⛽->🔋 The charging industry didn’t invent charging. It electrified refuelling by simply swapping petrol for electricity. That was the right call in 2016. For many operators, sticking to it today will be an existential mistake.
🔌 When the first fast chargers appeared at convenient locations, there was no blueprint for what charging could be. Most people knew electricity from the socket at home, but never for mobility. And the mobility that was already electrified, trams and trains, always had its power through a cable and never needed to store it.
⛽ What everyone knew was this: we need to replace refuelling, because now we charge. So the industry built what it had known for decades. A central location with multiple connectors, the plug even designed in the spirit of a fuel nozzle, wait until done, drive on. Just with electricity instead of petrol. Not stupid. Pragmatic. And right for that moment.
🙋 Let’s shift perspective. EVs were already a big step for most people. A new vehicle, new technology, often a significant leap in driver assistance systems, and in the early days some real compromises. If the refuelling process had also worked completely differently from anything familiar, that would have been cognitive overload. The petrol station logic helped psychologically. It translated something new into something known.
🏞️ And structurally, Journey Charging was simply the easier entry point. A motorway service area has a clear owner with clear interest. Traffic already flows there, parking already exists. Destination Charging is the opposite: ownership structures are complex, landlords and tenants disagree, regulation is missing or slow, the car park operator is not the building operator is not the user of the charger. Understandable then, why the industry went this way.
🏡 But understandable does not mean future-proof. Just as EVs today no longer require compromises for the vast majority of drivers, most private charging sessions will no longer happen at motorway stops or dedicated charging hubs. They will shift to the home, the workplace, the supermarket, the gym. Where life already is. And there, petrol station logic breaks down, because the driver is not there to charge. They are there to do something else.
☕And for the first time in individual mobility, we actually have the ability to reflect that. To turn refuelling into a passive act that simply happens while you get on with your life.
🛣️ Whoever is still thinking exclusively in petrol station logic is building for a minority of future charging sessions. That part of the market will still exist, but the fight for it will be hard, brutal and will lead to heavy consolidation. Either you have a strategy to win it, or you have the wrong market.
Now is the time to get clear on which market you are built to win, and if it is not this one, to find your differentiation before the consolidation finds you.
