Project Summary
Paua Plug & Charge seeks to ease the pain of public EV charging by investigating the easiest way to enable a driver to run an electric vehicle charge session. The vision is to plug in your car, charge, unplug and drive away with charging and payment automatically managed.
Project Achievements
- Investigated car data and infotainment systems, changepoint network systems, phone, and payments ecosystems to find ways to identify the chargepoint location and a valid payment system: the two key steps needed for the chargepoint operator to initiate a charge.
- Identified a way to enable a “plug & charge” event to be conducted on any chargepoint integrated with Paua and any modern electric vehicle.
- Successfully ran a “plug & charge” session where a driver drove to the charge point, plugged the charging cable to the car and the charging session initiated automatically. Additionally, the session information and receipt were automatically available for the user.
Next Steps
- Applied for further government funding to commercialise this technology solution. The goal is to fully integrate a “plug & charge” solution into our main product and offer it to our clients. Further investment will allow exploration to resolve possible limitations identified during early testing e.g. when multiple chargers are in the same location, we may need additional logic to understand what charger we will activate.
- We believe that this innovation, when adopted, can save nearly 17,000 hours per year of non-productive time worth £400,000 to the economy based on EV drivers today. This rises to £2.5m by 2026 as more drivers adopt electric cars.
