For me trust in charging should be a built in system property and not some fancy marketing words. And sometimes it breaks in real time with real consequences.
🪫 Anders Gaasedal documented what happened when he tried to charge his electric truck at a Circle K station near Stockholm. He tried several chargers and cables at that site with various charging speeds but was not able to charge his truck the way it should be. Then he left asking himself what went wrong.
🔌 Charging an EV, whether it is a truck or a car has one Job only: delivering arrival. On time, on schedule and with no excuses needed. In a car, an unreliable session is annoying, but in a truck, it can break an entire day as it ruins your delivery schedule. And Anders is not an angry customer. He’s constructive, detailed, wants to help fix it. That makes his account even more telling.
🚦When I apply my Trust-Friction-Framework to this session, every variable is damaged. Reliability broke when the charger delivered a fraction of its rated power. Expectation Consistency broke when every cable and charger behaved differently. And 51.60 EUR for that experience doesn’t qualify as reasonable Pricing. Multiply those together and the trust score approaches zero. As a result Anders left the site and might never return.
🔎 What also stands out is that Anders had to do his own diagnostics. Swapping cables, moving the truck, checking the car chargers nearby. The system had the information but never shared it. Was it shared site power? A hardware fault? He still doesn’t know even though those chargers have big screens showing data. That’s a missed opportunity at the one touchpoint where the CPO could have built confidence instead of confusion.
My honest recommendation: Listen. Learn. Act. Repeat. Listen to drivers like Anders who document exactly what happens. Learn from the patterns across sites. Act on the root cause. And repeat, because trust isn’t restored in one fix. It’s earned back over many sessions.
🔋 To be clear: most charging sessions work. Millions of EVs charge every day without drama, trucks included. But that’s exactly the point. One session like this erases ten good ones. The positive experiences don’t accumulate, the negative ones do. That’s erosion, and it’s why the charging market needs to move from craft to industrialisation. Standardised operations, real-time diagnostics, end-to-end ownership of the customer journey. Reducing friction systematically instead of fixing incidents reactively. That’s where this market needs to go.
Trust in Charging
