Remember when streaming TV became a thing, and everybody said it’d be the top of cable, but what we ended up was a multitude of multiple subscriptions and a sometimes costlier monthly bill? Pepperidge Farm remembers, but automakers apparently don’t. While lots of the world’s most outstanding automotive corporations are switching to the Tesla Supercharger standard to (presumably) improve the shopper experience, almost as many are concurrently working toward separate networks, and a number of other big-name automakers have joined forces to do it. Ford, BMW, and Honda are the most recent, announcing a project called ChargeScape, which it claims will revolutionize charging and profit EV customers and the electrical utilities powering them.
ChargeScape bills itself as providing “grid services” to coordinate returning EVs’ battery energy to the grid. EV owners can earn money for sharing that energy, which the corporate said will help even out the ebbs and flows in electricity supply and demand throughout the day. It also promised that its platform eliminates the “need for individual integrations between each automotive brand and every electric utility,” and can use each automakers’ telematics to administer all of it.
The corporate stated that its service will help make EVs greener by prioritizing energy from renewable resources like solar and wind and believes it should “help speed up the true potential of the EV revolution.” It’s unclear how the platform will work and integrate with electric utilities, and we don’t know if the vehicles will need any special hardware or software to enable compatibility.
Ford was the primary significant automaker to sign onto Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS), with BMW and Honda following suit not long after. Interestingly, BMW and Honda are involved in one other charging partnership with Hyundai, Kia, Stellantis, GM, and Mercedes.
While any improvement in the present broken state of EV charging within the U.S. needs to be welcomed, it’s hard not to attract comparisons to other emerging technologies that took similar paths, reminiscent of streaming services. Charging could also be hard to seek out and too slow in lots of places now, but several competing networks and services with individual payments and apps will grow to be an actual hassle for EV owners.
This Article First Appeared At www.autoblog.com
