Your charger screen tells you what’s happening. It never tells you why and almost none of it helps you when something goes wrong.
🧮 Piotr Krzemiński recently asked how complex charger screens should be and shared insights from his own user research. Camp A wants less data, Camp B wants more. I want to throw my own observations from over 40’000 EV drivers and many years of listening and learning into that debate.
🔎 I think simple or complex is the wrong perspective. The question is whether your screen describes or actually helps. Most charger screens today describe what is happening by telling you data about the charging process. That’s fine for people who understand tech speak. For the driver standing in the rain wondering why the session delivers 50 kW instead of 150kW? None of that helps.
💡What would help is an answer. Maybe my car is requesting less because the battery is cold. Maybe the site is running on max. capacity due to occupation. Or maybe something is actually broken. The cause, in plain language, with a simple visual. You could even add more value by telling what the driver can do next time. You don’t reduce complexity by stripping information. You reduce it by making the right information do the work.
🔌 Gerald SEILER made a real good point in the same thread: Tesla doesn’t need any screen on the charger at all. When trust is fully established, you just plug in and walk away. The car handles the rest and you simply do not need data anymore for a pseudo-trust moment. But Tesla can do that because they control the whole chain. Expectation consistency is a system property there, not something earned at the charger.
In the open CCS ecosystem it’s way more difficult and the charger screen is often the only place where the full picture exists. And right now, most CPOs fill that space with raw engineering data instead of using it to build confidence.
🚦But there’s an ironic twist for CPOs. If you do this right, if you build enough trust that drivers stop watching the screen, you lose a data display. But you gain something far more valuable: attention without anxiety. A driver who trusts the session is relaxed. That’s when your screen becomes a real touchpoint for the first time.
💰None of that works today because the screen competes with uncertainty. Remove the uncertainty first, and the screen transforms from an engineering monitor into a revenue channel.
🏅At the end of the day it boils down to two simple words what charging is all about: Delivering arrival.
That’s what a driver wants, nothing else. And if you want it a bit more explanatory use my Trust-Friction-Formula where Trust = Reliability x reasonable pricing x Availability x expectation consistency.
Charger Screens
