Electric mobility plays a crucial role in lowering the environmental impact of urban mobility, making it an important factor for achieving the European Union’s sustainability objectives. In its mission to improve the ease and convenience of charging electric vehicles to facilitate the widespread adoption of electromobility, eCharge4Drivers is actively working on ensuring the replicability of the solutions and services deployed as part of the project. To make these innovations a reality, eCharge4Drivers has established its External Interest Group (EIG), which serves as a platform to collect external feedback from experts in the field and gauge the willingness of diverse stakeholders to adopt them in their respective environments.
After an initial kick-off webinar in 2021, the project organised three successful in-person EIG workshops. The workshops combine insightful presentations and conversations with technical visits to the project’s demo sites to showcase the technical solutions already deployed and demonstrate how they work in practice. The feedback received so far from the EIG members has proved of immense value to the project partners and supports the ongoing replication activities of the project.
Catching up in person in Vienna
The first physical EIG workshop was held in Vienna in December 2022. The EIG members had the opportunity to finally meet face-to-face and explore the user-friendly technologies tested at the Austrian demonstration site. The workshop covered a lot of ground, from mobile charging and battery swapping service to enhanced smart charging.
Berlin showcases its battery swapping services
Berlin was the second demonstration site that welcomed the EIG members in February this year. The workshop centred on the battery charging services implemented and tested by project partner Swobbee in the German capital. The participants took the opportunity to exchange knowledge and experiences on the topic and visited a battery swapping station to discover its unique functionalities and assess its convenience for users.
From booking services to smart charging in Barcelona
At the end of June, eCharge4Drivers organised the third EIG workshop in Barcelona. This full-day workshop, which saw the participation of the project partners in addition to the EIG members, focused on the characteristics of the activities carried out in Barcelona. During the initial breakout sessions, the participants assessed the replicability of the solutions developed in Barcelona, which include user-friendly charging stations, smart charging solutions, pricing plans, and battery swapping for light EVs.
Discussions in the workshop revolved around the challenges and opportunities arising from these innovations. For instance, while battery swapping solutions make the vehicles more affordable, selling vehicles without batteries could be hard to market and less interesting for vehicle dealerships. Participants also considered the risk of deploying infrastructure that may become outdated in the near future as technology evolves fast, and the challenges linked to deploying viable business models for smart charging. The workshop concluded with a site visit to the Navas car park, where project partners B:SM, Mosaic Factor, and SCUTUM showcased their battery swapping and smart charging solutions.
Visit the eCharge4Drivers website to learn more about the user-centric solutions developed in the project demonstration sites and follow the project on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.
eCharge4Drivers has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement n° 875131.
