVERs goal is to make it easy – easy to choose an electric car, easy to choose a charging solution and easy to recharge the vehicle.
“We like to think that we combine the traditional energy supply industry with the car industry – providing both parties an opportunity to increase the value offerings to their customers. The concept of mobility is central for the evolution in both businesses. The consumers might not want to own their car, but subscribe to mobility in an integrated transportation system with different components like car sharing services, autonomous vehicles, electric bicycles and connections to public transportation. And as a result companies might stop looking at total cost of ownership and start looking at total cost of mobility. What are the total needs for you and your employees to transport themselves, both at home and for the business?”
“We envision a future multimodal transportation system where different means of transportation are combined in order to create a sustainable and seamless solution to the consumer’s mobility needs. Providing seamless solutions will challenge the traditional value chains and require a great amount of data integration and transparency between the different industry players. We don’t have all the solutions ourselves, so we need to work together in order to make this work” Nathalie explains.
After the introduction, it was time for questions from the audience.
So, what do you think should be on offer when I am charging my car for 20 minutes?
When it comes to the car it is possible to offer to upgrades of the software or change the tires. But I can envision services that helps me in my everyday life as well, like postal services or shoe repairs.
Wouldn’t it be better to place the chargers next to shopping centres or grocery stores instead of gas stations?
Sure, and I think we will see more of that. But the traditional gas stations has a great potential to offer a range of value-adding services, maybe even become a transportation hub with car pool services, rental cars or why not meeting facilities for people on the road.
With more charging taking place at home or at the grocery store, how do you secure the energy supply?
For sure it will require investments, even from the real estate owners. An investment in this infrastructure will on the other hand give you a competitive advantage today and prepare you to accommodate the further demands from visitors and tenants.
Charging your car takes a while, should the gas stations be extended to be able to accommodate more cars at one time?
I don’t think that is necessary. The charging time keeps getting reduced and the battery capacity is increasing, up to 500 km per charge, so you will not need to charge your car very often. But it is difficult to predict how the increased range of the cars will affect the need for public charging.
How do you package your offer, is it car + charging station?
As a result of our partnerships with some of the leading EV car brands we have the opportunity to offer our services early in the purchase process. We can train the staff at the car dealership and provide them with the answers to the customer’s questions regarding charging of the car. This goes back to our mantra of simplicity, to remove the obstacles for the customer.
Join us on March 28 for the next Future Transportation Square
