Core blimey — a smart charger for a dumb price?

In my first week at Evnex, Ed and I went to visit Jordan at EV City in Christchurch (he’s world famous in the NZ EV Owners Facebook group). We were starting to think about what the ideal home residential smart charger would look like, and I’m sure we talked about things like aesthetics, tethered vs. socketed, Wi-Fi vs. cell; to be honest I can’t remember but these topics seem likely. What I can remember very clearly is that at the end of the conversation I asked him how much it should cost.

He said under a thousand dollars. Ed laughed.

Fast forward nearly four years and the upfront cost of smart chargers is still a big deal, with recent research showing the cost of hardware and installation to be by far the two largest barriers for EV drivers considering a dedicated smart charger. EVs themselves are getting cheaper, so why shouldn’t EV chargers?

Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I’ll move the earth (Archimedes)

There are lots of levers you can try pulling to reduce the cost of a product. Remove things that aren’t needed. Find cheaper parts suppliers. Reduce quality. Stop providing great support. Create a costdown department named after a memecoin and start cutting corners. Start a side-hustle trafficking cocaine.

You’ll be pleased to hear that we did not choose to reduce quality or stop providing great support, so allow me to introduce the head of our new $pecial Team with Responsibility to Undercut Most other Product (no, not really). So what have we done?

Well first we looked at what it takes to be a smart charger. I’ve always thought of smart charging as not charging. By which I mean knowing when not to charge at all, and when to charge but do it slowly — unlike profligate dumb chargers which provide everything a voracious car wants as soon as it gets plugged in.

Everything must be made as simple as possible, but no simpler (Einstein)

There are four key times when not charging is the right choice. And between the top two, for most people they turn out to be quite a lot of the time (the last two are rare, but great for peace of mind):

1. When your power is expensive. Unless it’s always expensive, in which case you should look for a retailer with a good time of use plan, and then try again.
2. When you have solar but aren’t generating any excess beyond your home consumption
3. When your home is nearing the limit of its allocated supply and a breaker is close to tripping
4. When the network has a problem or is overloaded

So a smart charger needs to be able to:

1. Schedule charging around your lowest power prices
2. Divert excess solar into your vehicle without any energy coming from the grid
3. Slow down if your home is using too much power
4. Respond to network constraints (assuming the compensation is acceptable)

Our existing E2 chargers could already do this which was great, so now we needed to make them more affordable somehow. What do they include which isn’t necessary to achieve the above? From a hardware perspective not a lot — the E2 is already a streamlined design and almost all of the components do something towards the list above.

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away (Saint-Exupéry)

One area with redundancy though is the internet communication. The E2 offers both cell and Wi-Fi even though only one of them is active at any one time (albeit with a belt-and-braces fallback system). The cell modem and aerial are relatively inexpensive, but the cost of maintaining an active SIM amounts to quite a bit over the lifetime of the charger. Our field data show that over 60% of E2s are connected over Wi-Fi, and there are numerous successful competitor products which don’t offer cell and seem to do just fine. Apparently some company called Tesla makes a Wi-Fi only charger and it has sold a few.

So we could reduce cost a little by removing the cell hardware and still have a smart charger which covers the essentials. Another ongoing cost is the API fees we pay Tesla for the privilege of opening the flap on some drivers' cars. The feature is a pleasing quality-of-life enhancement for a subset of our drivers, but not in any way essential.

There is one rule for industrialists and that is: make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible (Ford)

The cable is an expensive part of a charger, and our cables currently come from Europe which incurs a significant carbon cost to ship. We’d love to use a NZ-made tether, but since the entire market for such a product is basically just Evnex, we had to look further afield – specifically China.

As you may imagine, there are many options. And a lot of them are terrifying. Some get wet internally as soon as rain is forecast. Others solve this problem by encasing the whole thing in carbonite. Or perhaps it was just plastic, but either way you needed a forklift to help lift it to plug it in. Still others are just downright ugly.

Eventually we found a few cables that were compliant and beautiful, and we set them up on our office chargers to see if they were also usable and durable. And after a year we decided that one of them was! In fact the manufacturer would also print our logo on them which looks cool, and strip the internal cables to the right length for the inside of our chargers, saving us a chunk of assembly time.

The more inventory a company has, the less likely they will have what they need (Ohno)

One final area where we looked to eliminate cost was in our inventory. The existing E2 comes in four colours, two cable lengths, and two plug types. By consolidating to one colour and one cable length we could streamline our operations. Our most popular colour is volcanic (aka black), so that’s all you can get. Henry Ford (or more likely his wife) would be proud to use one to charge his Mach E.

Which brings us to the name. We chose to call this new model in the range the E2 Core. Just like the aesthetic of the charger it has connotations of minimalism, but without compromising on any of the essentials. And apart from an unfortunate association with a film with science so bad the government intervened, I think it’s a great name.

The E2 Core joins the E2 Plus — a better-value version of our original E2 model — to make up a range of products we hope will satiate the needs of not just the NZ EV Owners Facebook group, but also the Electric Vehicles for Australia Facebook group; and everyone in between.

Charge me up, baby (Lopez)

At the end of the day, will Jordan be happy? Well, we’ve been able to squeeze under a thousand dollars for a limited time only with a launch promotion price of $999. And we’re not too far off that with our standard price of $1,149. In fact, since our conversation nearly four years ago the Reserve Bank tells me that $999 would have reached $1,188.27, so if you squint right maybe we’ve exceeded his target?

Whatever your view (and do please write in, Jordan, if you read this), Evnex’s vision remains that every journey is powered by clean and affordable energy, so we will continue to look for ways to reduce the cost of charging.

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