Whrring #11 - Charger Aggregators Explosion

Statiq, eHub, iRA.EV, Plugshare, Google Maps, PhonePe?

Aug 13, 2024

EV customers had no prominent charger aggregators in India for a couple of years now. Last week, MG* and TataEV launched their aggregator apps. There’s one more player quietly building to be an aggregator app - Statiq.

Fig 1 : Chains intertwined, generated by AI

Statiq began by onboarding one CPO after another. It got BPCL, Glida, SunFuel, EFill, Shell, ChargeMod among others.

MG released a new app earlier last week called eHub by MG. It has been executed by

Pulse Energy

. They have 21 CPOs on their app, with major CPOs like Jio BP, ChargeZone, Statiq and Zeon.

iRA.EV app, showcased by Tata EV during the Curvv launch last week, has a collaboration with all major CPOs. They have an edge over MG’s eHub by having Tata Power EZ Charge on board.

All the three apps have route planning and charger aggregation built in, in one way or other. I wrote what all features an ideal route planner and charger aggregator app should have. You can cross check the features from the post and compare it to what each app is providing to see how they rank.

P.S.: All three apps need upgrades for the route planning section.

Statiq

Statiq wants to be the only game in town when it comes to charger aggregation. They want to be the app everyone uses to charge their car. Of the three apps, Statiq has the largest user base. Statiq allows for anyone to sign up and start using their services. Statiq shows real time status of chargers for some CPOs, and processes payments for a few of them. Once Statiq has enough users, it is likely to charge CPOs on it’s network a service fee.

For route planning, Statiq assumes the range of the car and decides the best possible routes. They have to work a lot more on the route planning before it is useable for customers.

eHub by MG

eHub by MG is open for anyone to sign up. It also shows real time statuses from all CPOs listed on the app and processes payments for some of them. It really needs to be seen how MG pushes eHub to the customers. If MG cannot drive adoption among their own user base, it will be very hard to attract customers from other brands. If I were just an MG customer, I wouldn’t have known about this app.

eHub’s route planning is slightly superior than others. It allows you to put in the range of your car, which makes the feature useable. It still needs more work to make it seamless.

iRA.EV by TataEV

iRA.EV by TataEV is restrictive as it is designed only for TataEV customers. It is designed to be a single stop shop for them. TataEV has brought ZConnect, an app collecting data from the car and showing it to the user, EV TMSC, the current service app, with a dash of route planning and aggregated real time status of chargers on iRA.EV.

iRA.EV is available to Curvv customers for now. There’s no timeline on transitioning other existing users to iRA.EV, but it will be rolled out to other users subsequently as per Tata Motors.

I accessed iRA.EV through a friend’s Punch.EV. The route planner on iRA.EV doesn’t account for altitude. Lack of this information is bound to misguide customers. The charger aggregator platform doesn’t allow to pay for any charging sessions either. TataEV could have onboarded atleast Tata PEZC to enable payments. The users will be forced to maintain wallet balances across various CPO apps, which have to be downloaded too.

The idea of any app is to provide supreme convenience to the user. So if a Tata EV customer can book a service, buy accessories, plan their trip and pay for it from a single app, then it is convenient. It is anything but convenient right now. I hope by the time Curvv is delivered to people, Tata can fix iRA.EV’s shortcomings.

Veditum is running their annual fundraiser. Veditum is a non profit based out of Kolkata. I’ve been volunteering with them for close to 9 years now. They send young graduates to do field research and collect important data about our river ecosystems. Veditum also collects and hosts sand mining activity across India’s rivers as a part of their environmental watch project.

Veditum has a target to raise INR 5,00,000 this month. If you are an Indian citizen, you can make a donation using this link. You also get tax benefits if you are filing your taxes under the old regime. You can read about the work they’ve done so far here.

Donate to Veditum

If you make a donation, send me the screenshot of the payment on my Substack / WhatsApp / Telegram (ExpWithEVs) / email (priyansevs@gmail.com). I’ll send unfiltered thoughts on a peculiar observation during TataEV’s event.

I spoke with a few CPOs registered with MG’s and Tata’s apps. They don’t see any significant traffic coming their way through the OEMs as of now. TataEV shares anonymous customer behaviour data with CPOs, which is of some help to CPOs. Smaller CPOs also see tying up with these OEMs as a brand building exercise.

So, what’s next for CPOs?

The CPOs that have not signed up might just want to sign up because of FOMO. Tata EV (via group company Tata PEZC) and MG have been installing chargers. With realtime traffic / data on the charging points, these companies can guide preferred companies to setup more chargers.

The CPOs can continue to stick to their plans if all the above is just a marketing gimmick. If any of the apps pick up steam, CPOs might have to expedite their growth and expansion strategy to stay relevant.

Startups working on charger aggregation / route planning -

If you don’t have the users, no CPO is going to share their APIs with you, unless you are building on Beckn protocol. Get users to your platform before approaching CPOs. Solve other pain points of EV customers and then get to aggregation. Route planning is still a low hanging fruit for B2C that is waiting to be disrupted.

You need to work hard and fast to get users on board because there are other players in the market, with users, looking closely to add charging services on their apps. These are Google Maps along the likes of payments giant like PhonePe.

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