The first company that understands it’s not selling electricity and not building a ‚charging experience‘ but helping people arrive without worry, stress or hassle, that company wins this race.
I recently sat down with Sebastian Henßler for a long conversation about the charging market. It’s in German and on YouTube, but I will bring the key ideas to LinkedIn in English over the coming days because I think they matter beyond the DACH market.
We talked about why the charging industry still thinks in petrol station logic while the actual product is a service that should disappear into everyday life.
Why most operators are stuck between craft phase and industrialisation, building Phase 4 platforms on Phase 1 operations.
Why the obsession with charging experience is a category error, because the best charging experience is one you don’t even notice.
I shared my Trust-Friction-Framework, which I developed from years of systematically listening to over 40,000 EV drivers. Trust = Reliability x reasonable Pricing x Availability x Expectation Consistency. Multiplicative. One broken variable and the customer doesn’t come back.
And I probably made a few companies uncomfortable by arguing that most apps in this market are a symptom, not a solution. I call it Appflation.
I also argued that subscriptions aren’t bad, just misused today. And that charging is a digital product, not just electricity
Some of these positions are controversial. I don’t always have the right answer either. But they come from actually listening to customers at scale for a very long time, not from a slide deck.
Over the next posts I’ll unpack individual topics: why charging is an amenity and not a destination for most of your daily life, why Apps, Subscriptions and ad hoc pricing form a problematic circle, and why the market maturity model matters more than operators realise.
The video podcast is here (in German): https://lnkd.in/eNt5SiDu
EAN Podcast 1
